Gillibrand, unions sound alarm on Social Security cuts

Federal Social Security employees are "being set up for failure," the president of a union representing 1,200 Social Security Administration employees in New York City, Westchester and Long Island is saying.

Edwin Osorio, president of Local 3369 of the American Federation of Government Employees, says his members are accepting voluntary resignation offers, being arbitrarily reassigned to different departments, facing harsher consequences for infractions and are forced to work in-person every day despite a collective bargaining agreement provision that allows them to work from home.

“My members are facing myriad issues,” Osorio said during a phone interview with The Chief last Friday. “We’re being set up for failure.”

As the Trump administration continues to slash broad swaths of the administrative state, more than 50 members of Local 3369 have left their post, reducing staffing levels below even the historic lows at which the office operated prior to Jan. 20. In one office in Jamaica, Queens, staffing has been reduced from nearly 150 to around 40 in the last 20 years, even as workloads have increased, Osorio said. 

“You have about a third of the size of staffers servicing 20 to 25 percent more people,” the union leader said. “We’re asking people to do more than above what they were already unable to do.” 

In total, more than 2,000 Social Security employees have already accepted voluntary buyouts, and the Trump administration intends to cut an additional 12 percent of the service's staff, or roughly 7,000 employees.

On Tuesday, Osorio joined New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Brooklyn U.S. Representative Dan Goldman, labor leaders and elder advocates in lower Manhattan to deride what they said was the administration’s attempts to clandestinely cut the agency that provides benefits to 73 million Americans, and in the process slowing down wait times and demoralizing staff. They were joined by advocates for seniors and the executive director of the city’s largest municipal union, District Council 37’s Henry Garrido.

“The Trump administration’s cuts, however, are making it more and more difficult for retirees to access their Social Security,” Gillibrand said at the April 22 rally. "The website keeps crashing. They keep demanding you use online services and they’re not working. It's wrong and it's unfair." 

Gillibrand: 'All-hands-on deck moment’

Goldman and Gillibrand said that the Trump administration was attempting to gut the Social Security Administration without congressional approval by exhausting and demoralizing its workforce. Trump has denied that he’s cutting the program, but Elon Musk, the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has singled out Social Security as rife with fraud and inefficiencies. 

The agency has announced plans to close several field offices, cut the agency’s phone service for beneficiaries to cut fraud and use X, Musk’s social media app, as the means to field service requests. After backlash from groups advocating for senior citizens and Social Security beneficiaries from across the country, the planned cuts to phone service were scrapped. Instead the administration is instituting new technology that allows staff to conduct anti-fraud checks over the phone and flag abnormal behavior, they said.

 "The Social Security anti-fraud team has worked around the clock in person to improve technological capabilities and they are now able to identify fraud on claims filed over the telephone," a department spokesperson said in a statement at the time. 

The White House has tried to assure the public that there wouldn’t be any disruption to service but callers are spending nearly 50 percent more time on hold and are taking slightly longer to receive a callback since Trump came into power, according to the agency’s own figures. “President Trump has promised to protect Americans’ hard-earned Social Security benefits so that all eligible individuals can access them,” Lee Dudek, the department’s acting commissioner, said in a recent statement.  

New Yorkers are still being put on hold for hours when trying to contact SSA, Gillibrand said. The senator said one constituent called every single day in March, sometimes multiple times a day, and was repeatedly put on hold and told to call back later.  

It wasn’t until the constituent reached out to Gillibrand’s office and got help from the senator’s staff that she was able to get their questions answered by Social Security’s staff, more than a month after she had initially called. She insisted that the White House has the funds to properly administer Social Security. 

"This is an all-hands-on deck moment,” Gillibrand said. “We have to protect Social Security." 

Osorio says that the staffing cuts and heavy workloads has left his members “disenchanted” with their jobs and “alienated.” The Trump administration has insisted that Social Security employees work in-person every day and has ignored the contract provision that permits them to work from home several days a week.

That, and the heavy workloads have been two of the biggest drivers of his members’ discontent, Osorio said. "It makes it very challenging to start each day and not hope for it to end," he said. "We only became less efficient since [DOGE] got involved.”

dfreeman@thechiefleader.com