Recently I did another run through of the doge.gov listing of office closures. The five Social Security offices in our region that were to be closed had been narrowed to one, in Columbus, a week ago. In today’s list of lease closings, however, none of the five are now showing up with closures.
The removal of the Social Security offices from the terminated lease list could be because of the new changes to Social Security, requiring a lot more physical visits to offices. There has been criticism of increasing office visits for Social Security at the same time DOGE/Trump are closing the offices and the agency is planning on reducing staff.
However, the offices may only be temporarily removed from the list. Because of the nature of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ DOGE lists, I now download the JSON (data in a specific machine format) for the lease closures every time I check. This way I can verify that at one point an office was on the closure list but isn’t now…but could be on the list again, in the future.
What is on the list now, is the closure of the OSHA office in Savannah. As the header graphic notes, the Savannah OSHA offices covers all of the Savannah, coastal Georgia, and southern parts of the state—including the new Hyundai plant, where another worker recently died.
The Savannah office also covers both the Savannah and the Brunswick ports, as well as several chicken processing plants, which are considered to be highly dangerous environments for workers.
It’s unknown at this time whether the other two OSHA offices in Georgia will somehow have to pick up the slack. Considering the location of these offices (the Atlanta area), it will be difficult for OSHA to operate in the southern and coastal areas of our state without the Savannah office.