FTEs -- This Year And Next

      The Biden Administration has released its entire Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Budget proposal. We already knew that it would call for a big hike in the agency's administrative budget, from $13.7 billion to $14.8 billion, an 8% increase but the entire proposal goes into much greater detail. The part that interests me is the projected number of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) employees (page 1,241).  The proposal shows the FTE number for FY 2020 as 59,574 (actual), for FY 2021 (estimated) as 59,355 and for FY 2022 (projected) as 60,586. 

     A couple of things stick out. First, overtime only went down by 0.4% between FY 2020 and FY 2021. If there's been a decline in performance at Social Security, in general, it's not because of a lack of overtime. In fact, with the amount of overtime almost stable, one would expect an improvement in performance since there are fewer time-consuming disability claims being filed. However, I've seen the opposite from the field offices and the payment centers with backlogs going up substantially. Hearing office performance hasn't been negatively affected but their workloads have been way down.  Second, there's an increase of 1,231 FTEs or 2% from FY 2021 to FY 2022 projected if Social Security gets the entire appropriation recommended. I don't understand. The budget goes up by 8% but the number of FTEs only goes up by 2%? Where's the rest of the money going? Will we once again see an increased operating budget drained away by IT? Of course, IT is needed but you have to have some balance with current operations. These projections tell me that Social Security management is largely unconcerned with public service.

     Update: There was a comment posted saying that federal FTE numbers do not include employee overtime. It doesn't make sense to me to compute FTEs that way, especially for Social Security which usually uses a lot of overtime, but that's the way they do it.