Social Security faces thousands more job cuts even with service in tailspin
Source: Washington Post
Social Security faces thousands more job cuts even with service in tailspin
The agency has already seen 7,000 job losses from dramatic cost-cutting efforts by Trump and Musk — even as they promise no benefit reductions.
April 4, 2025 at 5:00 a.m. ED
April 4, 2025 at 5:00 a.m. EDT Today at 5:00 a.m. EDT
The Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland. (Wesley Lapointe/For The Washington Post)
By Lisa Rein
The Social Security Administration — already reeling from plunging customer service following a rapid downsizing under the Trump administration — is drafting plans to begin layoffs of potentially thousands more employees as soon as next week.
The cuts have been ordered by leaders of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, the U.S. DOGE Service, which reviewed the agency’s plans to shrink its workforce last week, according to four agency officials familiar with the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans. DOGE determined that the 7,000 jobs eliminated since February under acting commissioner Leland Dudek through early retirements, buyouts, resignations and firings were not enough, the officials said.
The DOGE team, which has amassed unprecedented power throughout the federal government, has demanded significantly deeper cuts to ensure that Social Security meets President Donald Trump’s goal to shrink federal agencies, officials said. ... Dudek had told the remaining Social Security workforce of about 50,000 in March that he hoped to avoid layoffs known as reductions in force, or RIFs, altogether. But that changed in recent days, when agency leaders were notified that they needed to propose a “more extensive RIF proposal,” one official said. ... The Social Security press office did not respond to a request for comment.
The DOGE team did not provide a specific number of jobs that must be eliminated, officials said, but asked for staff reductions to broad areas of operation, including communications, personnel, legislative and congressional affairs, retirement and disability policy, and other “support components.” Also on the list is the information technology department of about 4,000 employees, which is confronting a flurry of website crashes that has shut out customers from accessing their benefit information. Up to 800 people could be laid off in that department, according to one senior official. ... “It’s just cut, cut, cut,” the official said. It is unclear whether Frank Bisignano, President Donald Trump’s permanent nominee to run Social Security, would try to halt some of the layoffs after the Senate confirms him as expected, possibly as soon as next week.
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By Lisa Rein
Lisa Rein covers federal agencies and the management of government in the Trump administration. At The Washington Post, she has written about the federal workforce; state politics and government in Annapolis, and in Richmond; local government in Fairfax County, Va.; and the redevelopment of Washington and its neighborhoods.follow on X@FedGirlWapo
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/04/social-security-layoffs-trump-musk/
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