Social Security research group axed, including six centers
Social Security Administration sign on field office building. SSA is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government that administers Social Security - San Jose, California, USA - 2020
The Social Security Administration has summarily closed a federally funded consortium of research centers, including one at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that studied demographic trends and the impacts of policy on the federal retirement system.
Terminating the program has sharply limited the program's research sources at a time when the Social Security Administration is poised to cut 7,000 workers, close field offices across the country and cancel the ability for people to file for benefits by telephone.
'It's very, very frightening,' said Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works. 'I've been working on this issue for 50 years and I think this is the most destabilized I've ever seen the administration of Social Security.'
The UW center was one of six members of the Social Security Administration Retirement and Disability Research Consortium. The consortium was established in its current form in 2019, a successor to retirement research centers established in 1998.
The other five are Boston College, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), the University of Michigan, and Baruch College.
The Trump administration announced Feb. 21 that the consortium was being dissolved in keeping with an executive order President Donald Trump signed Jan. 22 gutting diversity activities across the federal government.
Shutting down the consortium canceled 19 research projects that were underway at the UW's Social Security research center, said its director, J. Michael Collins. Collins, a specialist in family economics at UW-Madison, holds positions at the university's School of Human Ecology, The La Follette School of Public Affairs and several other university offices.
Research by the center and its consortium partners in collaboration with Social Security represented an important collaboration that has helped shape policy for the 90-year-old Social Security program, Collins said. Studies on the income and expenses of older Americans, for example, have helped guide the formulas that the Social Administration uses to develop its annual cost of living adjustments.
'It really is a collaboration, and that is hard to build,' Collins said — and may be difficult to recreate.
Along with canceling the consortium agreements, the Social Security Administration has relocated its own research operations while also cutting staff.
'They've greatly reduced their ability to conduct research internally,' Collins said. 'Why would they want to eliminate their research capacity to that degree?'
Established during the Great Depression to lift seniors out of poverty, the Social Security program is primarily funded by payroll taxes. As each generation retires, its members' benefits are paid by the generation of workers behind them.
Social Security provides retirement benefits as well as income for people with disabilities. About 73 million people in the U.S. receive benefits from the system, according to the Social Security Administration. Three out of four are 65 or older. Another 15% are people with disabilities under the age of 65.
One project underway at the UW center when the research consortium was canceled was looking at the impact of state mandates requiring employers to provide sick leave for employees — a law on the books in about a half-dozen states. (Wisconsin is not one of them.)
That study could have provided evidence whether or not mandated sick leave policies reduce the need for future permanent disability claims. 'Either way, that's an important question for Social Security' to understand, Collins said.
Another project cut off was a study of Long Covid — the lingering collection of health-hampering symptoms reported by millions of COVID-19 patients. Understanding how the condition affects trends in work, health and disability could inform the projections Social Security actuaries must make as they look at the program's prospects 75 years into the future, Collins said.
The UW center was also contributing research to help structure Wisconsin's ABLE account — a savings account for people with disabilities that the state is in the process of establishing.
The UW center was launched with a five-year grant for $12 million. The grant was renewed in 2024 with another five-year grant that was supposed to be for $15 million. About $2.3 million of that has been spent, but with the termination there will be no reports or final studies, Collins said.
Altman of Social Security Works said research has been integral to the Social Security system from when it was established in the Great Depression, spearheaded in part by people with ties to UW-Madison.
'They've always done research to determine how the program should be structured, what the needs of the American people are, how economic security can be improved and what other countries are doing,' Altman said. 'You have to be informed to have legislation that will work and have administration that will work.'
The Feb. 21 Social Security Administration press release announcing the termination of the research consortium said the research center agreements 'included a focus on research addressing DEI in Social Security, retirement, and disability policy' and that ending them was in line with ending 'fraudulent and wasteful' initiatives.
'The reality is that Social Security is gender neutral, racially neutral,' Altman said. Nevertheless, she said, various social differences are important in understanding how disparate impacts might affect the long-term operation of the program. For example, an accurate projection for the program's resources and ability to pay benefits in the future requires considering the differing labor force participation rates of men and women.
Altman said contrary to the claims of the Trump administration, its actions with the Social Security Administration are 'the opposite of rooting out waste, because it's creating it.'
Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.
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USA Today
37 minutes ago
- USA Today
Former Biden press secretary is ready to tell Americans the truth? Give me a break.
