“The look on everybody’s face is they’re beat down, they are demoralized, they’re tired,” said Chris Delaney, a local union president in Hudson, N.Y., who represents Social Security workers and works for the agency as a claims specialist.

Reshuffling Workers

The job cuts touched the vast majority of Social Security’s 1,200 field offices across the country, most of which lost at least 10 percent of their staff, according to an analysis from AFGE Council 220, which represents field office employees.

For the past year, the agency has tried to fill the gap, at least in part, by reshuffling workers to the front lines. This included pulling field office workers from their regular jobs and assigning them to answer calls at the 800 number, in an effort to improve the often hourslong wait times. On July 6, 1,500 field office workers were reassigned to work shifts on the 800 number, according to internal agency data, but 2,500 have been redeployed from across the agency overall.

That move, coupled with an upgrade to the agency’s phone system, has improved service. The “average speed of answer” on the 800 number declined to five minutes in May, from 11 minutes a year ago, but beneficiaries who accept a callback later are counted as having a zero wait time, reducing the average. The average callback time also improved, but the agency stopped reporting that metric on its performance website last summer.

“I’d like to make this more complicated, but it’s not. It’s putting people where the work is,” Mr. Bisignano, who also serves as chief executive officer of the Internal Revenue Service, said during a congressional hearing last month. “It’s building technology in a modern-day fashion.”