Effects Of Reduced Staffing At Social Security

A line out the door of a Social Security field office in Hawaii

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has recently issued a report on the effects of field office hour reduction at the agency. The report shows:

• Many members of the public are unaware of the field office hour cutbacks. People regularly arrive at field offices that have closed for the day. Social Secuirty isn't doing a good job of communicating office hours and non-Social Security websites often contain misinformation on field office hours.
• Field office managers report that reduced hours allow staff to attend training and staff meetings as well as work on their workloads, particularly complex cases.
• Field office managers told OIG that the reduction in office hours did not reduce the number of visitors served. It just compressed them into a shorter time period.
• Public wait times at field offices increased from 14.4 minutes in July 2011 to 30.5 minutes in November 2013. This has led to increasing complaints from the public and lines out the door of some field offices. People sometimes wait in the rain.
• Field office appointment calendars are "usually" booked for the entire 60 day time period that the system allows.
• Overtime allotted to the field offices has declined dramatically. This alone has had the effect of reducing field office staffing by over 4,000 work years per year.
• Average staff on duty to handle 800 number calls declined by 833, 17%, between 2010 and 2013.

Once You Assume That Social Security's Workforce Will Be Cut In Half, This Is How You Pretend The Work Will Get Done

     From Government Executive:

... The National Academy of Public Administration -- a congressionally chartered organization -- worked with SSA to make 29 recommendations on how the agency should modernize and reform itself by 2025. Chief among the suggestions was to more aggressively embrace new technology to deliver services to Social Security recipients, and to move away from in-person customer support in favor of “virtual channels” such as phone, online and videoconferencing options. ...

“With a shrinking workforce, the agency cannot afford to continue to operate in this [old] way,” the panelists wrote. “Furthermore, as more work is automated, it becomes less necessary to maintain the current structure.”

While NAPA did not make any specific estimates of potential job cuts -- Project Director Roger Kodat said it was “too early to make that judgment” -- the union representing SSA employees said the results would be drastic. The American Federation of Government Employees estimated if fully implemented, the recommendations made in the report would result in 30,000 job cuts and the elimination of all 1,250 SSA field offices. ...

Your Wasteful Federal Government?

     A new Office of Inspector General (OIG) report shows that Social Security has 27,885 square feet of office space at its headquarters in the Baltimore area, most of it in the Annex building, that is not being used. You might say that this is just another example of your wasteful federal government and I expect that's how Fox News might present this report but it's not that simple. The first question is why is that office space vacant? It's doubt that it's because Social Security bought or leased too much space. Almost certainly, it's because headquarters workforce has been downsized. The second question is whether, as a practical matter, that space can actually be rented out or sold. Who wants office space in that area of Baltimore especially if it's part of a building that's mostly occupied by Social Security? I don't know the answer to that question. Neither does OIG.

Cutting Federal Workforce Costs Money?

John Gravois writing in the Washington Monthly makes the case that reducing the federal workforce may actually cost more money than it saves:

The problem is that, as employers go, the federal government is in fact pretty exceptional. A corporation can shed workers and then revise its overall business strategy accordingly. A strapped city government can lay off a few street sweepers and then elect to sweep the streets less often. But federal agencies are governed by statutory requirements. Unless Congress changes those statutes, federal agencies’ mandates—their work assignments—stay the same, regardless of how many people are on hand to carry them out. ... “It raises the hairs on my neck when I hear people say we’ve got to do more with less,” says John Palguta, a vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit focused on the government workforce. “The logical conclusion is we’re going to do more with nothing.” ...

[I]f Congress and the White House agree to substantial cuts in the federal workforce but don’t also agree to eliminate programs and reduce services, the end result could be more spending and deficits, not less. Strange as it may sound, to get a grip on costs, we should in many cases be hiring many more bureaucrats—and paying more to get better ones—not cutting their numbers and freezing their pay. Because in many parts of government, the bureaucracy has already crossed that dangerous threshold beyond which further cuts can only mean greater risk of a breakdown. Indeed, much of the runaway spending we’ve seen over the past decade is the result of our having crossed that line years ago—the last time there was a Democrat in the White House, a divided government, and calls for slashing the federal workforce in the air. ...

