The Office of Personnel Management has just released numbers on the number of employees at the Social Security Administration as of March 2007. Here are the numbers with some comparison points:
The Social Security Administration lost 7% of its workforce in two years-- just at the point at which the agency was beginning to experience a surge in disability claims caused by the aging of the baby boomer generation as well as a dramatic increase in its Medicare responsibilities. Why would anyone be surprised that the service that Social Security gives the public has gone to hell? Why was Jo Anne Barnhart, who was Commissioner of Social Security until early this year, not making an issue of this? Why is Michael Astrue, the current Commissioner, not making more of an issue of it?
3 comments:
My office is being decimated by retirements this year, with more to come. Cases sit on desks, unworked, no one to even pick them up to look at them. If anything is ever done to rescue SSA, it will have to be rebuilt from the ground up--it is to late to just backfill and try to catch up. It will take billions of dollars and tens of thousand of new hires to restore service to what it was 25-30 years ago.
Unforunately, Barnhart was sold on the idea that technology was a panacea for SSA's staffing problems and she seemed to believe that with enough expensive technology, SSA wouldn't need any staff at all. Hopefully, Astrue will have better sense than this.
Many of the SSA employees have never worked anywhere else. Those of us who have done time in the private sector know that the technology that SSA has is incredibly inefficient - although we are constantly reminded of the "good old days" of manual inputs. More people are needed, as is better technology that would allow claims to be processed more efficiently.
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