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The agency that sends monthly checks to more than 70 million Americans is running on its smallest staff in nearly 60 years—even as it insists service has never been better.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has cut more than 8,000 workers since January 2025, the largest one-year staffing cut on record, according to an analysis of federal data out this week from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).1
The 14% nationwide cut in staffing has left the agency with fewer employees than at any point since 1967, before it ran Supplemental Security Income, the safety-net program for low-income disabled and older people, and when it served two-thirds fewer beneficiaries.23
The recent reduction in staffing has heightened concerns among advocates for senior citizens that retirees—who rely on Social Security checks to cover about 40% of their expenses—could lose access to crucial services. The SSA has denied that the quality of service has suffered as it pursues its "digital-first vision," but experts say the impact is being felt.
Social Security sends checks to more than 70 million Americans, who rely on the funds to cover a large portion of their expenses in retirement. A big drop in customer-facing roles at the SSA could mean that phone calls from beneficiaries aren't answered, office-visits can't happen and open cases take a long time to resolve.
What the CBPP calls "radical changes" to the SSA have been felt in every state. Field offices in 42 states and Washington, D.C., each shed more than 10% of their staff between January 2025 and April 2026. Some states were hit harder than the 14% in overall staffing cuts nationwide. New Mexico lost 23% of its SSA workforce, while Hawaii and the District of Columbia lost 21% each.1
Nearly half the cuts were to customer-facing roles, according to the CBPP. The agency shed more than 3,800 staff members who handle field office visits and the SSA's national 800 number. The SSA has shifted some employees to fill in some of the gaps. But moving workers into unfamiliar roles risks trading one bottleneck for another, the CBPP report argued.
A December Washington Post report concluded that "record backlogs... have delayed basic services to millions of customers."4
SSA tells a different story. "Over the last year, we have delivered better, faster, higher-quality customer service," Frank J. Bisignano, the SSA's commissioner, said in a release last month.5 (The SSA did not respond to Investopedia's request for comment on the CBPP's report.)
The agency has trumpeted a December 2025 audit by its inspector general, which found the agency's phone service improved in 2025: the average wait dropped from 12 minutes in September 2024 to 7 minutes last September, even as the agency fielded 65% more calls.6 Last month, the SSA said the average response time for calls was even shorter, 6.6 minutes on average, and that it had reduced the backlog of initial disability claims by a third from its June 2024 peak.7
But it's not clear that better performance drove those shifts. The inspector general flagged how SSA now measures wait times through its new telecommunications platform: callers who opt for a callback instead of staying on hold are counted as having waited no time at all.8 In fiscal year 2025, that meant 24 million calls were zeroed out when calculating average call times.9
Kathleen Romig, a former Social Security official and a co-author of CBPP's staffing analysis, told Investopedia that any faster service for the national hotline would have come at a price. SSA shifted thousands of workers to cover calls to the 800 number, she said. Many were pulled from local offices and given only a few hours of training, the New Yorker reported last month.10 That left fewer people to book appointments or finalize open cases.
"If there aren't enough people to meet those demands, shifting them around is just playing whack-a-mole," Romig said.
A report from the nonpartisan Urban Institute also questioned the agency's success in reducing the disability claims backlog. It attributed the shrinking backlog more to a 7% drop in disability applications in fiscal 2025 and a "sharper than usual" rise in claim denials than to better service.11
Having closed six of its 10 regional offices, the SSA steered routine tasks—checking benefits, replacing a card, tracking a claim—to its online platform and automated phone line, where self-service tools and AI chatbots now handle about 2.9 million calls a month, up from about 300,000 a year earlier.12
But critics argue the digital-first approach is a bad fit for those the agency primarily serves.
Shannon Benton, executive director of the Senior Citizens League, said many older adults face digital and phone system barriers—spotty internet access, limited digital skills, hearing lossand a fear of online scams. "For many older Americans," Benton said, "maintaining access to local field offices and face-to-face assistance remains critically important."
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