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Christine Lizotte is secretary treasurer of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1164, the Social Security Union for New England.
I have been working as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration for 21 years and our current staffing crisis is the worst I’ve ever seen. Over the past several months, the administration has carried out the largest staffing cut to the Social Security Administration (SSA) in history. At the same time, it has radically reorganized regional offices by dramatically increasing wait times, causing stress for both employees and beneficiaries. These actions are potentially jeopardizing the delivery of benefits to these vulnerable populations.
Social Security is a critical safety net program that 360,000 Mainers rely on. In addition to processing benefits for retirees, we help so many others who would be in poverty were it not for this lifeline. This includes the parents of premature babies receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which qualifies them for MaineCare so they don’t go bankrupt while their child is in intensive care. We help people with severe autism, Down syndrome and other disabilities receive their benefits.
Many of the people we serve have survived trauma, homelessness and abuse. They come to us in fear because they are broke and can’t pay their bills. Some of them worked for many years and now find themselves in crisis due to an injury or poor health. The hardest cases I’ve seen are people with traumatic brain injuries who have problems processing information.
We help the 22-year-old woman who finds herself wheelchair bound after falling down a flight of stairs and now qualifies for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). We hold the widow’s hand as she breaks down in tears applying for survivor’s benefits. Increasingly we are working with grandparents who have found themselves raising small children because their parents died in the opioid epidemic. We treat all of these people with compassion and give them the dignity and respect that they deserve.
When the current administration took over in January, SSA was already facing a staffing shortage. Since then, it has gotten so much worse. First, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pushed out 7,000 SSA employees to meet an arbitrary staffing reduction target. It also implemented a federal hiring freeze so that those positions left vacant were never filled. Not surprisingly, the move has caused record wait times for beneficiaries. To address the problem, SSA’s new commissioner, Wall Street billionaire Frank Bisignano, shifted 1,000 employees from field offices to the national phone lines.
Our field service representatives were only informed on July 2 that the very next day they would be transferred to the national phone line despite having never received the necessary training on how to handle those calls or how to manage the different expectations. The SSA’s new phone system automatically routes callers to the national number if no one answers within one minute, so callers are being transferred all over the regional district, which includes Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and parts of northern Massachusetts. This makes it extremely difficult for field reps to answer questions from recipients in different states with different laws that impact Supplemental Security eligibility.
Field offices are now short staffed of service representatives who normally answer the phone and run the front counter, further exacerbating the staffing crisis and increasing wait times. A month ago, the average wait time in the lobby of our office in Auburn was 16 minutes. Following these changes it’s now an hour and half. Rather than hiring more staff, DOGE and the Trump administration simply shifted the deck chairs on the Titanic. I cannot tell you how many people I have talked to who have broken down in tears due to the chaos created by this reorganization. Employee morale is at an all-time low.
Elderly Mainers, people with disabilities and children who have suffered the loss of a parent deserve a Social Security system that is efficient and easily accessible. This is a promise that was made 90 years ago this August to every American and it must be kept. We urge our congressional representatives to do everything they can to prevent the dismantling of this critical social insurance program.
