SSA reorg plan contemplates field office closures, contradicting public statements
Two people enter a Social Security Administration office in suburban Detroit. Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group / Getty Images
A March draft of the Social Security Administration's reorganization plan proposes "consolidating" field offices while shuttling customer service to AI and other automated platforms.
Updated April 7 at 8:27 p.m. ET
A draft plan for service delivery at the Social Security Administration includes “field office consolidation” as a goal for next year — even as the agency maintains publicly that it isn’t closing field offices.
SSA posted Monday on X that it “is NOT permanently closing field offices. Only underutilized hearing office space has been closed and without permanently closing field offices.” But a plan circulating within the agency includes a goal to “further reduce footprint” in 2026 and beyond.
The scope of the envisioned "consolidations" is unclear, though the document singles out field offices as on the chopping block next year.
This comes after billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency posted information about nearly 50 field offices it was planning to shutter. SSA has said that news reports about plans to close field offices are incorrect.
The draft plan, originally sent March 21 and obtained by Government Executive, is required by the Trump administration by April 14 as part of its push to gut the federal workforce and reorganize agencies. Asked for comment Monday, SSA spokeswoman Nicole Tiggemann wrote, "There is no validity to this claim."
At the same time the agency is contemplating plans to shutter offices, it also is moving ahead with new identity proofing requirements expected to push more people to those offices. SSA is ending phone service for many of its benefits applications, as well as those looking to make changes to their direct deposit information, leaving them with online or in-person avenues to do so.
Some regional leaders that oversee field offices still haven’t gotten guidance on implementing the changes, which are scheduled to take place next week, according to one current employee.
SSA is also looking to shed thousands of employees. The March 21 document says that the agency plans to cut 5,500 employees by the end of the fiscal year as part of the agency’s plan to get down to 50,000 employees, as Government Executive previously reported.
Martin O’Malley, who served as Social Security commissioner during the final year of President Biden’s term, said that several elements of the plan, including further consolidations of the agency’s phone systems under Amazon Web Services and the development of a “digital service index” that elucidates which agency services can be conducted by phone, online or in-person, were already under discussion during his tenure. But none of it can be effectively done while reducing staff at the agency, which is already at a half-century low.
“Except for the butchering of an agency that has already been reduced to a 50-year low in staffing, many of these things were things we had put into motion during my team, and some of it reflects the good work of the Office of Transformation ... A lot of those things should happen, but none will make up for the gutting the staff at this already depleted agency with a chainsaw,” he said.
One operations component that formerly had about 400 feds now has only half that number, one current SSA employee told Government Executive. The office, a recent creation of what used to be two components, handles both operations support as well as some technology functions.
“With the Regional offices gutted… no one will be left to support field offices when they have difficulty,” said the employee.
Rich Couture, spokesman for the American Federation of Government Employees’ SSA General Committee, said he was alarmed to see the plan mention a hiring freeze at the agency, when Trump’s hiring freeze executive order specifically exempted employees who work on the delivery of Social Security benefits. He also noted that the reassignment of employees from regional and headquarters offices to frontline work constitutes a brain drain, both from those back-of-house components and from the frontline workforce.
“From the union’s perspective, it made no sense to offer buyouts and early retirement to experienced frontline staff just to turn around and fill those vacancies with people who have no frontline experience, who will need months of training and years of on-the-job experience to become proficient in these complex programs,” Couture said. “And in order to train them, you need to take staff off the frontline to do so. It was an easily avoidable problem.”
Couture said he too has heard concerns from frontline workers about the potential impact of the regional office consolidations and reassignments on the support employees in field offices and hearings offices need to do their jobs.
“A lot of these components have positions that don’t make sense to put in a field office or a hearing office–you wouldn’t put an HR staffer into one of these offices, because it makes sense to have these staffed regionally and centrally,” he said. “One of the big concerns I’ve heard from employees of late is: What happens if all of these HR personnel are reassigned or RIFed and there’s not enough people to do the job, and then I decide at a later date that I want to retire or need to take some action with my insurance? That hasn’t been fleshed out yet.”
SSA intends to push people online, the plan notes, by expanding what the public can do online with SSA, as opposed to going to an office in person or calling. Recently, however, people looking to reach the agency online have seen system outages as a result of new anti-fraud checks at the agency.
The agency has also warned staff in its Office of the Chief Information Officer — which handles the agency's tech and is being led by a DOGE associate — of coming layoffs, calling the office's work "not mission critical,” one SSA employee told Government Executive.
The agency says that it wants to ramp up the use of automation and artificial intelligence to handle calls. It hopes to use technology more broadly “to serve our increasing customer base with fewer employees,” the plan notes, including by fully automating the processing of most retirement and Medicare claims.
O’Malley said the combination of increased anti-fraud measures–for an agency whose error rate is already under 1%–and funneling more people into online and AI-powered service lanes will crush the public’s faith in the agency.
“There are things we could do to improve the level of customer service and ease of transaction for citizens and customers, but eliminating half the staff of the IT department is not one of those things and closing field offices is not one of those things,” he said. “Shutting down portals that had worked, whether online or via phone, to drive more people into the field offices–those are the things that actually destroy and degrade customer service, that appear designed to sour the public against the agency by cramming them into field offices.”
Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the plans surrounding Medicare claims.
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