The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has finally posted updated numbers showing the headcount of employees at each agency as of the fourth quarter of 2023. 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 December with earlier headcount numbers for comparison:
- December, 2023 60,343
- September, 2023 61,410
- June, 2023 60,726
- March, 2023 59,400
- December, 2022 58,916
- September, 2022 57,754
- June, 2022 58,332
- March, 2022 59,257
- December, 2021 60,422
- December 2020 61,816
- 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
9 comments:
Sadly, it takes a minimum of 4 months for most newly hired employees to finish entry-level training (if they start official training on Day 1). Oftentimes training is delayed because the agency waits for the majority of new hires to be onboarded over several weeks (or months) before starting a nationwide or region-wide training session (even though it's mostly self-paced online objectives which are poorly designed. By the time the employee finishes the 4-month training, then comes the 1-2-year gauntlet of applying what you learned in the first 4 months. Most people quit after the 1-year mark for a variety of reasons. In my small DO with less than 12 employees, we hired 2 employees in June 2023, and both have quit as of July 2024. Add that to the plethora of aging employees that know how to do their jobs well and are planning to walk out at retirement age, and you have a looming crisis ahead. Even if SSA hired 10,000 employees today, they would not be proficient to take their first phone call for at least 4 months, and arguably a year or two to make a real impact to agency backlogs. And that's assuming that you have capable mentors and trainers available (and not buried under their own workload)...
The strategy of paying overtime to make up for a lack of employees should be reconsidered. The goal should be to hire enough employees to cut down on overtime and not have a stressed out workforce. Eventually, these employees will retire or move on to other jobs that have a better work and life balanced approach.
That data is old. Current staffing is actually 56,949 and dropping.
@1:30pm,
Are those numbers as of June or July 2024?
I'm honestly surprised SSA hasn't tried to reach out to try to temporarily reemploy annuitants for 12-18 months to try to stabilize things in the field.
Though, I suspect they'd have to go to ones that retired several years ago whose memories might have dimmed a little about how bad it was getting when they left. Recent retirees know how bad it is and would probably hang up on them with a maniacal cackle.
How do you find the current staffing numbers?
1:30 here. Those numbers are what are made available to the public on SSA’s website under the security stat section. These numbers, including more detail, are given to the COSS every two weeks including more detailed attrition rates at the HR Stat.
https://www.ssa.gov/securitystat
So would us older ones
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