House Passes Bill to Boost Social Security’s Customer Service Budget

Measure headed to Senate also calls on agency to avoid closing field offices

Deirdre Shesgreen,

AARP

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Published January 23, 2026

a social security card lifting a building

Doug Chayka

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a major spending bill on Jan. 22 that would give the Social Security Administration (SSA) an additional $50 million for customer service for the remainder of fiscal year 2026, which runs through Sept. 30.

The bill now heads to the Senate. It must be approved by both houses of Congress and signed by President Donald Trump by Jan. 30 to avert another government shutdown.

In addition to the funding increase, Congress included conditions related to SSA customer service, directing the agency to take steps to avoid closing field offices or reducing other direct-service operations and to make monthly reports to Congress on customers’ wait times for office appointments.

“AARP has been leading the charge to ensure that SSA has the resources it needs to provide good customer service to the tens of millions of older Americans who rely on it,” said Jenn Jones, vice president of financial security and livable communities at AARP. “We appreciate Congress working to provide additional funding and the direction to ensure those funds are used to hire front line staff, lower wait and appointment times, and help ensure field offices remain open.”

The bill would also increase funding for the SSA’s efforts to eliminate waste and fraud, allocating an additional $500 million earmarked largely for reviewing current disability beneficiaries’ eligibility for payments.

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The Social Security provisions are part of a broader bill to fund several federal agencies ahead of the Jan. 30 deadline, when their current funding runs out. It passed the House by a vote of 341 to 88. The Senate is expected to take up the bill next week.

Overall, the SSA budget would increase from $14.3 billion to $14.84 billion, a roughly 3.8 percent increase. But Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), said the boost in funding devoted to direct customer service is less than 1 percent.

That would mean the SSA has “lost ground in inflation-adjusted terms,” she said. “That’s not really good news for an agency that, for a long time now, has been underfunded.”

The CBPP estimates that, when adjusted for inflation, Social Security’s customer service budget shrank by 21.2 percent from 2010 to 2025, while the number of beneficiaries grew by 26 percent.

Staffing levels an issue

In an explanatory statement accompanying the budget agreement, lawmakers expressed concern about workforce reductions at SSA field offices and processing centers as well as staffing for Social Security’s national customer service helpline (800-772-1213).

Social Security shed more than 6,000 employees in 2025, according to January 2026 data from the federal Office of Personnel Management. The SSA also shifted about 1,000 field office staff to help answer calls to the national helpline.

The average “speed of answer” for calls to the national number was 12 minutes in December 2025, down from 23 minutes a year earlier, according to SSA performance data, but that does not include the time that customers who opt for a callback rather than staying on hold wait to get one. The SSA does not publish the average wait time for a callback, but the agency’s inspector general found it was over 60 minutes as of September 2025.

A recent analysis by the Strategic Organizing Center, a nonprofit group affiliated with the union representing most SSA employees, found that the field office workforce declined by about 9 percent nationally last year.

The bill does not specify how the SSA can spend the extra customer service money, but the lawmakers’ statement signals that staffing is on their minds, noting that the measure “provides resources for SSA to increase the number of staff on the front lines.”

“We know customer service still continues to lag behind what the American public expects, but we appreciate the focus and investment on improving it for the American people,” AARP’s Jones said.

The SSA received $14.2 billion for customer service and other operations in the 2024 federal year and $14.3 billion in 2025. It has remained under that 2025 funding level since the 2026 fiscal year started on Oct. 1, 2025, as Congress struggled to pass full-year funding for most federal agencies.

Fewer field office visits eyed

Social Security applicants and recipients visit the agency’s more than 1,200 field offices to address a wide range of issues, from assistance with claim forms to questions about benefits to changes to personal and tax information.

While the SSA has not publicly outlined plans to close field offices, agency leaders have reportedly set a goal of halving field office visits in the 2026 fiscal year, from more than 31 million to 15 million, as they pursue a “digital first” agenda to move more service provision online.

Reducing access to field offices would be very detrimental to the population that the SSA serves, says Romig.

“Many people want and need to access help in person,” she says. “It’s especially important to seniors and people with disabilities who may not have the technological tools or the facility with online tools to access their service that way.”

Since January 2025, the SSA has required people to schedule visits in advance for most in-person services, and wait times for appointments vary widely across the country, says Stacy Cloyd, a staff attorney at Legal Aid DC, which provides legal services to Washington, D.C., residents with low incomes.

As of August 2025, more than half of customers seeking phone or in-person appointments to claim retirement or survivor benefits waited more than four weeks to get a date, according to data the SSA shared with Congress last year.

Because the SSA will not schedule appointments more than 40 days out from a customer’s request, some people find there are no dates available at all when they call, Cloyd says.

“If all available appointment slots are full, people are sometimes told to call back when more appointments will be available,” she says.

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Deirdre Shesgreen is an AARP writer and editor covering Social Security. She previously worked as a state news editor for the AARP Bulletin and as a reporter and editor at USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other publications.