I have not posted about my federal agency in a while. Here is why: we lost 94% of the staff in my regional office in the last two and half months. An office of 550 is now less than 2 dozen. One group of folks retired or quit. Another group were given directed reassignments to headquarters components (but did not have to physically move). A third (largest) group was bullied and pressured into “volunteering” to take front-line, public-facing jobs. Many of these folks had never worked in direct service before, and others took significant downgrades to positions from which they were promoted years or even decades before. So basically we’ve been in an inadvertent devolution exercise for the past 3 months. It’s exhausting and traumatic. I’m simultaneously enraged and grieving all of the time. All of my energy is spent on – I don’t even know what. Survival? Putting out fires? Offloading work? Responding to emails that 550 staff used to respond to?

Here is a long catch-up post.

The Trump administration continues to assert that Social Security is not being touched and that there have been no field office closures. While it is true that there have not been field office closures recently, there are closures and these are completely destroying the infrastructure of the agency. In order to be invisible to the public, the cuts are happening at regional and national offices that provide support to our front line staff. The destruction at SSA is designed to be off the public radar. What is happening at SSA is happening to other agencies as well – like NPS, HUD, EPA, etc.

Here is some granular info:

SSA used to have 10 regional offices. We are now down to 4. The 4 remaining are in hospice care. We no longer have enough staff to even triage. In my newly consolidated region, we had 550 employees in March. We now have less than 24. The remaining two dozen staff are trying to support the operations of 10,000 employees in 20 states.

The other three remaining regional offices are similarly gutted.

What do employees in regional offices do? These mission critical employees support the front lines; we provide computer hardware and software support, provide policy advice and guidance, train new employees, train journey level employees on new or changing policies and regulations, work with landlords and GSA, contract with guards, hire new staff, oversee labor and employee relations, allocate budget, overtime, and staffing, monitor spending, monitor for fraud, etc. We will not properly function without regional offices.

We are being dismantled, physically and organizationally. Employees are psychologically gutted. Deep grief, anger, distrust. Russel Vought's plan to traumatize the workforce is working. Everyday there is an employee on the other end of the phone or video call that is crying, or telling me about their sky-rocketing blood pressure, about new anti-depressants and anti-anxiety prescriptions or increasing dosages, about their family begging them to quit or retire because it is not worth their health.

It is frustrating that both the media and congressional staff keep asking only about how cuts are impacting the public. They are missing the bigger picture. It’s hard to explain what Social Security regional offices do as a lot of it is behind the scenes. We don’t interview the public or process claims, but here are some things we (used to) do that directly impacted payments and prevented fraud. As a result they are not getting done at all.

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• Troubleshoot W2s and FICA tax issues with employers – these are both mom & pop small businesses as well as large employers like Boeing and Amazon.

• Interface with the state governments on Food Stamps, SNAP, WASHCAP, etc.

• Coordinate with state child support enforcement on garnishments.

• Field inquiries from state L&I on worker’s comp issues.

• Manage Section 218 agreements that state and local entities use to with- hold Social Security taxes from wages.

• Work with fisheries, farmers, and advocate groups on special Social Security number applications and non-work number cases.

• Liaison with state vocational rehabilitation.

• Work with states on Medicaid pass- along agreements.

• Interface with CMS and state healthcare entities on Medicare.

• Work with jails to support pre-release agreements as well as to obtain info when individuals are incarcerated and not entitled to benefits.

• Negotiate with state and local governments to obtain safe and protected data exchange agreements.

• Resolve attorney fee issues with disability attorneys.

• Ensure that Social Security over- payments are not discharged and are recouped in bankruptcy cases.

• Respond to FOIA requests.

Headquarters components are also being hollowed out. Not only have they also lost employees to DRP, VSIP, and reassignments, they have been massively reorganized to the extent that there is no longer structural integrity. Staff have been scattered. Workloads are likewise scattered but have not always followed the staff that were scattered. We no longer know who “owns” what. Workload X used to be Department A’s responsibility but Department A is now Department Omega and the group who used to run it in Department A are no longer there. The work may still be in Department Omega or it could have moved to Department B except Department B is now gone too and maybe it’s in Department Beta? The regional offices are trying to move work to headquarters since there is no one left in regional offices but we don’t know who is left and where anything remains in headquarters either. All of this is invisible to the public because field offices continue to function at the moment. It is insidious. We are still in a freefall and haven’t hit bottom yet.

There is no talk of rebuilding. We are not there. Elon may have left, but DOGE has not.