The Office of Personnel Management
(OPM) has posted updated numbers
showing the headcount of employees at each
agency. Note that these numbers do not tell the whole story. They don't
account for part time employees nor for overtime. Overtime is a huge
part of the story at Social Security. A Full Time Equivalent (FTE)
report would cover that but we seldom see FTE reports. Here are Social Security's numbers
as of March with earlier headcount numbers for comparison:
- March, 2023 59,400
- December, 2022 58,916
- September, 2022 57,754
- June, 2022 58,332
- March, 2022 59,257
- December, 2021 60,422
- September, 2021 59,808
- June 2021 59,707
- March 2021 60,675
- December 2020 61,816
- September 2020 61,447
- June 2020 60,515
- March 2020 60,659
- December 2019 61,969
- December 2018 62,946
- December 2017 62,777
- December 2016 63,364
- December 2015 65,518
- December 2014 65,430
- December 2013 61,957
- December 2012 64,538
- December 2010 70,270
- December 2009 67,486
- December 2008 63,733
Honest prediction is that after Oct 1, things are going to go from bad to really bad once the new budget kicks in. SSA is currently using up the last of it's available OT and it's very likely there will be no OT money in the budget for next year. Claim's Reps already spend their entire week answer phones, working walk-ins, or taking claims. Without OT, a LOT more backend processing is about to come to a grinding halt. If you thought the backlog/wait times were bad now, be ready for real frustration soon. I don't personally see it happening, but I wouldn't be surprised if office/phone hours end up being shortened as a result.
ReplyDeleteNah, bro. First your managers will continue to blame telework and cut it further. Then they’ll call you lazy and crack the whip harder. Then they’ll be promoted elsewhere in the agency after it’s clear they’ve been unable to attain any improvements in service. Then a new set of managers will move in and repeat the same dumb cycle.
DeleteThese pre pandemic numbers weren’t even sufficient. I’d love to see the number of employees with less than 2 years experience.
ReplyDeleteNo OT in my office for the remainder of the fiscal year. Cue lots of credit time - and a bunch of December use or lose leave.
ReplyDelete@1:04
ReplyDeleteNope, I will not work credit time in lieu of OT. I also know that many of my coworkers feel the same. Sure, it's anecdotal and there will be some SSA employees that will work credit, but the vast majority will not. Credit being paid out at 1:1 ratio is nothing compared to 1.5x for OT pay. I'm not working credit, just to have to take a day off later, knowing that on that day off, my plate at work is just getting refilled exponentially faster than I can get it done.
SSA leadership has helped to create the constant yearly budget fiasco over the past few decades, and always expects employees to do more and more to dig them out of the situation. I will not be a part of that.
202 I will not work any extra unless they offer ot. I don’t care how backed up we get.. if mgmt cares they would fix it
DeleteDQB employee here. So far this year I have worked 497 hours OT this year. That equates with 497 cases clearing that would have had to wait for being assigned in the normal work queue. I will work credit beginning October 1 but only to get my 24 hours credit. Retiring 12/29 after 41 years. Magic number 24/208/240. Yea. It’s been a long strang trip. Good luck to my coworkers. The work load is unsustainable
DeleteSo much for those 8000+ new hires management was crowing about early this year....
ReplyDeleteI told my manager earlier this year he could stick his overtime wherever he found it most convenient. I'll never voluntarily work another minute before I retire.
Inching up, but not in the right places for hearing offices. The OHO leaders predict a landslide of cases in 2024 and 2025 as DDS works through its backlog. OHO has promoted support staff to the point where we are in great need of legal assistants to get cases ready for hearing. Leadership appears to lack common sense necessary for future planning. Training legal assistants takes time - by the time leadership plans for hiring, hires and onboards, hearings offices are well into 2025. What are we doing instead?OHO is hiring new attorneys to replace those who are detailed for a short period of time to help DDS. That would make sense, but caseloads are low .. so why do we need to hire attorneys when the detailed attorneys will return (the brakes were put on this hiring, but offers had already been extended for some so those hires will continue). Region 4 is also promoting support staff to unneeded paralegal positions - thus further decimating support staff ranks. It appears the Agency leadership is once again going to create a backlog with long wait times for those most in need... sad.
ReplyDeleteAs one of the experienced employees that got the hell out 2 months ago, I'd love to know how many of those new employees have been there less than a year. And how many will still be there a year from now
ReplyDelete@148 Hard to tell how long new employees will stay. On my office over half have left within 2 years. Many years ago that didn't happen... ever.
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ReplyDeletePC7 employee here. We're having a meeting Thursday and the rumor is that telework cuts will be announced. That certainly will not help with retention , as many employees could retire immediately.
The manager will only say "it's important that you attend this meeting". It would be nice if they at least told us what the agenda is.
That's going to be a very short upward blip. HR dragged their feet so bad during the hiring rush that we lost a lot of our good candidates to other agencies or private industry. We got a grand total of 2 hires in our FO before the hiring freeze was (stealthily) set. We've been told no new hires coming next year.
ReplyDeleteBoth our hires are fantastic, but we're probably going to lose them within two years to better opportunities.
Yep, the Republicans are telling SSA and, by extension, all Americans to "get lost" (Another four letter word would be more appropriate, but there may be children reading this) by purposely underfunding the agency.
DeleteFor as bad as things are now, imagine the shape the agency will be in on 10/1/24 after a year of no OT and no new hires.
I can definitely see it getting to the point where the AVERAGE waiting time for an initial decision by DDS grows to a year to two years. That is the direction we are heading.
Hopefully sanity will be restored starting 1/2025, after the most consequential election of our nation's history.
@1018. Republicans may be mostly to blame but things weren't much different in 2021-2022 when Democrats were fully in control. Neither party has done much to fix staffing shortages.
DeleteI've often thought about staffing issues at SSA, but in the more recent months and years of digging through past articles, I think part of the issue really comes down to SSA's inept management dropping the ball again and again on modernizing it's IT infrastructure. PCOM is from 1987....and it's still the Mainframe program for SSA. WHY. It's been 36 years! SSA management couldn't come up with something with more automation by now? Every thing SSA releases is some half-cooked program that barely runs half the time and causes the headache inducing "work arounds." In the past 2 decades, had SSA actually focused on Modernizing and automation, there wouldn't be a staffing issue, because less staff would be needed to complete the archaic bullshit that employees have to manually do still because SSA management has failed to adapt to changing technology. It's not rocket science, SSA management has reaped what it sowed and the hole just continues to get deeper while they constantly yell at their employees about the need to help dig them out of the mess they've created.
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