The average voter may imagine federal bureaucracies as overstaffed, full of people leaning on their rakes and sharpening their pencils. But the truth is, most agencies are, if anything, understaffed. The government has grown tremendously in its spending and scope since the 1960s, and the population of the nation has grown by a margin of 100 million people, but the size of the federal workforce has remained remarkably static at about 2 million. Since coming into office two years ago, the Obama administration has bumped up staff levels by about 100,000, in part through “in-sourcing”—bringing back into the civil service inherently governmental work that had been farmed out to contractors. If this leads to better management, it could well mean a stanching of some of the cost overruns and regulatory failures that have been causing the government to bleed red ink. Today’s mindless demands for austerity, however, could reverse this trend.

A 10% Cut In Federal Employees -- What Harm Could That Cause?

From the Washington Post:

A Texas Republican congressman wants to cut the federal workforce by 10 percent in the next decade, impose a three-year pay freeze across federal agencies and Capitol Hill, and trim government printing and vehicle costs.

Rep. Kevin Brady's bill, the Cut Unsustainable and Top-heavy Spending (CUTS) Act, is the first detailed series of spending proposals introduced in the GOP-controlled House that targets government operations and the federal workforce. Democrats and federal employee unions have long expected the GOP to target domestic spending programs and the workforce in an effort to trim the federal deficit.

Brady chairs the Joint Economic Committee and is a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee - perches likely to put him at the center of Congress's forthcoming debate on government spending and deficits.

It Takes People To Provide Public Service

From Joe Davidson's Federal Diary column in the Washington Post:

During a period when federal employees have been targeted again and again, it's not surprising that House Republicans' "Pledge to America" would promise to freeze the federal workforce. ...

Promoting the plan on NBC's "Meet the Press," Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind), chairman of the House Republican Conference, was clear: "We can reduce government employment back down to 2008 levels."

Federal workers are always an easy target, but it's worth examining whether a freeze would come at the expense of public service....

[R]eturning to employment levels in effect at the end of George W. Bush's presidency could mean service backlogs in many government programs. Take the Social Security Administration for example. It provides payments to retirees, people with disabilities and others. The number of the agency's pending cases and the time it takes to process them has been a serious problem.

Recently, there has been progress as a result of agency hiring. ...

Technology is great, but it takes people to provide public service.

2008 Annual Statistical Supplement Released

Social Security has released its Annual Statistical Supplement for 2008. This contains every imaginable statistic on Social Security other than basic data on operations at the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review, which for some perverse reason is never presented. Here is one table of interest:

Number of work years, fiscal years 1995–2007

Year	Full-time permanent staff	Total work years
1995	62,504	67,063
1996	62,133	66,726
1997	61,224	69,378
1998	59,943	67,210
1999	59,752	66,459
2000	60,434	65,521
2001	61,490	65,562
2002	61,914	65,742
2003	63,569	65,343
2004	63,186	66,154 c
2005	63,696	68,026 d
2006	61,692	66,878
2007	60,206	63,939

Social Security Retirement Woes

From Government Executive:

As 78 million baby boomers near retirement, the Social Security Administration faces double trouble; not only will it have to provide benefit and pension services to this large retiree population, it also must address a retirement wave within its own workforce.

While many federal agencies have not yet been shaken by the mass exodus of seasoned workers projected in the next eight years, Social Security expects its retirements to peak by 2010. Currently, about 25 percent of its 61,000 employees are eligible to retire, including 60 percent of senior executives. "The retirement wave has doubled for us," says Reginald Wells, deputy commissioner for human resources and chief human capital officer at Social Security. "As the baby boomers are retiring and moving into more leisure activities, they are coming to us to register for that retirement, and our employees are retiring in record numbers." ...

"Our workforce is the lowest it's been since the [1974] supplemental Social Security income came into being," Wells says. "We're down to 61,000 employees, down from 85,000 at one point." ...

