John Tilden spent almost his entire career at the Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn, retiring as a senior technical specialist. Being a civil servant gave his family choices that many corporate workers didn’t have, he said.

“We could make it on just my federal job,” Tilden, 56, said, noting that his wife stayed at home to raise their two children. “We were lucky enough to be able to split our roles and still have a life.”

The federal government has long been viewed as the kind of employer Americans could turn to for stable, good-paying and service-minded jobs, with benefits largely unrivaled in the private sector.

President Donald Trump’s administration is changing that. A flurry of executive orders, including a demand to end remote work and controversial cuts ordered by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have thrown the country’s biggest employer into chaos.

The impact is rippling through the Social Security buildings and other federal offices across Maryland.

Federal employees are losing their jobs and being whipsawed by the back-and-forth of Trump moves and court orders that pause or stop them. At Social Security, Acting Commissioner Michelle King resigned over the weekend after refusing to give DOGE employees access to beneficiary information. She had worked there for 30 years.

“Everything was smooth and very positive, and it seemed like this was a great place to work. But now, no one knows anything,” said a Baltimore-area Social Security employee who has been with the agency less than a year. “I still don’t know if I’m going to have a job.”

That employee, as well as other current Social Security workers, asked for anonymity out of fear of being targeted by the administration.

Some 327,000 Marylanders work for the federal government, according to U.S. Census data. That’s about 10% of the state’s workforce.

The Baltimore region is home to two major executive branch headquarters. About 10,000 people worked for Social Security in Maryland and roughly 4,000 at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as of last year, according to federal data. Together, those agencies would be Baltimore County’s largest employer, aside from the county’s public school system.

The majority of Maryland’s Social Security employees are tied to the Woodlawn campus, which includes a 10-story office tower and several other buildings just northeast of Interstates 70 and 695.

Trouble in the agency

Maryland’s congressional delegation, union leaders — even a handful of local residents worried about their benefits — rallied outside headquarters last week, decrying DOGE’s moves.

Trump has promised not to cut Social Security or Medicare payments; Musk claimed on social media that such programs are rife with fraud.

The Trump administration said it is terminating most probationary workers across federal agencies. About 4% of Social Security’s 58,627 employees nationwide had less than one year on the job as of spring 2024, according to the most recent federal data available.

The Trump-ordered changes arrive at the doorstep of an already beleaguered agency charged with administering retirement, disability and other benefits for more than 70 million Americans.

Budget cuts and layoffs have slashed the agency’s overall headcount over the years. The COVID-19 pandemic sent thousands of office workers to their homes — and many haven’t fully returned to the Woodlawn complex.

Former Gov. Martin O’Malley, who served as head of Social Security for most of the last year of the Biden administration, said at the rally that today’s agency headcount is at a 50-year low.

More than 20 years ago, Social Security was the third-largest nonstate or local government employer in the state, employing about 2,000 more Marylanders than in recent years.

Tilden, who lives in Millersville and oversaw anti-fraud programs, watched employees and contractors come and go. Toward the end of his career, an entire group detailed to work on a project with him was abruptly removed.

“All of a sudden, I didn’t have anybody to work on the program,” Tilden said. He had to start over.

He retired in 2022 as a high-level employee after 31 years with the agency, a decision motivated partly by annoyance with remote work and what he said were constantly changing budgets.

Social Security is home to long-tenured federal workers like Tilden. More than 1,100 of Maryland’s Social Security Administration employees had been with the federal government for 30 or more years as of spring 2024, the data shows.

When Baltimore resident Lillie Steinhorn retired from the Social Security Administration in 2000, she was the longest-serving federal worker in history — having worked there for 65 years.

A fork in the road

Trump began his second term by signing an executive order calling federal workers back to the office five days a week.

Days later, federal workers received an email from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management with the subject line: “Fork in the Road.” It outlined a buyout policy that, if accepted, would allow federal employees to receive their full pay and benefits and accrue annual leave and sick leave until Sept. 30.

Current Social Security employees told The Banner they were offended by the language used by the Trump administration and OPM, which described jobs with the federal government as “lower productivity,” and decided against taking the buyout.

“Honestly, $20,000 for a federal employee as a buyout is laughable — it’s a joke," said one employee who has been with the agency for about nine years. “I’m not doing that, like legitimately, they are going to have to fire me. I’m one of those hold-the-line federal employees. I work too hard.”

The Trump administration has also announced changes to performance evaluations, conduct expectations, an end to diversity, equity and inclusion programs and other sweeping measures.

It may be legally challenging for the Trump administration to force a return to the office at Social Security.

One of O’Malley’s final acts as commissioner last November was to sign a collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees, a federal worker union representing 800,000 civil servants, including 42,000 at Social Security. The contract codifies remote and hybrid work arrangements until 2029.

“They let people take jobs, especially if they had been in the agency for a long time and they knew what they were doing in the job, they let people take jobs like across the country and telework,” one five-year Social Security employee said.

Woodlawn gets Security

The Social Security Administration, created 90 years ago, is a Baltimore native.

When the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration couldn’t find enough space for the agency’s many files in the nation’s capitol, it set up shop 40 miles north.

The Candler Building at the Inner Harbor, a former warehouse for the Coca-Cola Co., became the headquarters in 1936, just a few months after the Social Security Act of 1935 passed.

The agency began with 18 local employees and stayed in the city’s center for 24 years before moving to the campus in Woodlawn, where it is today.

Security Square Mall, built in 1972 and less than 2 miles from the headquarters on Security Boulevard, attached itself to the growing federal worker community.

Baltimore County Councilman Pat Young, who represents the district that includes Woodlawn, said he grew up walking to the mall. The Social Security Administration, he said, has had “a clear impact on the economic viability of Security Boulevard.”

The mall was once a major lunch and resting spot for thousands of local federal workers, but remote work has sped up its decline, Young said.

Baltimore County has been acquiring properties there with the idea of eventually redeveloping it.

Until then, the mall’s anchors are health care centers, a church and what some Social Security workers described as “a revolving door” of smaller retail stores and restaurants.

Business at the nearby Salsa Grill, a popular lunch spot for Social Security workers, has picked back up recently, but it’s nowhere near what it was before the pandemic, said Jessica Caseres, who has worked there off and on for more than a decade.

The restaurant displays welcome-back signs and offers employee discounts to lure workers. If the administration’s efforts to slash the government workforce succeed, she said she worries about Salsa Grill’s future.

DOGE in the building

With the acting commissioner out and DOGE staffers knocking on the agency’s door, Social Security employees are bracing for what comes next.

The new acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, a longtime Social Security employee, said in a statement on Wednesday that DOGE “is a critical part of President Trump’s commitment to identifying fraud, waste, and abuse.”

Beyond the walls of the Social Security building, a government shutdown that would affect federal worker paychecks looms, The New York Times reported earlier this month.

“We are more impacted when it comes to uncertainty with the federal government than other states,” Young said.

It generally takes 30 years to get a full pension, as Tilden did, from the federal government. Current SSA employees wonder if they’ll make it that long.

“There’s nothing in my life that I crave more than stability,” said the Social Security employee who has been with the agency about nine years. “Now I’m having conversations with my peers about whether there is even longevity here.”