During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) spoke about DOGE layoffs to the federal workforce.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Any further members wish to strike the last word? Mr. Swazin.
00:06Okay, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
00:09I just want to point out some basic facts that people need to understand.
00:14Jody, this is important.
00:15In the 1970s, we had about 203 million people in America.
00:19Today, we have 350 million people in America.
00:22In the 1970s, we had about 3 million federal employees.
00:26In the 1980s, we had 3.3 million federal employees.
00:29In the 1990s, we had 3.4 million federal employees.
00:34In 2020, we had 3 million, same as it was in 1970.
00:39And so we have about the same number of employees in the federal government today
00:43as we had back in the 1970s, even though the population has increased
00:47from about 203 million to 350 million people.
00:51And we've hired a lot more outside contractors than ever before.
00:56We've spent a lot more on outside contracts, like with Elon Musk, for example.
01:01But we have the same number of employees that we had back in 1970 as we do today.
01:07Now, I don't have back to 1970, but in the Social Security Department,
01:13you talked about how your phone call took a long time today.
01:16Well, who's in charge right now?
01:17Because on the day the Biden administration left,
01:21they had gotten it down to a record low response time of 12 minutes to respond to a call,
01:26which even 12 minutes to me seems like too much.
01:28But that was a record low for what it was.
01:30Today, it's going through the roof.
01:32And if you look at the number of employees in the Social Security Department,
01:36in 1999, there were 59,000 employees.
01:40In 2010, there were 66,000 employees.
01:44So 59,000 in 1999, 66,000 in 2010.
01:50At the end of the Biden administration, there were 56,000 employees, less than it was in 1999,
01:563,000 less than it was in 1999.
01:58And now we're talking about taking it down by another 10,000.
02:01Well, no wonder everybody's going to complain that things are broken and it's not working well,
02:05because we're trying to take it down.
02:06Now, when I was the county executive of Nassau County,
02:09it was rated the worst run county in America before I got there, I want to point out.
02:14But we went from 8,500 employees down to about 7,000 employees.
02:18We did not do it by laying off the lowest-wage new employees, the probationary employees.
02:23We did it by normal attrition and by offering retirement incentives to the highest-wage, most senior employees.
02:31And when those people left, we tried to make up for the reduced workforce by improving the technology
02:38and by doing consolidation and procedures and processes to make things more efficient.
02:44What we're doing now through DOGE is so haphazard and so reckless.
02:49And the idea of trying to instill this fear in people and lay off the low-wage people,
02:56the provisionary employees, in places that we're trying to hire people up to try and get to the backlogs,
03:00like in the IRS, where we make more money than we spend when we hire employees,
03:05doesn't make any sense to me.
03:07It's just bad management.
03:09And it's just scaring the hell out of everybody in the process.
03:12And there's going to be a price to pay politically for people,
03:14because most of the federal employees live in Republican districts and in Democratic districts.
03:18But we'll see that as time goes on.
03:20All the stuff we're going to see.
03:21You say, we're not going to cut Social Security, we're not going to cut Medicaid, we're not going to cut Medicare.
03:25Well, we're going to find out in the next six months or so what people are really up to.
03:28Then we'll really know what it is.
03:30And it's not about instilling fear or not instilling fear.
03:32We're going to find out what it is as time goes on.
03:35Right now, we're concerned that what DOGE is doing is reckless and irresponsible.
03:41Do we need to get rid of waste, fraud, abuse? Yes.
03:44Do we need to make things more efficient? Yes.
03:46Do we need better technology? Yes.
03:48Do we need better procedures and processes? Yes.
03:51But the way that they're doing it right now, and I've given the examples before,
03:56laying off the people in the nuclear stockpile, laying off the people that oversee avian flu,
04:00laying off the people that oversee measles, doesn't make any sense to me.
04:04Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.
04:06I want to yield my remaining minute to Chairman Neal.