Former Biden press secretary is ready to tell Americans the truth? Give me a break. | Opinion The knives are now out inside the Democratic Party. And the party is bleeding, not only Americans' support and trust but also its last remaining drops of honesty and truth. Show Caption Hide Caption Karine Jean-Pierre talks exit from Democratic party in new book Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre talks about leaving the Democratic party in her upcoming book slated for release in October. The Democratic Party continues to self-destruct, and I am here for it. Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has teased a tell-all memoir about former President Joe Biden and the administration she served for nearly three years. 'Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines' is stoking claims that Jean-Pierre is a grifter, profiting off her time in the administration by trashing the former president and the political party that gave her prominence. Knives are out among Democrats for one of their own who has now betrayed them. Like other books that have recently exposed details about Biden's poor health, Jean-Pierre's book raises questions about the White House cover-up that attempted to hide the president's mental and physical decline from voters. It also calls into question Jean-Pierre's honesty: Why did she wait until now, when she can profit from it, to tell the truth about the former commander in chief? Former White House colleagues turn on former Biden press secretary Democrats are now a minority party in America. The GOP controls the White House, the Senate and the U.S. House along with a majority of governor's offices and state legislatures. The Democratic Party has lost Americans' trust because of its leaders' penchant for gaslighting, not just about Biden's health but also on issues like immigration, border security and the economy. Jean-Pierre, who now claims to be an independent, certainly isn't helping her former colleagues rebuild that lost trust. Details from the book are still sketchy, but Jean-Pierre should provide readers with an inside look at what happened after Biden's disastrous debate with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump a year ago this month. Jean-Pierre's coworkers have already reacted to the book with contempt. "Former colleagues expressed confusion at how Jean-Pierre seemingly intends to paint Biden as a victim while pinning her own decision to leave the party on his 'broken' White House," Politico reported, citing multiple former Biden administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Opinion: Biden's cancer diagnosis raises the question: Was he ever in good enough health? Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist who worked on the Commerce Department's communications team during Biden's presidency, took umbrage with Jean-Pierre's assertion that the Democratic Party betrayed Biden. 'Kamala Harris and the entire Biden/Harris campaign did hero's work to avoid losing 400 electoral votes and giving Republicans a supermajority in Congress, which is what would have happened if he stayed on the ticket,' Legacki told Politico. 'It's more productive to focus on that, and thank Biden for doing the responsible thing by stepping aside, than it is to pretend this was an unwarranted act of betrayal.' But party insiders continuing to squabble over whether a now former president was or was not betrayed by fellow Democrats entirely misses the larger point. Opinion: Guess who Americans want to run the economy? Hint − it's not Democrats. Far too many Democrats, Jean-Pierre included, worked hard to deceive Americans. Their willful lack of self-awareness about their gaslighting and dishonesty is why the party has shown no signs of recovering from the last disastrous election cycle. Karine Jean-Pierre's book about Biden isn't the first Jean-Pierre's book will be far from the first to address the deception at the heart of the Biden White House. On May 20, journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson released "Original Sin," which describes in detail Biden's cognitive decline and the mind-boggling efforts with which his inner circle and the Democratic Party tried to hide the truth from Americans. Opinion: Texas woman's death would have been prevented if Biden had secured the border Conservatives had long been suspicious about Biden's health, but journalists with White House access failed to ask tough questions then. Now that it's too late to make a real difference, those who were silent when it mattered most are more than ready to profit from belated exposés about the former president's failing health. The knives are now out inside the Democratic Party. And the party is bleeding, not only Americans' support and trust but also its last remaining drops of honesty and truth. Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.

Business Insider
38 minutes ago
- Business Insider
The rise of layoff culture
Shaffan Mustafa was laid off for the first time in 2020. Four years later, in January 2024, the software engineer in Ohio was laid off again. Then, in September, he was let go from a contract job. "I wish I could say I didn't have experience with layoffs, but unfortunately, I have a bit too much," he tells me. The first time, he found it depressing. It took him 10 months of scouring job boards and hundreds of unanswered applications before he landed his next role at a local consulting company. The second time, says the 29-year-old, "I was still sad about it, but at that point it wasn't as unexpected." His third layoff in five years has been different. In the middle of yet another job search a few months ago, he came across a Substack called Laid Off. "I probably typed something like 'being laid off sucks' and found it that way," he says. After reading several people's layoff stories on the Substack, he felt less alone. He became a paid subscriber and joined the dedicated Discord group where members went into more detail about their layoffs, shared job updates, and ranted about the state of the economy. Mustafa checks the group daily, sometimes every few hours. The Substack is the brainchild of Melanie Ehrenkranz. After being laid off herself from her role as a newsletter editor at a financial technology startup in 2023, she wanted a way to process the experience. "I felt like there wasn't really a lot of spotlight on the individual experience of a layoff outside of a LinkedIn post or a tweet or a group chat with a couple of your friends," she says. Ehrenkranz, 35, found a job nine months after being laid off, but she decided to launch the newsletter anyway. In August 2024, she shared her first post, an interview with a social media producer laid off from Condé Nast, asking her questions such as, "Where were you when you found out?" and "What was your greatest financial concern with the sudden loss of income?" and "Has being laid off changed how you view your relationship to work?" She has since been inundated with people willing to share their stories. Within two months, Laid Off grew to 5,000 subscribers. Recently, it surpassed 10,000. The number of Americans facing long-term unemployment has crept up from 1.05 million in February 2023 to over 1.67 million as of last month. Since 2022, more than half a million tech workers have been laid off — one analysis found there had been about 90,000 tech layoffs in the first five months of 2025. Amid the job losses, a new culture around layoffs has sprung up. Workers are livestreaming their layoffs to audiences of millions on TikTok. 