Social Security's Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs provides assistance to members of Congress and their staffers.

Social Security's Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs provides assistance to members of Congress and their staffers. mbell / Getty Images

Social Security office that helps members of Congress assist their constituents slashed by up to 94%

A spokesperson said that Social Security's congressional affairs work is continuing in offices across the agency.

A Social Security Administration office tasked with resolving beneficiary issues brought to its attention by federal legislators has shrunk from about 50 employees to as few as three, according to an agency employee.

In addition to constituent casework, employees in SSA’s Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs provide technical assistance to lawmaker offices when developing Social Security legislation and answer questions from Capitol Hill staffers, among other legislative and regulatory responsibilities. 

The former OLCA employee, who preferred to be unnamed due to fears of retaliation, said that the office was able to identify systemic problems with agency operations when, for example, officials got a high number of congressional inquiries from a given area. 

“Some members of Congress say ‘I shouldn't have to be asking SSA. Members of the public should get a direct answer from SSA and not have to ask me to get help from SSA.’ And that's absolutely true,” the employee said. “When you don't have a congressional affairs staff really plugged into what the Hill is saying, what the Hill is hearing…if you don't have that component in SSA, then I think Congress loses out.” 

The employee said that in February, at about the same time as the first round of the deferred resignation program, OLCA staffers received messaging that in order to avoid being laid off they should seek reassignments to other parts of the agency. Due to the number of individuals who took DRP or were reassigned, the employee said that remaining roughly 35 OLCA staffers were assured there likely wouldn’t be a need for further cuts. 

But then higher-ups once again started urging OLCA employees to take a new job at SSA or a voluntary separation incentive. Those reassignments took effect in April, and, according to the employee, OLCA was left with just three staffers, two of whom were brought over from a different office. 

“You have the work that was previously done by 50 people [and officials are] expecting to have three people be able to do it,” the employee said. 

SSA did move a congressional casework team to a different component and remaining OLCA staffers have been instructed to contact other offices to help with their responsibilities, according to the employee. But members of Congress seem to have taken notice of the upheaval. 

More than 50 House Democrats in July signed on to letters sent to SSA and IRS that their staffers are receiving “bounce-back emails and no-replies from [agency] legislative liaison offices that were previously responsive to congressional inquiries.”  A spokesperson for Rep. Gil Cisneros, D-Calif., who spearheaded the letters, said he hasn’t yet received a response from the agencies. 

The SSA employee said that members of Congress also often go to agency field offices regarding constituent casework, but the union council for SSA field office workers recently argued that workloads at such offices are worsening due to a variety of changes at the agency under Trump. 

SSA is in the midst of a reorganization and has brought in several individuals with no government experience to serve in senior leadership roles. 

The former OLCA employee is now working in disability adjudication, which handles eligibility determinations for SSA disability benefits. The employee said that they’re “overwhelmed” because the reassigned employees were provided with seven weeks of training instead of the usual six months. 

“It’s a s— sandwich, and we're eating it,” they said. “You have all these really inexperienced people who were doing other work effectively now doing disability adjudications.”

They did note, however, that reassigned employees were partnered with mentors who have been helpful. 

The employee said that some OLCA staffers were asked to return, potentially increasing the number of workers in the office, but the employee does not want to go back out of concern that there’s a greater chance of their job being cut there. 

“That's not exactly a place a person who's been jerked around for the last six, seven months wants to be,” they said. 

An SSA spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive that Commissioner Frank Bisignano “has pledged to have the right level of staffing to deliver best-in-class customer service.”

“We conduct congressional affairs work across the agency including at field offices working on local constituent services for members of Congress, employees in finance who work closely with our appropriators and our dedicated headquarters legislative affairs staff,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to respond to congressional inquiries, provide regular briefings to congressional staff and will adjust our resources as needed to continue to fulfill these responsibilities.”

The spokesperson also said that reassigned employees received eight weeks of training and that, paired with the mentorships, “this process ensures they can ask questions, request necessary assistance and possess the required knowledge to be effective in their new roles.” 

The employee said that the gutting of OLCA has left many staffers feeling like their work wasn’t valuable. 

“This whole experience has put a lot of us in an existential crisis as to whether or not we mattered at any point. Some of our managers [said] ‘Even though you’re being told you're not essential, you do matter. You do matter. And just remember, you matter,’” they said. “It was really sad just watching people be like ‘Okay, why am I doing this?’”

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