Rennie Glasgow took a pay cut when he left a job in sales to sign on with the Social Security Administration (SSA) 15 years ago, but he felt the stirring of something bigger than money when he raised his right hand and took the loyalty oath required of new federal employees.
“It felt great,” the 55-year-old career civil servant told the Daily Beast this week. “You have a purpose. Your job is important. You are working for the federal government of the United States. I felt very special at that time.”
The feeling was continually affirmed as he went to work at the Syracuse, New York, office of what has managed to remain the U.S. government’s most popular program, despite being fiscally starved by Congress for more than a decade. He embraced SSA as a calling.
“And not just as a job,” he said.
He and his fellow SSA workers shared a mission.
“To ensure that we provide quality customer service to those who have paid into the program and expect to enjoy that benefit as they get older or disabled or lose a loved one,” he said.
He had even more reason to feel he was right to have chosen a calling over cash as he rose from a claims specialist to a claims technical analyst and became vice president of the union representing the region’s SSA workers, Local 3343 of the American Federation of Government Employees. The whole agency seemed special despite being neglected for so long.
“Things were going very, very well,” Glasgow recalled. “What the government needed to do to make Social Security better was to fund Social Security. They have held back funds for Social Security for years.”
SSA had nonetheless managed to get the job done, accomplishing more than could rightly be expected with less than was its due.
“Our agency is the one agency that uses only 1 percent of its budget for employees, benefits, and payroll,” Glasgow noted.
But in recent days, the SSA has come under dire threat by someone who has more money than anyone else on earth. Elon Musk was appointed by President Donald Trump as a “special government employee” and also took the mandatory vow to defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Musk’s self-assignment was to head something he dreamed up, called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). A big question is why one of his first major targets was a government agency that was already remarkably efficient, given its funding constraints.
“We were getting the job done efficiently and effectively, until now,” Glasgow said.
One of the first moves by Musk and DOGE was to demand and secure access to the SSA’s heretofore sacrosanct databases.
“We are trained from day one [that] information that you have access to is not your information, it’s government information and we protect project that information, we have custody,” Glasgow said. “If you use that information outside of your duty, then you can land up in various different types of disciplinary action that can be taken if you decide to use that information for something other than what your duty requires.”
He added, “I cannot look up my own information, I cannot look up information for my family. If I look up that information, I have to report that within an hour, even if it’s a mistake that I accidentally looked up something with my last name or my wife’s last name or my mom’s maiden name.”
But there seemed to be no rules at all for DOGE.
“Folks that have not been trained, have not been sworn to protect that information, but they walk in and they just go around accessing and doing whatever they want, and we have no clue where they’re taking that information or what they can do with it,” Glasgow said.
In the Syracuse office, Musk’s attack came in the form of emailed commands and rules from people who act as if no rules apply to them. It was all the more unnerving because none of the DOGE crew actually appeared at the Syracuse office.
“You heard they were in Albany, but not Schenectady,” Glasgow told the Daily Beast. “I’d love to meet them. You never know who they look like, never know who they are, and I don’t know what training they receive.”
The Syracuse office was already down to a bare-bones 31 employees. Since Trump took office, it lost seven to lay-offs and retirements as part of a ”workforce reduction” that saw 140 years of collective experience walk out the door.
“They were told that they’re no longer needed,” Glasgow said.
At the same time, the public was hit with numerous confusing emails about what they could or could not do. A dozen people showed up at the Syracuse office on Monday under the mistaken impression that they had to present an ID in person.
“Our seniors are traveling to come in here to be told, ‘Oh, you don’t need to bring in an ID,‘” Glasgow said.
Prior to DOGE, wait times on the SSA 1-800 were sharply declining, but now they are spiking. The website that has previously been a relatively reliable alternative is repeatedly crashing.
As a result, double the number of people are coming to the office in person. They then often find that only four of the 18 windows are open due to the staffing shortage. And a person could finally step up to a window after a three-hour wait only to encounter more DOGE-induced inefficiency.
“Every day, between the hours of 10 to about 12, our system goes down,” Glasgow said. “So it’s not just that people are sitting there, waiting for us to help them. When they get to the window, they’re told, ‘Our system is down. We can’t help you. We don’t know what’s going on.‘”
And the frustration can then turn to fury, or fear, or both.
“You sometimes have to tell people who are either needy or disabled or both that the law only permits them to receive a certain amount,” he said. “Those are difficult things to tell people when this is all that they have, they’re going to lose their house, they can’t get food.”
Glasgow went on, “It’s easy to stand up and say, ‘Well, those are the rules, talk to Congress, blah, blah, blah.‘”
Glow and like-minded SSA workers seek an alternative other than just breaking the rules.
“We’d rather say, ‘I’m sorry, but this is what we can do for you. We’re going to try to get this done. We’re going to try to do it this way. We’re going to try to help you this way. We can refer you to these social services or something,‘” Glasgow said.
But the rules are still the rules, unless you are DOGE, which seems to just make up whatever new ones best suit itself.
“Emails are coming in every day changing some rule to make it more difficult for individuals that are collecting Social Security benefits,” Glasgow said. “Individuals are living at a time of so much uncertainty.”
And when dealing with the public, SSA workers have to act as if everything is normal, even as Social Security is becoming increasingly insecure.
“We cannot afford to get upset,” Glasgow said. “We cannot afford to lose our cool. We cannot afford to show the public that we are breaking.”
The SSA can only turn to their coworkers for support.
“We have to, at all times, lean on each other, lean on our patience, lean on our understanding,” Glasgow said. “[It’s] all that we have.”
He had always advised his co-workers to leave the job in the office elevator when they depart at the end of the workday. That is now an increasingly impossible challenge.
“When you go home now, it’s the stress, it’s the uncertainty, it’s the what’s on TV, what’s on the news, what’s the next executive order?” he said.
Back at the office, SSA workers worry they might not be able to perform their jobs when their individual workload has been doubled or tripled.
“Individuals are in tears because they are feeling like they’re getting so much work coming on them now, and … they are worried that they might not be able to perform as they were performing before,” he said. “People don’t want to fail in their job.”
As a claims technical expert, Glasgow handles the most complex cases, but even as he tries to successfully untangle situations such as a blended family with multiple marriages and multiple sets of kids, he has begun to wonder if Social Security will be there at all in the future.
”What’s happening now, I am not sure that my kids will be able to get Social Security when the time comes,” Glasgow, a father of six, said “I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to get Social Security when the time comes.”
He cannot help but feel that Musk and DOGE are deliberately seeking to sabotage SSA and cause the public to lose confidence in it.
“We’re being pushed to ensure that we cannot perform effectively and efficiently, so that they can privatize,” Glasgow said. “I’m almost certain that the goal is privatization for this agency because there’s a lot of money they want to get their hands on.”
Glasgow was speaking of the cash the SSA has amassed from taxpayers’ contributions. He noted that Musk has called Social Security the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.
“Let them get their hands on the $3 trillion and you’ll see what’s a Ponzi scheme.” he said.
Glasgow made another vow, in keeping with the one that felt so good when he raised his right hand 15 years ago.
“We are going to continue to fight,” he said. “We’re going to continue to stand up. We’re going to continue to ask our Congress to stand up and to implement whatever measures they can to ensure that this agency is not privatized.”