And while Congress has offered Social Security a bigger budget and more staffing flexibilities, Wells says, the agency still cannot replace every position one for one, and it's the commissioner's and managers' responsibility to pinpoint where the most urgent hiring needs are.

Haven't Noticed Much Of This At SSA

From the Washington Post:

Joseph Wassmann thought he had a secure position producing videos for the U.S. Military Academy, but not long ago he found his job on the line because of a Bush administration plan to inject more efficiency into the federal bureaucracy.

Wassmann, 40, was among a group of information management employees at West Point who had to prove that they could do their jobs better and more cheaply than a private contractor. If they could not, they were told, the work would be outsourced. It was all part of President Bush's government-wide plan to reduce costs by inviting contractors to bid on about 425,000 federal jobs that could be considered "commercial" in nature.

The West Point competition dragged on for more than two years. In the end, Wassmann and most of his co-workers won, but only by agreeing to downsize from 119 employees to 88. And the mood has never been worse, he said. ...

The public-private face-off at West Point illustrates just what Bush envisioned when he proposed the "competitive sourcing" initiative in 2001 as part of his management agenda. It turned on a simple idea: Force federal employees to compete for their jobs against private contractors and costs will decrease, even if the work ultimately stays in-house.

But as Bush's presidency winds down, the program's critics say it has had disappointing results and shaken morale among the federal government's 1.8 million civil servants.

Private contractors have grown increasingly reluctant to participate in the competitions, which federal employees have won 83 percent of the time.

The article says that 210 Social Security employees' jobs were threatened in this way and that 84% of those employees kept their jobs. It makes you wonder why Social Security brass seem convinced that they can get much better productivity out of their employees when private enterprise seem unwilling to compete with the productivity that Social Security is already getting from those employees.

Unions Oppose Rehires

From the Federal Times:

Drowning under a growing case backlog in 2001, the Social Security Administration rehired 152 of its retired claims representatives, office attorneys, administrative law judges and other employees on a part-time basis. By 2006, 392 retirees were on board.

SSA got special waivers from the Office of Personnel Management to pay those retired employees their full pensions and part-time salaries. Without the waivers, retirees returning to SSA would have had their pensions docked by the amount of their salaries. In effect, they would have been working for free.

OPM and some leading lawmakers are pushing legislation to expand those waivers — available now to only a few agencies — to all agencies.

But the government’s two biggest unions, the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union, oppose the measures, which have gone nowhere.

Without the waivers, retirees would be “working for nothing, and I think that is outrageous,” OPM Director Linda Springer said at a Feb. 29 news conference.

Now, with the Bush administration in its final year, Springer appears pessimistic about the chances of getting the bills passed.

“It will probably be the greatest frustration I have” this year, she said.

What I do not understand is why Social Security would be offering incentives for employees to retire early at the same time they are trying to rehire retired employees -- unless the real goal is reduction of the work force.

Continued Workforce Reduction -- Correction

Yesterday, I had posted the numbers on the number of employees at Social Security, reporting that there had been a 3% decline in the past year. Actually, the decline was 1.9%. I had mistakenly posted the numbers for Social Security employment in the United States, instead of the gross Social Security employment as I had done previously. Social Security has some employees in territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam and one lone employee on truly foreign territory. (I believe that one person is employed at the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt, Germany and is completely overwhelmed. I have helped some people who have filed claims for U.S. Social Security benefits while living in other countries and the problems are almost literally insurmountable. Did you know that there is an international DDS that handles claims for U.S. Social Security disability benefits filed from overseas and that its backlogs make any other backlogs at Social Security look trivial?) Below are the corrected numbers from the Office of Personnel Management.

Social Security can take little comfort in having a 1.9% decline in employment in the past year instead of a 3% decline. The agency's workforce may decline at an even greater rate in the next year.

In the face of rapidly increasing workloads and a significant workforce reduction, how can Social Security work its way out of its backlogs? The answer is simple. It cannot. Expect backlogs to get worse.

