Campaign aims to bolster Social Security’s workforce, strengthen its benefits

Members of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans and supporters of the union for Social Security Administration gather in Eau Claire in April as part of a two-month campaign to draw attention to understaffing in the Social Security Administration. (Courtesy WARA)

Several times a week this spring a band of union representatives and retiree activists has been popping up at Social Security offices around the state.

Their target isn’t the Social Security Administration or the people who work there, but rather the U.S. Congress. The advocates contend Congress hasn’t done enough to support either the Social Security program or the people whose job it is to help the nearly 90-year-old national retirement plan keep going.

A surge in retirements in the aging Baby Boom generation has ballooned the number of people submitting claims for Social Security. Meanwhile, staffing for the Social Security Administration has not been able to keep up.  

Jessica LaPointe, president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 220, said that’s because Congress has been underfunding the agency’s administrative expenses for years. The AFGE council represents Social Security field office, teleservice and other employees across the country.

With underfunding, the agency has had to repeatedly institute hiring freezes — but as staff leaves, “we can’t replace those workers,” LaPointe said.

Through April and May, the union and the Wisconsin Alliance of Retired Americans have held demonstrations outside Wisconsin’s Social Security Administration offices to show their support for the employees who process new claims and address the questions of current recipients.

On Tuesday, the group takes its campaign to the Social Security office in Waukesha. A week later, they plan to be in Janesville, where an earlier event was rained out.

“Social Security is at a 27-year low in staffing right now, while beneficiaries are at an all-time high due to Baby Boomers retiring at a rate of 11,000 a day,” LaPointe said in an interview.

That has caused frustrating delays as new retirees or people newly applying for disability payments file claims, then wait for confirmation that they qualify. People already enrolled also have encountered delays.

“I’m already collecting my Social Security, and every now and then I still have questions,” said Ross Winklbauer, president of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans. When he has called to address those questions, “I’m on hold for a very long time.”

Last year Social Security paid about $1.4 trillion in benefits, including retirement benefits as well as benefits for people with disabilities, according to the agency’s annual financial report.

In passing the 2024 spending bills earlier this year Congress set Social Security administrative expenses at $14.2 billion. Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley told Congress in March that with the latest hiring freeze lifted the agency was readying plans to hire more workers.

LaPointe said O’Malley “has worked diligently to do what he can with the funding that he has, and he’s also committed to getting more funding for the agency.”

AFGE is campaigning to bring the annual operating budget to just over $19 billion. The additional funds would allow the agency to hire about 20,000 more employees as well as improve wages and benefits to make them competitive with other federal agencies, according to the union.

Currently, LaPointe said, it’s common to see employees enter federal service by going to work in the Social Security Administration only to transfer “to other federal agencies that can pay more for the same work and educational level.” Employees also have experienced heightened stress, sometimes confronted by members of the public upset by delays in their claims approval or other glitches.

Ensuring Social Security’s solvency

The other objective for the series of demonstrations is to head off calls to cut Social Security benefits or raise the retirement age, currently 65, said Alex Brower, executive director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans.

With more people retiring and a smaller ratio of younger generations of workers who pay into the program, the funding for Social Security — covered by federal payroll taxes — is projected to fall short in about a decade. If left unaddressed, the program “will only be able to pay out 77% of the benefits that it will owe to retirees at the time,” Brower said.

Those projections have led to proposals to curb benefits, force people to delay when they can file for benefits, or both. Other suggestions have included changing the program more radically, moving away from its historic mechanism of funding retirees’ benefits from the cash that new workers pay into the program.

Retiree advocates consider those approaches wrong and unnecessary. “The solutions the right wing is proposing are not the answer to having a program that keeps seniors out of poverty and has people live a dignified retirement after working so hard for their entire lives,” said Brower.

His group, along with other organizations, instead wants to raise the maximum income that is subject to the Social Security payroll tax.

For 2024, the tax is levied on income up to $168,600. People who make more than that don’t pay a Social Security tax on their incomes above the cap.

“If we eliminate that cap, that means that the richest and wealthiest Americans will pay their fair share and contribute more money” to the Social Security program, Brower said. “Then the trust fund will become solvent for decades and decades and decades to come.

The campaign’s public presence outside Social Security offices over the last several weeks has drawn curiosity and interest — and, Brower said, appreciation from passersby when they find out that the message is about strengthening Social Security.

He recalled a conversation with one bystander in Madison who told him that her father was on Social Security’s disability program. “She said, ‘Thank you so much for fighting for this — my family depends on Social Security.’”

LaPointe said campaign organizers want to make sure that more people understand the history of Social Security, founded in the Great Depression to help the nation’s elderly out of poverty. But she said she also wants people to understand that it can remain viable for generations, and that younger workers’ belief that the program won’t be there for them doesn’t have to come true.

“It’s paid for by the people, it’s designed to protect the people,” she said. “And it is the people’s job to make sure that Social Security stays and is protected and expanded.”

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