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The Social Security Administration (SSA) recently reassigned a small share of its field office employees in an effort to bring down lengthy wait times for the agency's national 800 phone number.

Workers at local offices across the country say these reassignments have been disruptive for staff and are increasing wait times for other services.

Experts say the tradeoff is a byproduct of a declining Social Security workforce dealing with thousands more Americans who qualify for benefits every day. Thousands of employees have left the government agency in recent months.

"They are in a deep hole of their own creation on staffing and so you just don't have enough people to go around to serve the public," said Kathleen Romig, a former SSA official who's now director of Social Security and disability policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). "And so all you can really do at this point is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic."

Earlier this month, about 4 percent of frontline workers were temporarily reassigned to cover the national 800 number, according to the SSA, which added that phone service has improved as a result.

"Thanks to a new telephone platform, most callers are now served quickly through callbacks or automated options, and answer times have already improved significantly in field offices," the agency said in a statement to NPR. "By temporarily assigning a small percentage of field office staff to assist with 800 number calls, we can improve the 800 [number] average speed of answer without disrupting local services."

‘The stress level is probably at a maximum for everyone’

But Nicole Morio, a field office worker in Staten Island and union representative, said these reassignments have forced frontline staff to take on more work.

"The stress level is probably at a maximum for everyone," Morio said. "At one point I think we were doing the work of 1.8 people. Now it seems as though we're doing the work of 10 to 15."

Monique Buchanan, president of an American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) chapter that represents teleservice center workers, told NPR that the agency has also started to reassign vital claims specialists to the 800 number.

Buchanan, who works at a field office in Detroit, said temporarily removing claims specialists from frontline positions is "directly harmful to the public." She said these workers finalize applications for people seeking help accessing benefits, such as payments for disabled children.

"These applications are taken through an interview that the claim specialist engages in," she said. "So, the start is the interview with the claims specialist."

CBPP's Romig said staffing up the national hotline might not actually be faster for beneficiaries because so much work is done by claim specialists and other staff at field offices.

"Often customers can't actually complete their business on the phone," she said. "They are going to have to end up in a field office ultimately anyway, or a field office employee is going to have to process that claim that has been taken on the phone or resolve the problem that has been raised on the phone."

 that it had reduced the average answering speed on the 800 number to "13 minutes, a 35 percent reduction compared to this time last year and over a 50 percent reduction compared to last year's annual average."

But experts say it's harder to track whether the agency is doing better in other metrics. Recently the agency

 various real-time metrics from its website.

Romig said it's possible wait times are decreasing as more people are transferred to 800-number duty, but it will surely come at the expense of other vital services.

"Sure, you can get a boost in a particular metric like phone hold times by making a massive shift of staffers to answer the phones," she said. "But you do that by creating a new hole in the field offices, and that's what they're doing."

Morio, the Staten Island employee, believes she and other field office workers are being "prevented" from properly serving the people who need their help.

"We can't complete all of the things that need to be done," she said. "When you have so little employees and so much work — it's stressful because we get hired to help the claimants. We get hired to help the American public. We're public servants. That's what we do."

Thousands have already left SSA this year

Policy experts and frontline workers say that lowering wait times for phone services is a worthy goal, but it cannot be achieved without hiring more staff.

Romig said staffing levels at Social Security were already at a decades-long low before the Trump administration began urging people to resign or retire early.

According to agency officials, roughly 4,600 employees have left since March.

Romig cautioned that staffing "numbers are very hard to pin down" because resignations are constantly "in flux," due to the administration's deferred resignation program and ongoing early retirements.

During a congressional hearing last month, new SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano told members he does not believe increasing staffing is necessary to improve the agency's services.

"I do agree we must perform significantly better," he said, "but increased staffing is not the long-term solution."

But Jessica LaPointe, who works at a field office in Madison, Wis., and is the president of the local AFGE chapter that represents 25,000 field office workers, said the shuffling of staffing is prompting even more people to leave the agency.

"If they decided not to take the buyout incentives that were offered in March, then now they're just leaving to save their mental health as their work keeps piling up," LaPointe said. "It really is a manufactured crisis as a result of past changes that just continue to just make everything worse, sadly."

Some local field offices only have a few employees, so the loss of one can have a big impact.

Juan Daniel Vasquez, who is a generalist technical expert in a field office in Monroe, Mich., said his office had an employee who covered the phones who was recently shifted to the 800 number. He said that since then, all the staff have been tasked with covering the phones, which has added a significant amount of work to everyone's plate.

"It's a lot tougher," Vasquez said. "I'm nearing retirement age and … if you had asked me last year, I would have said I want to stay another five to seven years. Now I'm looking at one to two."

The agency told NPR that Bisignano has been "visiting field offices and processing centers to hear directly from front-line employees," since his confirmation hearing.

"He is committed to giving SSA employees the tools they need to provide best-in-class customer service to the American public and succeed in their roles," the agency said in a statement. "SSA monitors all workload measures in the field offices that are helping answer the 800 Number calls. In addition, we have established field office support units to assist with critical workloads and demands."

But LaPointe said that working conditions for field office workers in the past few months have only gotten worse.

"There's no indication that this is getting better," she said. "We have an agency not listening to the workers."

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The Social Security Administration reassigned some field office employees in an effort to bring down lengthy phone wait times. But workers say these reassignments have been disruptive for staff.

Efforts to shrink Social Security’s phone wait times are putting a strain elsewhere

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