A group of Social Security Administration workers rallied outside the John Weld Peck Federal Building on Main Street Jan. 14, calling on lawmakers to fully fund and staff the agency ahead of Congress’ Jan. 30 funding deadline.
Similar protests were held outside Social Security offices across the country as part of a national day of action organized by workers and members of the American Federation of Government Employees. In Cincinnati, employees and retirees said staffing cuts and policy changes under the Trump administration are making it harder for seniors and people with disabilities to access benefits.
By the numbers
Ohio’s 1st Congressional District, which includes Cincinnati, has lost 13% of its Social Security field staff in the past year, according to union data shared at the rally. Nationwide, more than 150,000 federal workers accepted the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” buyout offer, allowing them to resign while keeping pay and benefits through Sept. 30. This includes at least 7,000 SSA workers who were laid off in 2025. At the same time, the administration has frozen all hiring at the SSA.
A leaked internal memo reviewed by The Associated Press indicates the agency is seeking to cut visits to field offices by 50% in the next fiscal year. As of September, SSA workers and the AFGE say those staffing losses have contributed to 12 million delayed transactions at field offices and another 6 million pending cases at processing centers.
For people who rely on in-person assistance, those numbers translate into months-long waits.
“It went from two weeks to get an appointment to two months,” said Melissa Schardine, who retired in November from a Social Security field office in Cincinnati.
“We were in a staffing crisis before this administration, but we were making strides to get more employees,” Schardine said. “There were 50,000 of us, the union was asking for, like, 7,000 more at the minimum to take the strain and stress. And then the minute this administration came in we were the focus of reducing staff. DOGE came in and it was kind of like a death nail.”
Schardine said field offices have lost roughly 9% of their employees even as demand for services has surged.
“The field offices have lost roughly like 9% [of employees], but we’re serving 20% more,” she said.
That growing demand is being driven in part by the rapid aging of the U.S. population. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that by 2030, one in five Americans will be 65 or older, the traditional retirement age. By 2034, older adults are projected to outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. The population of adults 65 and older is expected to more than double between 2000 and 2040, reaching about 80 million, while the number of people 85 and older is projected to quadruple over the same period.
In-person vs. online help
In Hamilton County and across Southwest Ohio, those demographic shifts mean more residents turning to Social Security for retirement, disability and survivor benefits, often with complex cases that require in-person help.
The AP found that agency leaders are aiming for no more than 15 million in-person visits to SSA offices in fiscal year 2026, down from more than 31.6 million visits between Oct. 1, 2024, and Sept. 30, 2025.
Barton Mackey, a Social Security spokesperson, told the AP that field offices will remain the “front line” for the roughly 75 million Americans who receive monthly payments and the more than 330 million people with Social Security numbers. He said the agency is expanding online and phone services so people can manage benefits more easily.
Union leaders and retirees at the Cincinnati rally said technology cannot replace face-to-face assistance for many seniors and people with disabilities, particularly those without reliable internet access or the ability to navigate complex digital systems.
“We want to know who and what we’re talking with – not some crazy hallucinating AI system that doesn’t know what it’s talking about and makes shit up,” said Norm Wernet, president of the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans.
Jessica LaPointe, a national leader with the AFGE who represents about 30,000 Social Security employees, told the AP that field offices are especially critical for people who cannot afford computers or smartphones.
“They should be able to walk into an office to get help,” LaPointe told the AP, warning that the administration wants “AI and the internet to replace a well-trained, well-vetted workforce.”
But much of the skill offered by SSA workers, according to Schardine, is catching what the applicant might not think to enter online. She recalled a case involving a double-widowed woman:
“When we were talking to her, we were like, ‘Well, do you have any other marriages?’ ‘No, just that one,’ and then we’re like, ‘Well, you have a name change here. What happened here?’ ‘Oh, I was married, but he died.’ The benefits that she would get off of that husband’s record was higher than it was on the second marriage,” Schardine said.
“If she did it online, she might have not mentioned that marriage because she didn’t think of that, and that was so many years ago.”
Insecurity from the inside out
For SSA workers who remain, the pressure is mounting. A January 2026 report by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) analyzed wages and working conditions for more than 36,000 SSA employees represented by the AFGE. The study found that 54% of frontline workers earn less than a living wage based on local cost-of-living estimates.
The SOC survey also showed that 84% of respondents said their workloads had worsened over the past year. Seventy percent reported that service to the public has slowed, while 65% said the quality of service has declined. More than 90% said their job-related stress has increased, a trend the report linked to low pay, staffing shortages and rising caseloads.
Those conditions were exacerbated by the historic government shutdown that began in October, lasting more than 40 days. About 730,000 federal workers were required to work without pay during the shutdown, including Social Security employees deemed essential.
Donna Winston, who has worked in the downtown Cincinnati Social Security office for 15 years, said the shutdown took a personal and professional toll.
“What feels different now is that, I feel like this administration may not appreciate us as much as the other administrations have, for the simple fact that we are so understaffed. And then this was the longest shutdown where we did not get any pay whatsoever,” Winston said.
She said workers continued to process claims and issue benefits even as their own finances became precarious.
“We were dedicated to still make sure that the people who are retired, the disabled people and the people that need their medical, that they would be okay, you know? But on the same note, while we’re making sure that they would be okay, some of us had to go to food banks. We had to borrow money, because we have to pay to park down here, you know? And that’s not cheap. It’s $10 a day.”
Winston said chronic understaffing is now affecting workers’ mental health.
“It is so important that we are able to be fully staffed so we can make sure that the people who are disabled on SSI and depend on Medicare, that they get their benefits,” she said. “I have co-workers that are, like, literally crying because they’re taking it home because they care about that person who’s disabled. They want to make sure they can get that claim done. So, they can’t sleep, they’re stressed out.”
As Congress debates funding levels, Senate leaders announced Jan. 15 that progress had been made on a trio of spending bills covering the Commerce, Justice, Energy and Interior departments. Funding for the Social Security Administration, however, remains unresolved ahead of the Jan. 30 deadline to avoid another partial government shutdown.