U.S. Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Bay City) held a press conference Tuesday advocating to keep a Saginaw Social Security office open, and demanding clarity on its future from the White House.
The office was one of the buildings included on a list of 443 properties the General Services Administration considered non-essential and potentially up for sale.
McDonald Rivet held the conference across the street from the building. She says the building is important to the community.
The list of buildings was later deleted but McDonald Rivet sent a letter to the Trump administration demanding clarity on the Saginaw office's future.
“On March 4, 2025, the GSA published a 'Non-core property list' on its official website, identifying properties across the U.S. for disposal. This list included the Social Security field office in Saginaw, Michigan,” the letter reads. “This threatened closure would create barriers for my constituents, limiting their access to timely and easily accessible support for their benefits.”
At her speech, McDonald Rivet reiterated her concerns over what she says is a lack of clear communication over the site.
"We want to know what the process is for determining which offices are closed, why we're closing any to begin with,” she said. “We want to understand what their plans are, that will make benefits very hard for people in our community to access, and we want them to say definitively that this office is off limits."
McDonald Rivet was joined by Tom Brubaker, a 61-year-old retiree who relies on Social Security, after being left blind by a stroke.
“The last 18 months, applying for disability, like when you access any service is a lot of work. It's a lot of paperwork. It's a lot of accessing doctors and getting support letters and documentation,” he said.
Brubaker said the office needs to stay open. "To close this office. Are you kidding me? This is going to devastate our community,” he said. “It's going to hurt people like me, because if I run into a problem, I know there's people right here at Social Security who will meet with me. It's so easy to get in and out of that building.”
“Last year I was going applying. The one thing I kept saying to my family was. ‘There's an office in downtown Saginaw.’ I knew that office was there for people like me.”
The GSA says on their website they are taking a “more incremental approach,” amid “overwhelming response that we received after publishing the first list.”
As for the future, the GSA says they are “focusing on a shorter list of assets that have already been evaluated, based on several criteria such as deferred maintenance and operating cost, utilization, and the general availability of replacement space in the local market.”
They say much of the portfolio of federal assets is unusable.
