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A Social Security Administration office is seen on March 6 in Nashville, Tenn. George Walker IV/AP hide caption
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Jessica LaPointe has worked at a Social Security field office in Madison, Wis., for the past 16 years. And she says right now, the work is harder than ever.
LaPointe says disruptions prompted by the Trump administration's efforts to make deep cuts in the federal government workforce have left many remaining Social Security employees "burned out … and overwhelmed."
Field offices are the public-facing branch of a sprawling agency that provides retirement and anti-poverty benefits to 73 million Americans.
"We really feel the brunt of the public that we serve and the chaos and confusion surrounding Social Security and its impact on them," said LaPointe, who's president of a local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 25,000 field office workers.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has laid out plans to slash about 12% of its overall workforce, or 7,000 jobs.
Rich Couture, a spokesman for AFGE SSA's General Committee, says more than 2,500 employees at the agency have taken an offered buyout, and that many of the workers who have left were in critical roles — including those local field offices.
"That's the primary point of contact, other than the 1-800 number, that the American people have with Social Security," he said. "They take care of enumeration issues with respect to Social Security cards, handle retirement, disability survivor claims, interviews and processing, among other workloads."
Couture says the agency has lost about 2,000 employees specifically from the field offices through the federal government's buyout program.
These losses have disproportionately affected certain local offices. Couture told NPR that there are about 40 field offices that have lost at least 25% of their staff so far, and others, such as offices in Nevada, Mo., and Alexandria, Minn., have lost half or more of their workers, according to agency data.
"The impact on those offices in particular is going to be significant, where you are going to see waiting times for visitors, including those who have appointments, go up exponentially," Couture said.
The office in the city of Wisconsin Rapids has lost more than 58% of its staff. LaPointe, whose field office is 100 miles south, says massive losses in one office often affect nearby sites.
"That office then takes the work and moves it to the surrounding offices, the surrounding areas and then throughout the region and even then nationwide to get help," LaPointe said. "So every office is overburdened, short-staffed with public demand."
Trump promised no cuts to benefits, but advocates say service cuts affect benefits
The Trump administration has routinely pledged not to cut Social Security benefits, while simultaneously cutting waste and fraud from the program.
"President Trump has promised to protect Americans' hard-earned Social Security benefits so that all eligible individuals can access them," Lee Dudek, the acting commissioner of Social Security, said in a statement recently.
But SSA workers and advocates for older and disabled Americans say these staff cuts — as well as controversial agency moves under Dudek's leadership — amount to a cut to services.
"The cut to the program is the deterioration of staff," LaPointe said. "That is the backdoor cut to the program because benefits delayed are benefits denied."
According to the agency's own performance data, there has been a significant increase in wait times for phone services since President Trump was elected.
Last year the average wait time for phone services was about an hour. So far this year, it's more than an hour and a half. At the same time, the number of people calling in to the agency has skyrocketed. In November of last year, roughly 6.5 million calls were received by the SSA that month. Last month, the agency received 10.4 million calls.
Much of the increase in call volume, LaPointe said, is due to "confusion and fear" created by the administration. Some of that concern, she said, was a result of recently announced anti-fraud measures, as well as stories of some beneficiaries being erroneously classified as dead. She said she also saw an uptick in calls after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that only a "fraudster" would complain if they missed a Social Security check.
"People started to come in just to verify their identity [and] that they're alive," LaPointe said, "that they're associated with their account [and] to let us know they do need their money."
Reassignments and retirements
It's expected many of the lost field office employees will be replaced by staff who were working at the agency's headquarters or one of the regional offices. One of the Trump administration's plans is to cut down the number of regional offices — which provide IT and human resources to the field offices — from 10 to four, and then retrain some workers who "volunteered" to be reassigned to public-facing roles.
"SSA offered all employees the opportunity to volunteer to be reassigned from a non-mission critical position to a local field office, teleservice center, processing center, payment center, workload support unit, or hearing office," the agency says. More than 2,000 employees have volunteered for a reassignment.
Couture said the union, however, has not heard any "well-developed plan for ensuring that there was orderly knowledge transfer" as people are placed in those roles.
Laura Haltzel was the former associate commissioner for the SSA's Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics in the agency's Maryland headquarters. Rather than volunteer for reassignment and face more uncertainty, she decided to take an offer of early retirement.
Haltzel said there are problems with the expectation that workers in roles like hers would be able to quickly jump in and replace the thousands of frontline workers that have left. She called the plan a "sort of mythical idea."
"We've lost an extreme amount of expertise and knowledge that we simply are not going to get back," she said. "Let's say somebody in my team, who is a statistician, [you] suddenly turn them into a claims processor. It takes two years of training for someone to become proficient at taking a Social Security claim because of the complexity of the law. That is not something that you can simply plug somebody into overnight and keep up at the same pace as it had been operating previously."
And to meet the overall staffing goal, agency officials are urging more workers in "non-critical roles" at headquarters to consider the deferred resignation program.
But Haltzel said it's an open question whether many of these workers will want to leave, despite the pressure.
"People are taking reassignments out of fear that they will have no jobs because the entire economy in the D.C. area now is affected by a loss of employment across the federal landscape," she said. "And for all of these individuals to find new jobs in the private sector, that's simply not a reality, particularly from the Social Security Administration, for which there is no private equivalent."
A spokesperson for Social Security told NPR in a statement that the agency "has implemented its workforce optimization plan that focuses on reducing employees in non-mission-critical positions and bolstering staff in mission-critical roles" and that officials will "continue to monitor progress" of the staff reductions as they continue throughout the fiscal year.
Haltzel said she's deeply concerned about the loss of expertise that has left the SSA in recent weeks. She said her former team, which analyzed whether the agency was doing a good job serving beneficiaries, has been cut by more than half.
"I hope that we're able to sustain a basic minimum of knowledge in order to maintain the functioning of the agency," Haltzel said. "But frankly, given that they have no control over who takes the reassignments and who simply retires and leaves, they could lose individuals where we are one person deep in knowledge. And once that knowledge is gone, it is gone. These people will not come back."
