Social Security beneficiaries seeking in-person help might encounter new obstacles — including faulty HVAC systems.
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More than a dozen Social Security field offices are listed as closed to in-person service, instead directing customers to reach out by phone or contact the national 800 number. Now, the list of closures has prompted concerns for the beleaguered agency and its recipients.
A federal employees’ union memo obtained by Business Insider sheds some light on why offices are closed: Some due to operational issues with their buildings, while others are so small that any understaffing forces them to temporarily shut down.
Two offices — located in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, and Logan, West Virginia — are closed due to “facility issues.” One in Detroit Park, Michigan, is closed due to ongoing HVAC issues; that office has previously closed due to mold and water intrusion. Another in Fort Walton, Florida, is being repaired after a fire, per the memo.
The closures come at a tumultuous time for the Social Security Administration and its beneficiaries; the agency shed around 7,000 workers, or nearly 12% of its workforce, during the DOGE era, and has had to temporarily reassign some employees to staff phone lines. While the SSA said these office closures are temporary, staffing issues and a lack of field offices could be an increasing problem for the administration and recipients alike.
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Some currently-shuttered offices simply don’t have enough staff. These smaller offices, called resident stations, are often staffed by just one person and serve low-population areas. Two resident stations in rural Montana and Wyoming are closed for lack of workers.
“These resident stations are a really important part of the way that we ensure that folks, particularly in rural areas, get access to services,” said Molly Weston Williamson, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress who’s been tracking Social Security staffing.
A station in Decorah, Iowa is currently closed because its last remaining worker retired over the summer, and the staffer who had been filling in returned to their home office during the October shutdown.
“Over the last decade and a half, we have not gotten any kind of meaningful sustained hiring to replace the aging SSA workforce and to actually meet public demand as the baby boomers began to reach their retirement age,” said Jessica LaPointe, a council president for the federal workers’ union and longtime SSA employee.
“The car is rattling down the highway leaking more and more fuel every day — and that fuel is people,” said Martin O’Malley, former commissioner of SSA under President Joe Biden. “Ghost offices are happening with greater and greater frequency.”
Losing ‘a lifeline’
If a rural office is closed, local residents don’t have many options. Sometimes paperwork or identification needs to be done in person, or older adults have questions that are more easily answered by a trained employee they can talk to.
“The field office closures listed on the Social Security website are not permanent. The offices are temporarily closed or providing limited service due to planned renovations, required maintenance, or facilities issues that we are actively working to resolve,” the agency said in a statement to Business Insider. “SSA’s resident stations are located in rural locations and typically have one or two employees assigned to provide in-person services on a limited basis.”
LaPointe said she worries about beneficiaries in small towns that lost their office and may not have easy access to the internet or a phone. Some of the offices have been closed for over a year without a clear reopening timeline, she said.
“Those resident stations are vital,” she said. “They’re often in rural areas of the country, where they are a lifeline for people in the surrounding communities. If they close down, beneficiaries might have to travel hundreds of miles” to another office. A report published in 2025 by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found that six million Social Security beneficiaries already live more than 45-miles from the nearest field office.
The temporary shutterings follow years of stretched-thin funding at the agency. Employee numbers recently hit a 50-year low. LaPointe said that both hiring and retention are “in crisis” and struggling to compete with the private sector. Hundreds of SSA staff members were recently reassigned from field offices to the 800 customer service line, and Business Insider previously reported that 41 (largely rural) offices lost more than 25% of their workers due to DOGE cuts last year.
The SSA has previously said that staff reshuffling and an AI chatbot feature on the agency website are intended to fill these gaps and ensure beneficiaries receive their checks.
Even if closures are temporary or waiting on needed repairs, service issues may extend beyond just a shuttered door.
“Writ large, we also know that there are plenty of offices across the country where the doors are open, they’re not shut down, but folks are experiencing really significant delays,” Williamson said. “Folks are having real trouble getting the appointments they need.”
