New procedures and requirements — some implemented in the name of improving operations — are slowing down federal agencies.
DOGE’s intense scrutiny of federal spending is forcing employees to spend hours justifying even the most basic purchases. New rules mandating review and approval by political appointees are leaving thousands of contracts and projects on ice for months. Large-scale firings spearheaded by DOGE have cut support offices — especially IT shops — that assisted federal workers with issues ranging from glitching computers to broken desk chairs. And the piecemeal reassignment of staff is causing significant lags in work in some agencies, notably Social Security, as inexperienced workers adjust to new roles.
At the Social Security Administration, for example, Trump officials and DOGE pushed thousands of central-office workers to take lower-level positions answering phones in field offices, threatening to fire whoever did not make the jump, according to emails reviewed by The Post and interviews with a half dozen agency employees.
Chaos has ensued across field offices in the weeks since the reassignments took effect, staffers said. Claims processing has bogged down as regular field office staff — already overburdened because of widespread resignations and retirements — are pulled off their normal duties to train incoming administrators and analysts.
But the backlog means the trainings are being shortened and rushed through, employees said, so inexperienced, reassigned staffers start work unprepared. That leads to more mistakes, more requests for help and more backed-up claims — and more time wasted all around.
At NASA, employees recently wrote several detailed paragraphs, across multiple rounds of emails, to win approval to buy simple fastening bolts, according to a staffer and records obtained by The Post.
Within the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate arm, more than 1,500 project requests — included fully executed leases and notices saying construction can begin — backed up in an internal tracker awaiting political appointees’ attention, records show. Some items waited for months, and almost 200 are still on hold, while about 300 were never approved, an employee said.
And at the Food and Drug Administration, once-routine tests on food — monitoring for accuracy in labeling, coloring and exposure to heavy metals — were delayed significantly, a former employee said. That’s because the agency began requiring department-level approval for expenses at every step: Purchasing samples to test. Paying to ship samples between labs. Buying lab supplies.
“What Musk showed is that you cannot do this without a plan, and if you do it without a plan that respects some of the functions of government that everybody wants, then what’s going to happen is you’ll end up making the government less efficient, and not more efficient,” said Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton administration official.
