Credit: larryhw/Adobe Stock
The ongoing actions to cut staff and fundamentally reshape the Social Security Administration being taken by the Trump administration are ostensibly being made in the name of efficiency, but two former Republican-appointed leaders of the SSA say the end result will be detrimental to American retirees.
Andrew Biggs and Jason Fichtner, former senior SSA officials who were appointed during the second Bush administration, shared this warning during the American College of Financial Services’ inaugural Horizons retirement conference in San Diego. They said the SSA — like any government or private organization — can always benefit from a commitment to efficiency, but they shared their frank and candid concern with the Trump administration’s cavalier approach to “reform.”
Complete your profile to continue reading and get FREE access to BenefitsPRO, part of your ALM digital membership.
Your access to unlimited BenefitsPRO content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:
- Breaking benefits news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
- Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
- Critical converage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
Already have an account? Sign In Now
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
John Manganaro
John Manganaro is a senior reporter for ThinkAdvisor. His coverage focuses on all things retirement, with a special emphasis on the perspective of financial planning professionals and family wealth managers. Before joining ThinkAdvisor in 2022, John was a reporter and editor at PLANADVISER Magazine, and earlier in his career his coverage of the Pennsylvania Legislature regularly appeared in premier metropolitan newspapers including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He can be reached via at [email protected], on X at @manganaro_news, and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/manganaronews/.
