Social Security Administration announces more than $800 million in savings

“For too long, SSA has operated on autopilot,” acting SSA Commissioner Lee Dudek said in a statement. “We have spent billions annually doing the same things the same way, leading to bureaucratic stagnation, inefficiency, and a lack of meaningful service improvements. It is time to change just that.”

The agency found the bulk of its savings from placing a hiring freeze on SSA Disability Determination Services and reducing overtime pay. A total of $550 million was recovered.

The SSA’s cancellation of nonessential contracts reduced the budget of the agency’s Information Technology Systems by $150 million.

Another $15 million in contracts and $15 million in grants were also canceled.

The SSA also made SSA-1099 and SSA-1042 notices available online, leading to 5.4 million customers opting out of paper notices, a measure avoiding $3 million in costs. The agency also reported saving $28 million by moving to centrally print and mail notices rather than having front-line staff print and mail them locally.

The SSA also canceled over 60 leases, which will yield $4 million in annual rent savings.

Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency has struggled with false reports of savings, erasing $4 billion from its “wall of receipts.”

On Sunday night, the group removed 1,000 contracts it had claimed to cancel from its website, representing more than 40% of all contracts listed on its site last week.

WHAT IS DOGE? WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY

Some of these contracts DOGE has taken credit for were either already canceled under the Biden administration or even the Bush administration.

“Overall, there’s a certain randomness to it,” Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, told the New York Times. “It seems like DOGE had certain agencies pull together some random lists of contracts that may or may not currently exist anyway, and then, without checking the data very well, uploaded it onto a website and summed up the amounts. It doesn’t seem to be centrally coordinated.”