The Office of Personnel Management
(OPM) has posted updated figures for the number of employees at the Social Security Administration -- and the downward trend continues:
- December 2016 63,364
- September 2016 64,394
- December 2015 65,518
- September 2015 65,717
- June 2015 65,666
- March 2015 64,432
- December 2014 65,430
- September 2014 64,684
- June 2014 62,651
- March 2014 60,820
- December 2013 61,957
- September 2013 62,543
- June 2013 62,877
- March 2013 63,777
- December 2012 64,538
- September 2012 65,113
- September 2011 67,136
- December 2010 70,270
- December 2009 67,486
- September 2009 67,632
- December 2008 63,733
- September 2008 63,990
33 comments:
The joy of statistics - we are either 10% down in staffing since December 2010 or 5% higher than March 2014... I'm not sure what the happy medium should be, I just know there is not enough staffing in the field offices. And I am sure other components will say the are understaffed too.
all offices are getting re-org
and a HUGE percentage of the existing staff is of advanced age or closely approaching retirement age.
I've been in three offices, very few people under 40.
When Part D was rolled out I joined SSA along with 4 other hires to become CRs. Of those 5 hires only 2 remain with SSA and one of those is now management. The rest of us quit. I consider it one of the best decisions of my life. 2nd worst job I have ever had. The first was mucking out stables when I was a teenager. Same amount of waste but the horses were polite about it.
go back to the 80s or at least 90s to get the bigger picture and significant downward trend.
I still have yet to fully understand out why staffing is such an issue when so much of the interaction with the agency has been moved to online services. I realize that there is still back end work to do on online transactions but it would seem as though whatever efficiency was to be gained by moving matters online has not truly been realized?
There is a huge amount of back-end work. When people are barely literate or don't understand what you're asking or why you're asking it, they fill out the online forms in ways that are incomplete or nonsensical. Sometimes, it takes longer to untangle an online submission than it would have taken to handle an issue in person, where it's easy to clarify a question, look at body language, etc.
Plus, there are more people applying for benefits than there were in the past. Baby Boomers are retiring (and dying) and their claims take time to figure out--especially when you add in all the auxiliaries like spouses, exes, and DACs.
12:00 -
Left the position, but yet you still hang around SSA related forums to keep the discussion alive? I don't get it. The job is clearly not for everyone, but if you work at it and it becomes a career, your defined benefit package is much greater than you'll find elsewhere. There a multitude of reasons why and why not to continue employment with SSA.
@2:32 I use the knowledge gained as a CR for good now, helping people with SSA problems and programs. I became a social services worker, and provide the services that SSA cant or wont provide. I do more LIS applications now than I did when I was a CR! Medicare enrollments, untangle problems and provide the CRs in the local office a place where they can send the people that need more than SSA can provide. It is less lucrative, but I sleep better knowing I am helping more people get the services that SSA and its new CRs cant. I would say 25% of my workload is cleaning up SSA made messes.
Im not sure I would characterize employment as a CR as lucrative
I know several Judges that are jumping ship, some because of telework and 50 a month, but also because management sucks.
I can see retiring if that's what you mean by jumping ship but no sane person would leave the ALJ gig for something in the private sector.
Give me a break. SSA is a bloated, feather bedding union bureaucracy.
@3:24 GS 11 lots of time off, dirt cheap insurance. That's not bad when you add a few steps to it.
4:05 - I wouldn't go that far. The ALJ gig might have been nice once upon a time, but not anymore. The file size keeps growing, the support staff keeps shrinking, the agency keeps raising the quota on scheduling hearings, more and more time is devoted to mandatory training, and less time is available to review files and hold hearings. The judges in my office that are meeting the hearing quota have to work more than 40 hours per week, and often forfeit the extra hours. Speaking with the more tenured judges, there used to be more job satisfaction with helping deserving claimants, but with the current state of the claimant mills, deserving claimants are a needle in the proverbial haystack. I personally haven't felt this much pressure to meet quotas and account for every minute of my day since working as a law firm associate. Overall, it's still a good job, but there are a lot of other good, rewarding jobs available in this economy, with many paying far more.
"The judges in my office that are meeting the hearing quota have to work more than 40 hours per week." Sounds rough for a job with no real accountability. How many ALJs have been fired in the last decade?
I hope the downward trend continues and hope many more ALJ's leave sooner rather than later. Overall, too many ALJs don't do their jobs and many of them should be fired.
