By Edward Cates, Chairman, TSCL
Since the Trump administration assumed leadership at the start of 2025, it has pushed for a sweeping transformation of the federal government. That extends to the Social Security Administration (SSA), which has announced that it will undergo a major organizational transformation.
According to a press release from the SSA, the transformation will aim to “implement efficiencies and reduce costs, with a renewed focus on mission-critical work for the American people.”
Streamlining the Organizational Chart
As part of its transformation, the SSA plans to reduce the resources it allocates to non-mission-critical functions. This can include reducing certain functions’ staffing, moving functions to another part of the organization to streamline management, or abolishing them entirely.
One example is the Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, which the SSA has closed. The SSA moved the office’s statutory responsibilities, which included processing Equal Employment Opportunity complaints and reasonable accommodations requests, to other agency components.
Another example is the Office of Analytics, Review, and Oversight (OARO). In late February, SSA announced that it had broken this office up and reallocated its functions to other parts of the agency. According to an SSA press release, realigning the function’s responsibilities will streamline layers of management, increase data sharing, and accelerate opportunities to uncover fraud, waste, and abuse.
The SSA will also take steps to reduce redundancies in its regional offices. According to an agency press release, the agency no longer sees its current operating model with 10 regional offices as sustainable. As a result, SSA will shift to a four-region administrative structure. According to the agency’s X (formerly Twitter) account, this will not include closing any of the agency’s field offices, where the public can directly interact with field representatives.
Reducing the Workforce
The SSA’s transformation efforts will include a targeted reduction in the agency’s workforce, from 57,000 employees to 50,000. The SSA aims to achieve these cuts primarily through two programs that incentivize staff to leave with one-time payments that range from $15,000 to $25,000, depending on their level of seniority:
- Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA): The agency will allow employees with 20 or more years of service above age 50 (and all employees with at least 25 years of service) the option to retire early in exchange for a one-time payment. Eligible employees have until December 31, 2025, to accept the offer.
- Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments (VSIP): This program extended the buyout payments to employees who were not eligible for VERA. Employees had until March 14th to accept the offer, and separations occurred by April 19th. The agency had to approve individual separations for them to go through.
Although the SSA has yet to release figures on the number of employees who accepted these offers, it anticipated that enough people would take them to cover most of its workforce reduction goal. If not, the agency has said that it will use reductions in force (RIFs) to achieve its goal by prioritizing functions and positions not mandated by legal statutes.
The SSA will also work to shift its workforce toward mission-critical work through reassigning staff to customer service positions. It has offered employees worried about being affected by staffing cuts and other organizational restructuring efforts to undergo voluntary reassignment, and it has indicated that any RIFs it issues may involve reassigning employees. Positions that employees can be reassigned to include field offices, teleservice centers, and processing centers.
TSCL’s Take
At TSCL, we are 100 percent on board with the idea of cutting waste from the SSA, improving its operational efficiency, and renewing efforts to strengthen the agency’s customer service capabilities. However, we want this done with surgical cuts, not a sledgehammer. That’s why we’re working on Capitol Hill to encourage the administration to work with us, on seniors’ behalf, to make cuts that align with the priorities you share with us through our polls and surveys.
