Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a spending bill worth more than $1 trillion dollars. Included in that package was an extra $480 million worth of funding for Social Security. Since the agency has an extra $480 million you could come to the logical conclusion that the number of Social Security employees would increase to assist with massive backlogs of processing cases, but unfortunately, the opposite is true.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) periodically releases the total number of employees at the Social Security Administration. And, as you can see, the numbers of employees are not increasing, but continuing to decline.
- March 2018 61,487
- December 2017 62,777
- September 2017 62,297
- June 2017 61,592
- March 2017 62,183
- December 2016 63,364
- December 2015 65,518
- December 2014 65,430
- December 2013 61,957
- December 2012 64,538
- September 2011 67,136
- December 2010 70,270
- December 2009 67,486
- December 2008 63,733
- September 2008 63,990
If the extra funding does not go to hiring more employees to assist with the daily duties at Social Security and to improve customer service, where is it going? That is a good question, but Social Security, in recent months, has announced several projects that it is hiring outside contractors to assist with and the agency has also indicated it would be improving technology systems, which is supposed to improve customer service, but apparently extra employees are not included in the funding. There have been recent news stories about Social Security closing field offices across the United Stats and members of Congress are not happy about it because it limits access and does not improve customer service. As you can see, Social Security is staffed lower than it was 10 years ago. It would be valuable to see an itemized spending report of where the extra $480 million is going.