The worst is probably yet to come, as the agency hasn't made its usual annual early retirement offer so far this year.
With the way they've totally botched the new SSI system modernization release (a slow browser based system with an apparently intended design for 50-70% productivity loss per claim), I wouldn't be absolutely shocked to see the early out numbers absolutely explode this year.
I took a simple SSI child claim Friday for a family with 8 kids that took almost three hours to finish (the income screen alone required clicking 100+ irrelevant radio buttons to clear, which I had to do twice because it decided to crash the first time).
If nothing else, worker's comp claims are gonna go up for carpal tunnel syndrome, that is for sure....
Agee . They are a bunch of robbers with a license. Took the union dues on the run from members in broad daylight, then turn around and be incompetent as they all are. Check out the SSA local union in the Worcester/Boston area, THE WORST!!!!!!!!
7:50 PM, can you please remind me of the time the Agency offered early retirement to Judges? I think not.
6:00 pm. Most attorneys in private sector work more than 40 hours a week...and no pension.
The early out was already offered in NYS.
210 its not nice to tease the salvating masses (; what does NYS stand for and when was the early out offered?
3:08
There was a conference call in New York State for employees who were within 3 years of retiring from SSA. It is my understanding they were given instructions on the early out opportunity this year (poor excuse for drain the swamp).
yeah, 6:00 PM
As a lawyer myself, you really need to take a step back and just look at that statement--"work more than 40 hours a week"--and see how absurd you sound.
Even within the Federal Government...you jokers make what Congresspeople and many other of the highest paid government workers make and, you have to admit, have 1/10th of the stress, hours, etc. that they do. Let's not even get into what ~ $180,000/year lawyer jobs look like in the private sector.
You all work three days from home if you can schedule roughly 50 hearings a month; take home a cool $180k in salary and another $9,000 in TSP contributions if you aren't a dummy; have liberal leave and hours of work policies; and are generally untouchable. Aside from maybe losing telework if you have a harda-- HOCALJ, what real consequences would you ever possibly face if you were just mediocre? Like if you did 400-450 dispositions a year and kind of phoned it in on your file prep and instructions. I have the answer based on tons of empirical data--absolutely nothing. There's no performance reviews to do badly on, no bonuses to miss out on, and you have a life tenure job in an agency that generally treats you as deified untouchables--think about all the ALJs that we have terminated or forced out the door into retirement and how egregious their conduct or performance was to get to that point. It's a really high bar.
Can we talk about how everyone in this agency that doesn't wear a robe is referred to by their first name--from that GS-4 front desk person to Nancy and Teri and Donna, while any jerk in a robe must be referred to as "judge" or "your honor" or some nonsense like that no matter the setting.
A lot of posters say it, but I guess you all don't hear it. Quit complaining, you have it unbelievably good no matter how you slice it even with the recent changes that have made it worse. Try and remember how excited you were at the prospect of landing the job before you got it and how unicorn-esque it was before you got used to it. It's still that sweet, you goofs!
The majority of ALJ's should be canned because they don't do their jobs properly. The backlog problem would be solved if ALJ's would do their jobs properly. Sadly, no one makes them do their jobs properly and no one seems to know why.
The ALJs complain because they couldn't make it on the outside. Never saw a rich prosperous lawyer walk away from a lucrative private practice to become Almost Like a Judge. Just mediocre performers that knew the only way to a robe and the prestige they desired was through SSA.
ALJs are like SSA most of the SSA management. Considered "Rejects" if working other than SSA or outside as in the private industry's management. Yet, demandingly abusive inside because of the nepotism, cronyism, and corruption culture which is their only protection.
The ALJ jobs at SSA should end and are probably going to end because too many of them are lazy and don't do their jobs well.
Does anyone know why there are so many managers at ODAR who are not attorneys? How do they help the agency goals?
ODAR should be drained from the the top down to the abyss to save the US public from more financial torture!!!
ODAR has way to many non-attorney managers for reasons unknown. I am not the biggest fan of attorneys but quite frankly you can get more for your money with attorneys in management roles. Creating an artificial career path for non-attorneys is wasteful spending of taxpayer money. I
Since there is such a huge backlog shouldn't something new be tried at ODAR? Obviously the current structure is not working. Too many lazy ALJ's and too many managers at ODAR hearing offices who don't earn their pay. Don't taxpayers deserve better?
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