Bad news for seniors, veterans, the sick, the disabled, and the American people in general. The many programs and services they have enjoyed are being cut as the number of people who provide these services has been reduced over the years and is now the smallest since the mid-1960s. Among the country’s largest industries, the federal government is the only one that saw the workforce shrink last year. Since 2010, the government has destroyed 200,000 federal jobs, thanks to lawmakers’ embrace of sequestration.
Laying off federal employees is their back-door way to do away with social programs (so they can free up money for tax cuts for the rich). SSA, for example, has closed 80 offices and 500 contact stations. It now has 11,000 fewer staff to handle an increasing workload of retirement and disability applications. The agency is pushing people to apply benefits online where they have to wade through 2,728 rules, at which point many people give up. More than 70,000 My SSA accounts have also been subject to some kind of fraud or identity theft.
