New Data Show Social Security Staff Cuts Harm Service Delivery in Every State

In just 15 months, the Trump Administration has pushed out more than 8,000 Social Security Administration (SSA) workers — causing SSA’s largest one-year staffing reduction on record. This 14 percent cut has compromised SSA’s ability to reliably serve seniors, bereaved families, and people with disabilities. By January 2026, SSA had fewer employees than at any time since 1967, when the agency was not yet responsible for administering Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and served 52 million fewer beneficiaries.

This largest-ever cut in SSA staffing has affected field offices and operations in every state — with 42 states and the District of Columbia seeing SSA staff losses greater than 10 percent between January 2025 and April 2026, according to Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data. (See table below.) This short-staffing of critical functions has affected SSA’s ability to deliver across the country.

The loss of thousands of employees hit key customer service positions hard, including a drop of more than 3,800 customer service staff who assist visitors to SSA field offices and callers to SSA’s national 800 number. SSA leadership responded by shifting thousands of remaining workers to new roles to help fill the gap the Administration had created. But redistributing the too-few remaining workers to roles where they have little or no experience risks ameliorating one service delivery problem by exacerbating others.

But it’s hard for Congress and the public to understand how these radical changes affect the people SSA serves, from new babies being assigned a Social Security number, to workers at the beginnings and ends of their careers, to the surviving spouses and children of workers who die. That’s because in the summer of 2025, amid bad press on its worsening performance, SSA stopped publicly releasing regular monthly updates of many customer-focused service metrics.

SSA restored the public release of some of those measures over time, but certain key metrics have remained unreported. For example, SSA no longer shares how long callers to the 800 number wait on hold or for a call to be returned, how long it takes applicants to get an appointment, or how many unfulfilled requests languish in the processing backlog. And in May 2026, SSA failed to publish any updates to its monthly performance measures.

The lack of transparency is not serving the agency well, particularly as agency leadership claims that SSA is “working better and faster than ever” seem readily undercut by press reports on customer service and processing strains at the agency. For example, phone wait times are much longer than publicly advertised; lengthy waits for appointments particularly harm widows and children who have lost parents; local offices often struggle to operate with shrinking staffs; and record-high processing backlogs create longer waits for needed help.

SSA already faced customer service challenges when the Trump Administration took office, as years of underfunding had forced the agency to serve the growing number of beneficiaries with fewer staff. The Administration’s personnel policies have made things worse. While SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano has promised that SSA will partly compensate for cuts in staffing through improved efficiency, he has yet to explain how it will do so. The reality is the agency will need to begin hiring significant numbers of new employees now to avoid even greater deterioration in service.

The Administration needs to publish detailed plans for addressing its customer service challenges, identifying the specific steps it will take to improve customer service. It also needs to increase transparency by publishing the type of regular, detailed customer service metrics it used to release to the public. Taking these basic steps can help restore confidence in the agency and hold it accountable for delivering on its promises.