The US Social Safety Administration that gives advantages to tens of hundreds of thousands of older People plans to chop 7,000 staff, it introduced on Friday, as a part of the Trump administration’s plan to slash the dimensions of the federal workforce.
The Social Safety Administration (SSA), which sends checks to 73 million retired and disabled People every month, stated in a press release it’ll cut back its workforce by greater than 12 p.c.
“The company plans to scale back the dimensions of its bloated workforce and organizational construction, with a major give attention to features and staff who don’t immediately present mission essential providers,” the SSA stated. “Social Safety not too long ago set a staffing goal of fifty,000, down from the present stage of roughly 57,000 staff.”
The company additionally stated it’s going to shut down a lot of its regional workplaces, from 10 to 4.
The company is seen as an important supplier of advantages to aged People and their pensions, and one in all few authorities departments historically seen as off limits for cuts by U.S. politicians.
U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly pledged when he campaigned for re-election to the White Home that he wouldn’t contact Social Safety when it got here to his plans to chop authorities spending.
The White Home and the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
On Friday two dozen senior workers members at SSA resigned from the company, in line with a memo written by Leland Dudek, the company’s performing commissioner, a duplicate of which was seen by Reuters.
Dudek took over SSA after Michelle King, the earlier performing commissioner, stepped down over her issues about members of billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE gaining access to SSA’s pc techniques, which include the non-public knowledge of tens of hundreds of thousands of People.
The Trump administration and DOGE have downsized greater than 100,000 of the federal authorities’s 2.3 million civilian staff by a mixture of layoffs and buyouts. Trump and Musk say the federal government is bloated and wasteful.