Managing a Social Security staff barbecue during a tense closing meeting

During the call, SSA managers talked about how difficult it is to keep employees motivated, especially when they know their work will have to ramp up after the shutdown ends. “It’s hard to keep morale going with the way the staff is going, and they also know that once this lockdown is over, we’re going to hit them hard with (more work),” one employee said. “It’s very frustrating when we have to keep these employees motivated and we need them for the long term, not just for this fiscal year.”

Staff also described the specific impact the closure has had on Social Security beneficiaries. In one case, mentioned in the call, a company lost half of its team. The same employee said: “Now the public waits for two hours in the reception area, and an hour and an hour and a half on the phones,” noting that waiting times were about half an hour.

The SSA has been embroiled in disarray throughout President Donald Trump’s second term. Wired magazine reported In March, nearly a dozen agents of the so-called Government Efficiency Department were deployed in the Sub-Saharan region, including early notable agents such as Luke Variator, Marco Elise, and Akash Poppa.

According to a DOGE court filing in federal court and accompanying affidavits, a number of DOGE agents gained access to a number of sensitive data sets, including Numident, which contains detailed information on anyone with a Social Security number. DOGE claimed to require this type of access in order to detect “fraud.” However, many of DOGE’s claims about the agency were untrue and inaccurate, including the claim that 150 years They were collecting Social Security benefits.

In August, Chuck Burgess, the SSA’s chief data officer, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that DOGE mishandled sensitive data and uploaded the confidential information of millions of Americans to an unsecured server. When Borges sent an email to agency staff stating that he was involuntarily resigning, following a whistleblower complaint, the email mysteriously disappeared from their inboxes. Staff told WIRED at the time.

“I’m invested in this organization. I love what we’re doing, but I feel like it’s not going in the right direction, and we’re not really serving the public as well as we should or even our employees,” one employee said during a management call Thursday. “We’re not trying to bash people, it’s just that we’re very invested.”