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"We've all heard those stories about a dad who was laid off," says Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. "Every day, instead of going to work, he goes to the mall and spends eight hours there before coming home. He's embarrassed to not be working." The pandemic changed layoff culture. People stuck at home on their laptops all day began broadcasting their unemployed status. Then the pandemic changed layoff culture. More than a fifth of the American workforce was laid off during the first few months of COVID-19, a decline in employment not seen since the end of World War II. Layoffs stopped being seen as an individual failing but as an unfortunate byproduct of economic instability. People stuck at home on their laptops all day began broadcasting their unemployed status. LinkedIn introduced its green #OpenToWork banner in June 2020. The post-layoff note, with its cheery tone and calls to "reach out if you're hiring," quickly became standard practice. As more layoffs have hit in the past year, the stigma has vanished even more. "It used to be if you got laid off, it's because you're a screwup — you're just a bad employee," Mustafa says. "Now it's just par for the course." For some, being laid off became not just a LinkedIn update but lucrative content. Giovanna Ventola, a commercial real estate worker, first went viral for sharing advice to other job seekers after being laid off three times in three years, Bloomberg reported. She has gained nearly 30,000 followers sharing her perspective on coping with unemployment and has launched a professional networking platform, Rhize. Others have documented their days-in-the-life navigating being newly unemployed. In her newsletter, Ehrenkranz has spotlighted stories from everyone from a design intern for the National Park Service to a creative director at Google. 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"I hope it's a place people can vent on a bad day and it's not on social media for hiring managers to see," she says. As the stigma around layoffs disappears, the boundaries of professionalism on social media have become increasingly blurred. Ask any recruiter, and they'll say bad-mouthing a previous employer on social media is tantamount to career cyanide. "It gives me alarm bells," says Brad Thomas, a business manager at Orange Quarter, a tech recruitment company in New York. "It's the same as when a candidate interviews somewhere — talking bad in an unprofessional manner about a previous employer is just not a good look." His advice when it comes to posting on social media is to keep it professional. In the new culture of layoffs, however, there is an important caveat. "The size of the company makes a difference," Thomas explains. "If someone has a pop at Meta or Google, it's less personal and less damaging to the brand versus a startup of 30 people." As the stigma around layoffs disappears, the boundaries of professionalism on social media have become increasingly blurred. Earlier this year, when Meta let go of some 4,000 workers, branding them as " low performers" on the way out, the departing employees refused to leave quietly, pushing back on the label on LinkedIn. As Business Insider's Aki Ito wrote, "This is something we haven't seen before in the professional world: Employees sticking up for themselves in public, and calling out their former employer for misrepresenting their work." Both the social media posts and the private communities offer a kind of testimony that shifts blame from the employee back onto the employer. Ehrenkranz has had many people tell her that being interviewed for Laid Off or filling out her surveys is a cathartic experience. "A layoff these days is a 10-minute Zoom call, shut your computer, and then you're thrown into this new chapter," she says. Having a dedicated space to talk about being laid off with those who get it is a relief for Mustafa. "I don't really feel like I'm being pushy or shoving my layoff experiences down someone's throat," he says. While there is power in numbers, for some, those numbers can be overwhelming. A friend of Mustafa's left the Discord group shortly after joining. "She was getting emotionally burned out from hearing about layoffs," he explains. "She's fortunately a freelance writer, so she's making some money. She can just tune out that stuff if she wants to. For me, I'm still desperately tuned in." Ehrenkranz focuses on making sure the Laid Off community is a toxic-positivity-free zone. "I would say the vibe is just real," she says. "There's no 'Everything happens for a reason' or 'You'll get the next one.' People don't want to hear that." Rather than just a place to wallow, many of these support groups are designed as both a safety net and a springboard for when members are ready to begin the hunt for their next role. Fana Yohannes, a social media consultant and former Meta employee, founded the group Here2Help to give job seekers a leg up. In the wake of the 2020 layoffs, she posted on Instagram that she was open to reviewing and providing feedback on five people's résumés. "One person replied and was like, actually, I'd be down to help too," she says. From there, Yohannes says, Here2Help grew to 200 mentors who helped about 2,000 people find new opportunities during COVID. "We've come to an era where layoffs are part of the job," Yohannes says. "We have to kind of be strategic." After four months of sending out applications, Mustafa has a second interview lined up for another tech role. Even if he gets the job, he plans on staying in the Laid Off community for a while — just in case. "I can't trust these people anymore," he says about employers.


The Hill
6 hours ago
- The Hill
Harris calls Trump's LA response ‘dangerous escalation meant to provoke chaos'
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