Federal Workers Speak

Sylvie Williams Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration

Sylvie Williams worked in federal service for nearly 20 years, mostly at the Social Security Administration and more recently at the Internal Revenue Service. During her final months at the IRS in 2025, the work she had loved doing—helping make the public’s online experience on the IRS website easier—was being dismantled.

I came from working at Social Security to the IRS as a customer experience strategist. Not many members of the public understand what federal workers do as a whole, and what I did can be hard to explain, even to my family. In simple words, I worked with a group that was trying to make paying your taxes easier.

The IRS isn't just there to take your money or make your refund as big as possible. There are so many things people don’t understand about interacting with the IRS. You go to IRS.gov and there's so much information. Our group, the Taxpayer Experience Office, was created—what we call “stood up”—to make the process easier, to make forms easier to understand, and to explain credits that come and go every year.

Before that, I spent 17 years at Social Security. Our group worked to get feedback from taxpayers. I was brought in to create a centralized survey system to gather feedback and identify where the real problems were. In paying taxes? Understanding credits? Identifying scams or misinformation on social media? Until you talk to the people interacting with the system, you don't know what to fix. Once we set up the survey on SSA.gov, we could identify the top issues and go to Congress and say, this is what needs funding.

When I was 10 years old growing up in India, my uncle worked for Hewlett-Packard in the U.S.      He was my hero. I told everyone I wanted to work with computers. My parents sent me to the U.S. as a pre-med major, but I changed to computer science immediately. I graduated and realized I didn’t like coding, but I loved talking to people. I found a human-computer interaction program at the University of Michigan—the first program to offer a master’s degree in the field. I got a scholarship, and that was it. I always say I announced my dream at 10, and I’m living it.

People told me I was an idiot for taking a government job. But I fell in love with SSA. It serves people from birth to death. None of us came to this work for the money, but there was a feeling of security with government jobs. I stayed because I saw the value of this job, the value that it provided for the citizens. And it gave me a personal mission. My very first project was the Social Security Number Card Application Processing System. We improved the way that people got SSN cards replaced, and we later moved the process from one of those old green screens that was all text to a web interface.

Replacing a Social Security card is always urgent—because you need a job, or you need to enroll a kid in school, health insurance, college. Suddenly you realize you don’t know where the card is and you need a new one. I interviewed people about the process of getting a new Social Security card and how we could make it easier.

I went on to work with Supplemental Security Income and interviewed folks about getting SSI.  As I listened to their stories, I realized that when they’re going through these painful life events that lead to applying for SSI benefits, we're making it even harder! It can be painful to go to our website to figure out how to get SSI benefits. And even before they come to us, it can be painful, because in the media, these benefits are called welfare, but they are benefits folks are entitled to.

One of the things I valued about my work was talking to people—hundreds of citizens over the years. Sometimes they’d ask, “What are you going to do with this?” And we could show them—bring prototypes, make changes on the spot. We sat with people applying for SSI or survivor’s benefits. Many came in expecting to be treated badly, because of how welfare is seen. I could hear the relief in their voices when they felt heard. Just being seen as humans mattered.

Deploying the survey platform on SSA.gov was transformative. We finally had centralized, nationwide feedback. Before, feedback stayed at individual field offices. We could now compare across regions, see what worked, and learn from it. What we heard in the feedback over and over was that people couldn’t find what they needed. Website satisfaction and trust were the lowest scores. That survey helped convince leadership that we needed a significant overhaul.

We used the results of that survey to do the first major SSA.gov redesign. Before, when you went to SSA.gov, it was information-heavy: “This is SSA and this is our history.” Afterward, it was task based: “I am here to apply for retirement,” “get a replacement card,” “apply for benefits.” And our trust and satisfaction scores improved—that was incredibly gratifying.

When we redesigned the site, we reduced time-to-task by 67 percent. Drop-off rates were reduced a lot too—the percentage of people who, after four or five clicks, leave the website and call instead. We were able to match incoming calls with topics that were dropped and figure out what we needed to do to reduce the drop-off rates.

These things seem small—auto-populating fields, tabbing through phone numbers—but they matter. When you’re applying for unemployment or SSI on a phone, going through screen after screen, those details make a huge difference.

After the administration change, when I was in the Taxpayer Experience Office at the IRS, we got a RIF (Reduction in Force) notice in April, 2025. As of then, in our office, we weren't allowed to do any work. We were never actually RIF-ed, but people took the Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed people who agreed to resign to stay on paid leave until a quit date. We went from nearly 100 people to a couple dozen. Now the office doesn't exist, and people were detailed elsewhere. The work that we did isn't being done. We're not collecting feedback. There's no centralized modernization. Everything is siloed again, and there’s duplicative work.

I think members of the public need to understand that, if they find anything easy to do online with the government, it's UX (user experience) teams that are making it happen. If they find a form that became easier to understand, if they found an online service that’s faster, it's because of UX teams. But those teams got kicked out in the last year, or they've been decimated. I think most agencies now have teams of one. One person is trying to get it done now. They keep talking about hiring technologists—AI, engineers, project managers—which is great. But who’s talking to the humans trying to use these services? You can’t just have computers and AI do everything. If we cut out UX, then we're back to 50 years ago.

I think everyone in federal service that I've met believes in the mission that they came to do. Is there inefficiency? Yes. But we could have helped solve it, we could have helped show where those inefficiencies are.  Just cutting out just swaths of groups is not the way to do it. Especially the people who were already trying to make the government efficient.

I have 16 and a half years as a full-time federal employee and an additional 3.5 as a contractor. I never thought I would leave—I thought I would retire from government. I go between sadness and anger every day. I hope to come back one day.

Being a public servant was very important to Sylvie, but in early 2026, she left the federal government and took a position at a contracting company that does similar work for SSA. She told her husband that she was just taking a break from government, that she needed to reset. She enjoys supporting her former colleagues at SSA and feels lucky to be able to still be doing the user experience work to which she has devoted the past 20 years.