The family of a Black federal worker who died at her job two months ago believes her stress and uncertainty about the current White House administration’s sweeping overhaul of federal agencies contributed to their loved one’s death.
Monique Lockett died on Feb. 18 at her job at the Social Security Administration’s campus just outside Baltimore.
She walked into the building, fell asleep at her desk, and never woke up, according to a police report cited by CNN. She was laid to rest on March 14 in Randallstown, Maryland.
She worked for the SSA for 25 years and was just five years from retirement.
In the weeks leading up to her death, Monique’s sister Ksha said Monique was deeply troubled by how Elon Musk’s agenda as head of the Department of Government Efficiency to carry out major federal spending cuts and mass layoffs might impact her job.
“My sister had a lot of anxiety around the changes that were happening in other agencies and, inevitably, what would happen to Social Security,” Ksha told CNN. “She was concerned about the overall well-being of everybody that she worked with because it was stressful for a lot of people.”
According to a spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland, Lockett died of hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which causes plaque buildup in the arteries. Monique’s sister said that her sister also had high blood pressure and was obese.
A 2019 medical journal cited by the National Institutes of Health states that chronic psychological stress can increase the risk of atherosclerotic diseases as well as strokes and heart attacks.
It’s unclear what exactly triggered Lockett’s fatal health complications on the day of her death, but Ksha believes stress might have been a factor. She noted that Monique was also feeling undervalued at her job in her final days.
“It was very upsetting to her to hear that what they did wasn’t valued, what they did wasn’t important and certainly that what they did was wasteful,” Ksha said.
Co-workers told police that Monique did not display “visible signs of distress” before she fell asleep at her desk. Paramedics spent about 40 minutes trying to revive her, but were unsuccessful in their life-saving attempts. The 53-year-old was pronounced dead at the scene.
“What happened to Monique was truly sad and tragic, literally shook me to the core,” an SSA employee told CNN.
A former SSA worker stated that agency employees have received multiple emails from the Trump administration inquiring about their productivity levels, which has had a “whiplash effect” on the workforce.
“It’s creating a level of anxiety that’s making it hard to do their jobs. These are good people who are being traumatized,” the former employee said.
Monique was an information technology specialist in the SSA’s Office of Systems Architecture, which creates databases for sensitive data maintained by the agency. A former colleague said she was “one of our best” and “very familiar with the existing data repositories that we have at the agency.”
In the months since Donald Trump took power in the White House, administration officials have granted several DOGE representatives access to sensitive data on millions of Americans to facilitate the quasi-agency’s purported purpose of discovering whether fraud is happening in the Social Security payment system.
Last month, billionaire U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick remarked that if SSA missed sending a payment to his 94-year-old mother-in-law she would simply wait until next month and wouldn’t call in to complain, using her example to suggest that “a fraudster always makes the loudest noise” and only someone defrauding the system would complain about a missed payment instead. (The Daily Beast reports that records indicate Geri Lambert, Lutnick’s mother-in-law, lives with him and his wife in their Upper East Side penthouse.)
Elon Musk voiced his disapproval of the SSA during a Feb. 28 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, calling the agency “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
In an interview with Fox Business, Musk said “the waste and fraud in entitlement spending” is the “big one to eliminate.”
Trump has stated that he will not cut Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare benefits, but in a March 11 “fact check” report from the White House, the administration reported that the SSA has made an estimated $72 billion in improper payments between 2015 and 2022.
