At the direction of then-Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley, I spent 2024 assessing the Social Security Administration’s operations. I tested my observations with the agency’s 6,000 managers during 31 workshops across the country. This past October, I delivered a real transformation plan to the commissioner.
Anyone who has ever felled a tree with a chain saw knows that all that is left is an unsightly stump.
The actions of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency are impulsive and amateurish, and they show no concern for the consequences. Its actions exemplify the very waste, fraud and abuse it claims it wants to reduce.
The plan for the Social Security Administration is rich with DOGE-driven misguided actions:
· Waste: Firing for cause the 80-person Office of Transformation at Social Security based on a search for the word fragment — “trans” — that DOGE associated with now-banned programs. This office was formed six months ago by agency leaders to accelerate its programs to address waste, fraud and abuse.
· Fraud: It has been claimed that Social Security is making payments to individuals who have been deceased for decades, which the agency asserts is clearly untrue. If a Social Security recipient has died, the agency terminates benefits within days of their death and even recovers any funds they were not eligible to receive.
· Abuse: Firing people for “cause” — when there was no such rationale or documentation — is abusive in and of itself and has immediate consequences for the individual fired. The process ignores their actual contributions and potentially puts their families in financial peril. Who ultimately suffers? The very people SSA was created to serve, because there aren’t enough people to serve them.
American businesses in the early 1980s started to realize that Japan’s approach to business management was rapidly eroding U.S. market share, notably in the automotive and consumer electronics sectors. Since then, the principles taught to Japanese businesspeople by an American economist, W. Edwards Deming, have evolved and now dominate business management practices globally. Today’s lean and agile philosophies and practices have all evolved from that foundation.
These management practices are not, in general, followed by the government. Ten years ago, I wrote “Government That Works: The Results Revolution in the States.” The book was an effort to show how effective these principles are when applied to the work of government. It was endorsed by four governors, two from each party.
Government workers are not the problem, although the premise that firing a lot of them will fix anything seems to dominate DOGE’s pursuit of efficiency.
The issue is and always will be leadership.
Having the right leadership in place for this critical agency was such a low priority to the White House and to the U.S. Senate that when O’Malley was confirmed by the Senate in December 2023, he was the first commissioner to be confirmed in 10 years. That gave him, a man known for his success driving results as Baltimore’s mayor and Maryland’s governor, less than a year to fix the agency.
Congress continually cut agency budgets and declined to invest in modernizing technology. The agency today has the fewest employees it has had in 50 years, with DOGE showing more the door. Now, at an agency that is serving 70 million people and rising but has declining staff levels, wait times are on the rise.
Social Security has real issues. We have all heard the stories.
But it isn’t all bad news. A recently retired colleague wrote to me last week that he has found Social Security to be remarkably responsive and efficient and has had no problems with payments.
Social Security is the most successful anti-poverty program the country has ever had. It can become significantly more efficient; its problems can be fixed. There are business-proven approaches to do so, if fixing it is the intent.
