The Social Security Administration could soon lose as many as 10,000 workers, according to former agency leaders who expect a large portion of federal workers to accept a buyout offer from the agency.
The SSA last month announced a restructuring initiative that gives all employees the option to accept “voluntary separation incentive payments” to leave the agency, as part of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE’s effort to cut costs by culling the federal workforce. Led by billionaire Elon Musk, DOGE has abruptly terminated thousands of federal workers over the last three weeks, causing turmoil across multiple departments.
The deadline for SSA workers to accept the “voluntary separation incentive payments” is Friday, March 14. Those who opt in must leave the agency by April 19.
Last month, the agency said it aims to cut the size of its workforce by 7,000 people, focusing on workers and jobs that don’t “provide mission critical services.”
Former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley, who led the agency under the Biden administration from December 2023 to November 2024, expects the actual number to be closer to 10,000 workers. The agency currently employs roughly 57,000 people.
“Everybody who can is going to take that early out, but I think that 7,000 number is conservative,” O’Malley said Thursday at a panel discussion on recent changes at the agency and how they could affect customer service, held by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.
“They are all going to take it,” he said, adding that employees who choose to stay, will risk losing their jobs without a bonus.
“They are communicating to people if you don’t take the cash and get out now, you are taking the chance of being fired and playing the game of Russian Roulette that follows,” said O’Malley, who believes the changes being implemented at the agency will “cause a total system collapse of social security.”
The amount of the SSA incentive payments being offered individual workers depends on the employee’s classification, or where they stand on the federal payscale. The highest-tier worker would receive a maximum of $25,000.
O’Malley is also concerned that offering to buy workers out in the name of efficiency amounts to the “greatest amount of waste in operational history by paying people not to work.”
Security vunerabilities
Former SSA commissioner Michael Astrue added that the staff cuts could lead to vulnerabilities at the agency, if employees tasked with protecting sensitive data choose to exit.
“We should be petrified about privacy and the theft of data,” he said at the NASI panel discussion.
In the past, attempts made by adversaries to access proprietary information “have been consistently thwarted” with staff in place to safeguard data, Astrue noted. “It is a daunting thing to imagine what a foreign power might do with broad access to this kind of data.”
