Without budget anomaly, SSA hiring is restricted and overtime is at 'historic lows'

Officials at the Social Security Administration said this week that as a result of Congress’ inaction on the Biden administration’s request for additional funding for the beleaguered agency in September’s continuing resolution to keep the government open, the agency has had to cut back on two key tools in its fight to improve customer service.

Last month, the White House and Commissioner Martin O’Malley warned lawmakers that failure to include a budget anomaly to fund the agency at a prorated equivalent of the president’s proposed $15.4 billion fiscal 2025 annual appropriation request in a six-month CR—as initially proposed by House Speaker Mike Johnson—would lead to dire consequences, including the loss of more than 2,000 staff, a hiring freeze and significantly curtailing overtime usage.

Though the enactment of a shorter continuing resolution may have delayed the worst-case scenario of a full hiring freeze or furloughs, officials say that fixed cost increases are forcing the agency to restrict both hiring and overtime.

“Without additional funding during the CR period, we must operate conservatively,” said SSA spokesman Mark Hinkle. “We have been forced to restrict hiring to critical targeted areas and will not be able to invest in new information technology development. In addition, we have reduced overtime to historically low levels and essentially have no overtime to serve the customers who are waiting in our lobbies late in the day or to clear workloads that we are unable to get to during core hours of operations.”

Hinkle warned that members of the public will see longer wait times both at field offices and on the agency’s 1-800 number, and those applying for retirement or disability benefits will wait longer for their requests to be processed and evaluated. And he reiterated that if Congress fails to increase funding for the agency either in a full-year spending agreement or a second continuing resolution, the agency will hit a new 50-year staffing low by January 1 and lose more than 2,000 workers by the end of March.

Level-funding the agency’s administrative expenses actually amounts to a 4.2% budget decrease, as the organization sees its fixed costs increase by around $600 million per year. Rich Couture, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 215, which represents the agency’s Office of Hearings Operations employees, warned that even the restrictions on hiring and overtime could endanger the agency’s recent progress on a variety of service metrics.

“The agency has relied heavily upon overtime as a tactic to try to boost productivity and service delivery in an environment where we’ve been understaffed since at least 2010,” Couture said. “We’re at a point where in 2024, our staffing levels are around 57,000 employees agencywide, and we’re managing benefits for 75 million people, whereas in 2010, we were at 67,000 employees and administering benefits for 60 million people. With that context in mind, the overtime has been used as a salve to try to alleviate the pain caused by that understaffing. But the fact is we don’t have the budget and haven’t had a sustained budget to be able to do sustainable hiring, training and retention to meet our important service delivery needs.”

O’Malley spoke Tuesday at an event hosted by the Urban Institute examining the agency’s customer service and budgetary challenges, touting his work at the agency since his Senate confirmation in December and continuing to advocate for Congress to restore Social Security’s 1.2% ratio of administrative funding to annual benefit outlays, which in recent years has fallen to less than 1%.

Since last November, the average wait time on the 1-800 number has fallen from 42.5 minutes to 11.3 minutes, and for 18 straight weeks, the agency has closed more disability cases than it opened. But there are still places where the agency still is hanging by a thread.

“How do we make progress on these things, even in the absence of staffing?” he said. “That’s the open question. In Ohio, we recently lost a field office in Cleveland completely without warning. It just imploded, because attrition doesn’t care.”

And severely limiting overtime is also already having devastating impacts for the agency’s workforce, Couture said.

“My of our employees, particularly lower-graded workers, rely on overtime in order to make ends meet, because, again, these salaries are no longer competitive,” he said. “We have a lot of people who have left the agency to go to other agencies where they can get paid better for the same or similar work, not to mention guaranteed telework and other benefits that the agency hasn’t been able to or willing to provide. That’s had a major impact on recruitment and retention, and again, this overall budget situation and how it relates to staff and overtime. It is impeding the ability of the agency to deliver on its mission to the public and it is impeding the ability of many of our members to be able to provide for themselves and their families.”