• September 2007 62,407
• June 2007 62,530
• March 2007 61,867
• December 2006 63,410
• September 2006 63,647
• September 2005 66,147
• September 2004 65,258
• September 2003 64,903
• September 2002 64,648
• September 2001 65,377
• September 2000 64,521
• September 1999 63,957
• September 1998 65,629

Bernoski Letter Quoted In Baltimore Sun

From Melissa Harris' "Federal Worker" column in the Baltimore Sun:

Mailbag
Ronald G. Bernoski, president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges, was among those who responded to last week's column on the government's new roster of more than 600 administrative law judge candidates.

The Social Security Administration "indicated it had funding to hire 150 new administrative law judges and 92 support staff members to begin clearing the backlog of disability cases," Bernoski wrote. "This is an unjustifiable management decision.

"Each judge needs four to five staff members to prepare cases for the judge to review and to draft the judge's decisions. The 1,150 judges in SSA are already severely short of staff members. In many offices judges are unable to get enough prepared cases to fill their schedules.

"To hire 150 judges and only 92 staff members is a hollow gesture and another example of poor management decisions at the Social Security Administration."

Nobody Could Have Foreseen This Problem

From an article by Eric Yoder in Government Executive published on September 1, 2001 (emphasis added):

During the next 10 years, the Social Security Administration's retirement processing workload is projected to increase by one-fifth as the oldest of the 77 million baby boomers enter their 60s. At the same time, the disability insurance workload is projected to rise by one-half as the rest of the boomers hit ages at which they are more likely to file disability claims. By 2020, the retirement workload will increase by one-half and the disability workload by three-fourths over current levels. Meanwhile, claims under the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program for the poor, disabled and elderly are expected to grow by one-fifth by 2020. ...

According to "2010 Vision [a report prepared by the Social Security Administration in 2000]," SSA would need 95,000 to 100,000 work years to handle its projected 2010 workload using current methods. [Social Security's annual staffing is now about 65,000 work years] "We recognize that an infusion of this level of resources is neither likely nor the best means to achieve our vision," it says. Thus the agency plans to make more and better use of technology. ...

Says [Stanford] Ross [a former Commissioner of Social Security], "The agency, I think, is whistling a little in the dark. They're saying, 'Well, if we get this, that and the other thing, we'll do the job. We always have. We'll be OK.' I don't think you'll wind up with the resources you're going to need unless you make your case clear. The beginning of getting the resources is being candid with the Congress and OMB and the President and the public about how deep and serious your problems are.

"Clearly, the number of workers is inadequate for the workload, and, short term, there's no substitute for the number of workers. Longer term, maybe technology and different methods of doing business can substitute for bodies, but I don't think that's true in the short term," he says. "The public is going to be ill-served if these shortfalls in service delivery are not corrected, like, yesterday. It's not being well-served right now in some ways."

This puts into better focus just how irresponsible former Commissioner Barnhart was. She was entering office about the time this was published and, undoubtedly, was made aware of the 2010 Vision report. Instead of vigorously pushing for increased staffing for Social Security, she promised that her "plan" would dramatically improve service at Social Security without any increase in personnel. Indeed, she seemed to have no objection as her agency's staffing was cut.

Social Security Hiring

Currently, the Social Security Administration has 138 job openings posted. This is the most for the agency in some time. However, as high a number as this may seem, Social Security's overall employment is dropping. They are not hiring as many people as they are losing by attrition. Office of Personnel Management figures on total agency employment are only available as of December 2006. When the March 2007 figures are released, they are certain to show a dramatic drop in employment, at a time when the agency is struggling to keep up with its workload.

The Big Picture -- A Credit Union Adjusts To a Downsized Social Security Administration

Sometimes you have to step back quite a way to see the big picture. There used to be an entity called the Social Security Baltimore Federal Credit Union. The winwin partnership reports that they are now called the Securityplus Federal Credit Union. The credit union had to change because the Social Security Administration's employment in the Baltimore area dropped over the last 15 years from 30,000 to less than 15,000. Because of the erosion in their customer base, the Securityplus Federal Credit Union has shifted its focus as well as its name. In addition to serving Social Security employees and retirees, the credit union now tries to serve underserved, presumably low income, areas in the Baltimore region. As a result, their business is growing.