SSA workforce challenges

As a federal employee for nearly two decades, and labor organizer with oversight of six southern Missouri field offices, allow me to share an uncomfortable truth: the Social Security Administration is in crisis.

Right now, Social Security operates with 4,000 fewer field office and teleservice center employees than it did 12 years ago. The current workforce of less than 60,000 is a 25-year low, even as the number of beneficiaries has increased by more than 10 million.

That means considerably longer wait times for claimants, including at our offices in Cape Girardeau, Kennett, Park Hills, Poplar Bluff, Sikeston and West Plains.

This prolonged staffing crisis is only going to get worse. Overworked, overloaded and underpaid, thousands more of those workers are expected to depart in the current fiscal year. A recent American Federation of Government Employees Council 220 survey found that nearly half of the respondents plan to leave the Social Security Administration within the next year.

One key sticking point: the agency's refusal to adopt a sensible telework policy that benefits both civil service workers and taxpayers.

As the agency tasked with administering Social Security to tens of millions of elderly and disabled Americans, SSA should be on the forefront of making its services more accessible and convenient.

We serve the most vulnerable populations of our society -- and should utilize every tool at our disposal to ensure that these customers aren't wasting time and being needlessly put at risk when so many tools of modernization are available.

MIRA LIBLA, Patterson, Missouri