Social Security Employees Grill Management During Tense Shutdown Meeting

On the call, SSA officials explained how difficult it is to keep employees motivated, especially when they know their work will have to ramp up once the shutdown ends. “It’s hard to keep morale up at the pace the staff is going, and they also know that as soon as this shutdown is over, we’re going to hit them hard with [more work]”, said one employee. “It’s very frustrating that we have to keep these employees motivated and we need them for the long term, not just for this fiscal year.”

Employees also described specific impacts of the shutdown on Social Security recipients. In one case reported on the call, an office lost half its team. “Now my audience waits two hours [the] at reception, hours and hours and a half on the phone,” says the same employee, who points out that waiting times used to be around half an hour.

The SSA has been thrown into chaos throughout President Donald Trump’s second term. WIRED reported in March that nearly a dozen agents from the so-called Department of Government Effectiveness had been deployed to SSA, including high-profile early agents like Luke Farritor, Marko Elez and Akash Bobba.

According to an SSA filing in federal court and accompanying affidavits, a number of DOGE agents had access to a number of sensitive data sets, including Numident, which contains detailed information on anyone with a Social Security number. DOGE claimed to need this type of access in order to detect “fraud.” However, many of DOGE’s claims about the agency were false and inaccurate, including the claim that 150-year-olds were receiving Social Security benefits.

In August, SSA Chief Data Officer Chuck Borges filed a whistleblower complaint claiming that DOGE mishandled sensitive data and uploaded the confidential information of millions of Americans to an insecure server. When Borges sent an email to agency staff saying he was involuntarily resigning, following his whistleblower complaint, the email mysteriously disappeared from inboxes, employees told WIRED at the time.

“I’m invested in this organization. I love what we do, but I feel like it’s not going in the right direction and we’re not really serving the public the way we should, or even our employees,” one employee said on Thursday’s management call. “We’re not trying to beat people up, it’s just that we’re so invested.”