Truth First does not confuse institutional failure with employee character. SSA has caring, intelligent, highly skilled public servants. It also has a documented workload and morale problem.
SSA is asking a horse to fly, handing it another saddle, and then scheduling a performance review because it did not become an eagle by close of business.
The joke lands because the pattern is familiar: demand an impossible outcome, provide another procedure instead of capacity, and then treat the predictable failure as an individual performance problem.
SSA's FY 2016 performance report said the agency held a top-10 large-agency workplace ranking from 2011 through 2016. The later Best Places to Work scores show a steep decline. SSA finished last among large agencies in both 2023 and 2024.
Employee engagement and satisfaction score, based primarily on federal employee survey responses.
The agency's own 2024 survey analysis identified workload management, recognition, empowerment, involvement in decisions, and innovation among the lowest positive-response areas.
This was not a tiny or anecdotal survey. OPM invited 57,387 SSA employees; 40,016 responded, a 69.7% response rate. SSA stated the respondents were representative of its employee population.
SSA wrote that increasing demands on a declining number of staff had reduced morale, and that its employee-survey scores had been among the highest in government when funding and staffing were sufficient. That is an institutional admission of the relationship Truth First is documenting.
SSA's FY 2016 report lists top-10 performance throughout this period and a ninth-place ranking in 2016.
The score rose temporarily in 2020, then fell again in 2021 as service demands, staffing constraints, training burdens, and pandemic disruptions collided.
The following year's rankings show the 2022 baseline at 53.9.
SSA fell another 1.8 points to 52.1.
The score improved slightly to 54.2, but the agency remained at the bottom of the large-agency ranking.
An impossible workload does not disappear because leadership publishes a target. It becomes unanswered calls, shortened interviews, rushed training, deferred reviews, misrouted work, incorrect closures, avoidable rework, and employees thinking about the office long after they have gone home.
That is why former coworkers still talk about work over lunch and dinner. The work follows them out the door because the unfinished human consequences do not fit neatly inside a timecard.
Measure leaders not only by completed workloads, but by whether their goals were achievable with the staffing, systems, training, and time they actually provided.