Hill Dems: SSA has shuttered offices, slashed thousands of its employees, and changed customer service practices, with little transparency or consideration on customer impact. Image: Matt Gush/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffTop Democrats in both the House and Senate have asked the inspector general’s office at the SSA to investigate the impact on employees, customer service and benefit delivery of planned staff reductions and organizational changes underway at the agency.
“In just the last month, SSA has rapidly shuttered offices, slashed thousands of its employees, and abruptly changed (and then reversed) long-standing customer service practices, with little transparency or consideration on its impact to its customers,” says a letter to the IG from Senate Democratic Leader Charles Shumer of New York and four others.
“These actions have already created a chilling effect among the agency’s workforce, with several senior SSA officials with centuries’ worth of institutional knowledge and experience having already left the agency. We are concerned that this hostile environment will foster burnout, low morale, higher attrition, and worse productivity among employees,” it says.
It asks for a review of issues including whether there were “any qualitative or quantitative analyses to evaluate the impact of these changes on SSA’s ability to administer the programs and on SSA’s beneficiaries” and the impact of staff reductions and office closings on customer service and timeliness of benefits claims processing.
Separately, Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has asked the IG to assess recent actions including reductions in IT staffing, with more planned, “at a time when the SSA website is repeatedly crashing and beneficiaries are not able to log into their accounts or access their benefits information.”
He also expressed “concerns about how the Trump Administration and DOGE are putting SSA benefits and Americans’ sensitive data at risk, particularly given the exceptionally careless approach that individuals associated with DOGE have shown thus far in managing federal information technology systems and handling sensitive data.”
He asked for information on the “impact of these staffing changes on SSA’s operational capacity and risk posture”; the causes of the website crashes and failures in processing; the activities of DOGE personnel at SSA; and more.
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