Karime Masson spent nearly a quarter-century at the Social Security Administration, then retired early in December 2025 and started working part time at TJ Maxx for $12.50 an hour. She says she is “happier than I’ve been in a while,” and the shift has cut her stress and anxiety while giving her back control of her days.
Her story reads like a personal reset, but it also lands in the middle of a larger fight over how the federal workforce works now, and what happens when flexibility disappears.
The return-to-office push under President Donald Trump has forced agencies to weigh service backlogs, employee health, and budget realities against political pressure to put people back at their desks.
A personal story with a policy shadow
Masson, 59, worked for SSA for about 24 and a half years as a claims representative and bilingual translator. She describes a workplace that was already strained by staffing shortages, where phone duty, front desk tasks, and complex casework all competed for attention.
Telework during the pandemic, she says, made her more productive because it gave her quiet time to read policy, digest details, and make careful decisions. When the option ended, wait times climbed, customers grew more frustrated, and employees took the blame even as the staffing picture worsened.
She had planned to work at least until 62, maybe 65. But with telework gone, a shutdown that caused missed paychecks, and worries that pension or health benefits could change, she decided her body and mind could not take much more.
What the Trump-era telework crackdown changed
The policy shift was not subtle. A White House memorandum dated January 20, 2025, told executive branch agencies to end remote work and return employees to their duty stations full time, with only limited exemptions.
The Office of Personnel Management followed with guidance, and later published a 2025 Guide to Telework and Remote Work that frames full-time, in-person work as the default while allowing narrow, case-by-case exceptions.
In practical terms, that puts managers and unions into a new tug-of-war over what counts as “operational need” and what counts as a reasonable accommodation.
At SSA, the fight quickly moved from policy memos to collective bargaining disputes. In March 2026, an arbitrator ordered the agency to restore telework for many employees represented by AFGE after finding SSA violated its labor agreement when it curtailed telework.
SSA says service is improving, but the picture is complicated
Masson argues that telework helped experienced staff process cases faster and reduce errors, especially for complicated claims. But agency leaders have said the opposite, pointing to backlogs, long lines at field offices, and rising phone demand as reasons to pull people back on site.
The agency’s official messaging points to improvements that are hard to ignore, including “65% more calls” answered in FY 2025 compared with FY 2024 and an average speed of answer in the single digits for months. SSA also says field office wait times fell nearly 30%, and appointment holders wait about six minutes on average.
Those claims line up with a December 2025 Inspector General review that found SSA’s publicly reported phone metrics were accurate and that service improved after a new telecommunications platform expanded self-service and automation.
Still, the same report notes that average callback time was roughly 1 hour and 49 minutes in FY 2025, and that millions of callers abandoned calls before receiving service.
Why retail feels like relief
For Masson, the numbers do not capture the daily grind. She says she was already on anti-anxiety medication and sometimes relied on Xanax, and she has an autoimmune disease that stress makes worse. After retiring, she says she no longer needs Xanax and her health symptoms have eased.
At TJ Maxx, she works about 15 hours a week and turns down offers for more hours or responsibility. She likes being a “worker bee,” and the paychecks often flow right back into the store because she enjoys shopping there.
The wage gap is obvious, but the trade-off is time. A $12.50 hourly retail job is well below the median $16.62 hourly wage for retail salespersons reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yet Masson says the real payout is flexibility. Yoga, Pilates, or a mid-morning workout without racing the clock.
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Masson says she misses helping people, especially when she could fix a widow’s benefits problem or untangle a bureaucratic mess. She is now considering starting a consulting business to help clients navigate Social Security rules, reflecting a growing market for “system translators” when public systems feel hard to use.
For policymakers, the bigger question is whether strict in-person mandates will make federal staffing shortages worse, especially as more workers reach retirement age.
Labor force participation among Americans ages 55 to 64 was 65.9% in 2024 and is projected to rise in the next decade, according to federal data, meaning agencies may be competing harder for experienced older workers who value flexibility.
Federal agencies can improve customer service without treating flexibility as a perk, but the balance is delicate. When remote work becomes a political symbol, employees like Masson may decide the safest move is simply to leave. And that is a costly outcome for an agency tasked with serving 330 million people.
The press release was published on the Social Security Administration.
