From the Washington Examiner:
Some Social Security offices are closed or limiting in-person services across 12 states, potentially delaying access to benefits and other services. According to the Social Security Administration’s emergency operations webpage, the SSA has temporarily closed or shifted several field offices to phone-only service. …
Offices in Yuma, Arizona; Mission Viejo, California; Fort Walton Beach, Florida; Wailuku, Hawaii; Decorah, Iowa; Elizabethtown, Kentucky; Detroit College Park, Michigan; Glasgow and Havre, Montana; Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania; Del Rio, Texas; and Logan, West Virginia, are operating on a phone-only basis. …
That’s way more than can be explained by ordinary office repair type issues. I have to guess it’s lack of staff in most cases.
15 comments:
This is where honesty goes a long way. O'Malley got on there saying benefits would be impacted, and when it did not, the GOP crowed (rightly) about how people were lying. Instead the honest truth is that the cuts have led to massive service disruptions and horrific service. We need honest people to speak out.
O’Malley could definitely have been clearer, saying that service would be impacted, which could very easily lead to benefits being impacted.
If claimants cannot get help timely, their benefits can be affected.
If staff continues to leave, benefits can be affected.
If SSA continues to only care about numbers over quality (been happening for years), benefits can be affected.
Not enough staff and incorrect payments (or lack thereof) lead to benefits being impacted.
Check it again around a holiday weekend and the list will be far longer. It's a lack of staff.
Port Angeles WA i know is limiting its hours of service
To run with limited staff, legislation needs to simplify the programs the agency administers. Getting rid of ISM penalty for food and housing assistance on T16 benefits would help, if passed. But they will need to do much, much more.
Have we reached the point with medical advances and AI, that disability could be purely based on the listings? Steps 4 and 5 were relevant when we had primarily factory work. Are they still relevant now?
This is O’Malley. Only one Field Office ever closed during my time with you due to lack of staffing — southeast Cleveland.
These ghost offices and sporadic closures are a direct result of the deep cuts inflicted on this hard-working agency by the guys of doge and their successors, doge lite. (And yes, they are all guys)
Were it not for enormous public push-back against team Trump’s stated goal of reducing IT staffing by 5O%, there would have been the interruption of benefits by now of which I warned. Salute to Mike Astrue for also warning publicly at the time that a reckless cut of this degree “would put benefits at risk.” They backed off that 50% cut to IT, thankfully.
But a lot damage has been done all across the agency as they’ve reduced staffing to AT LEAST a sixty year low.
Thank you to you — the courageous men and women of SSA — who continue to hang in there. Strength and honor to the Mission We Share.
In solidarity,
Martin O’Malley
Thank you Commissioner O’Malley you attempted to fix the agency. The crook and fraud currently holding your job is taking credit for your initiatives while limiting services everywhere possible. I hope you are willing to return to fix SSA on day one of the next administration.
Attention Frank…
Why can’t SSA do some rehiring?
RFK: Cuts at HHS haven’t led to problems, but we’re hiring 12,000 new employees
Really wish you were still our COSS. Miss your vision, common sense, and commitment to the spirit of social insurance.
The Work CDR program needs to be simplified as well. The current policies and procedures are extremely cumbersome and time-consuming, and we simply don’t have the staff to do the work timely. It leads to many, many errors.
It would be nice if our programs worked too. We were supposed to get a new and better program in the very beginning of 2025. We are now halfway through FY 2026, and a quarter of the way through the calendar year, and still waiting on the new program. The people manning the programs refuse to update the current program any further, and as a result various (almost all) notices can no longer print from that program. We have to go to three additional programs/applications to print out notices, which just adds to the time.
In 30 years, MOM was the only Commissioner who took the time to understand the mission from the seats of people doing the work, to gather recommendations for improvement, and to prioritize investments that had the leadership and potential to improve service delivery. In fact, he was the only COSS to call BS on people and products that were not performing -- something far too many leaders don't have the courage to do. If SSA wants to keep getting what it is getting for its limited IT resources, they can continue to do what they're doing, while everyone else, including CMS, leaps into the future with partners who have the creativity, discipline, and technology to solve todays challenges and anticipate the needs of future beneficiaries. With some leadership, courage, disciplined investment strategy, and alignment to shared goals, maybe -- just maybe -- SSA can get there. An org chart might be a good start ...
What a complete cluster by the current admin.
The agency has been on a steady decline since 2024. That was the year many people quit and DOGE took care of what was left. No plan for the future. A miserable place to work. No hope. Good luck to those still there.
I know I don’t speak for everyone, but I definitely miss your leadership Mr. O’Malley.
A lot of the field was put under pressure by your Stats but I full heartedly believe that was never your intent. You wanted to highlight the problems and tell the story of an agency failing by way of poor funding and staffing. The executives and GS 15s/14s below wanted to suck up and look good and ratcheted up the pressure to make things better which began the downward spiral of employee morale.
I’d love for you to have another chance to right the ship again. This time with constraints on the sycophants. Because I truly felt, at least for a while, we were heading in the right direction.
Wow the one in Glasgow/Havre, MT is SUPER rural. They NEED that office so one doesn't have to travel through nothingness for several hours. I'm surprised by that one! There's really nothing there BUT the SSA office! (That's not true, but close.... tiny area population wise, but lots of seniors, and it is a very spread out rural area).
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