SSA provides financial assistance to eligible individuals through three major benefit programs: Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI)—provides retirement benefits to eligible older workers and their families and to survivors of deceased workers. Disability Insurance (DI)—provides benefits to eligible workers who have qualifying disabilities, and their eligible family members. Supplemental Security Income (SSI)—provides income for aged, blind, or disabled individuals with limited income and resources. In administering these programs, SSA provides a range of services to the public. For example, SSA calculates retirement benefits for individuals based on factors including earnings history and the age at which an individual chooses to start receiving benefits. Also, SSA staff determine whether DI and SSI benefit applicants meet the agency’s non-medical eligibility criteria. Applicants who are not satisfied with the initial decision on their claim may appeal, which can include a hearing before an SSA administrative law judge. Recipients of SSA benefits can work with the agency to manage their benefits in various ways, including obtaining letters verifying that they receive benefits, changing their address and telephone number, and starting or changing their direct deposit of benefits. SSA has other responsibilities in addition to administering benefit programs. Its mission includes issuing Social Security numbers, which are currently used for many non-Social Security purposes. Most original Social Security cards are issued at birth during the Enumeration at Birth process, which is completely electronic. SSA also issues both original cards not issued at birth and replacement cards. In addition, SSA uses and stores a great deal of sensitive information, including financial and medical records as well as Social Security numbers. Customers access SSA services primarily through four delivery channels: In-person at SSA facility: Customers can access a wide range of services at SSA’s field offices, including applying for benefits, managing benefits, and obtaining Social Security cards. Customers can also obtain Social Security cards at SSA’s card centers. Individuals who are appealing SSA’s decision on their disability applications may participate in an in-person hearing before an administrative law judge at one of SSA’s hearing offices. By phone with field office staff: Customers can access many of the services that are available in-person at field offices through phone calls with field office staff, including applying for and managing their benefits, according to SSA officials. By phone through national 800 number: Customers can manage their benefits and obtain informational services through the national 800 number. They have the option of conducting business through an automated system or by speaking directly with an SSA staff person at a teleservice center. Online: Many services are available online. Customers can apply for retirement and DI through SSA’s website. The majority of online retirement benefit applications are reviewed by SSA staff at one of 16 Workload Support Units, while most online DI applications are reviewed by staff at field offices, according to SSA officials. Also, the mySocialSecurity online portal allows customers with an account to manage their benefits and view information online such as their earnings record. See table 1 for a summary of how some of the more commonly used SSA services may be accessed. SSA’s facilities include: Its headquarters, located mainly in the Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. A network of field offices, Social Security card centers, teleservice centers, and other facilities that deliver services directly to the public. These services are managed by SSA’s Office of Operations, which is further organized into 10 regional offices around the country, each with a regional commissioner, and 51 area offices, each with an area director who reports to a regional commissioner. A network of hearing offices around the country where claimants can participate in hearings before administrative law judges. The Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) manages the appeals process for disability applications out of its headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia, and through a network of regional offices. SSA leases all of its facilities from the GSA through occupancy agreements—a signed agreement between GSA and SSA to the financial terms and conditions for occupying a GSA-controlled space. GSA- controlled space can be in privately-owned or federally-owned buildings; approximately two-thirds of SSA’s space is in privately-owned buildings. Overall, the Office of Facilities and Logistics Management (OFLM), within SSA’s Office of the Deputy Commissioner for Budget, Finance, Quality, and Management, is responsible for planning and implementing the agency’s policies related to its physical footprint. In fiscal year 2012, SSA began centralizing its facility planning process, moving responsibility for this process from the regional offices to OFLM. This shift included establishing one signatory for all requests for office space and monitoring changes to the amount of office and warehouse space in its inventory. SSA’s facility planning is guided by factors including: (1) Leasing cycle. SSA’s typical leasing cycle, according to interviews with SSA officials as well as agency documentation, begins approximately 36 months before a lease expires. SSA begins developing alternatives for future space use, which could mean renewing the lease for the current space, moving to a new location, or adjusting the current space (e.g., consolidating or co-locating offices). Facilities officials at each SSA regional office work with area directors and field office managers to determine an office’s space needs. For field offices, regional facilities officials then apply space allocation standards (space standards) to determine the size of the office based on the current number of staff on board. After determining the space needs and applying the space standards, OFLM officials provide final approval before a request is submitted to GSA. Then GSA officials work directly with SSA regional facilities officials to complete the process for renewing a lease, including identifying potential sites if a field office needs to change location due to, for example, a shift in the service area population. (2) Service area review. SSA policy requires area directors to conduct service area reviews—which assess the need for office changes based on service delivery conditions—at least every 10 years for each field office in their area of responsibility to determine whether the service area’s needs are being met by the field office. However, area directors can decide to conduct these reviews on an ad hoc basis, such as when an office’s lease is expiring. Service area reviews consider a wide variety of factors, including demographics, workload, and the physical accessibility of the office. They can result in an internal recommendation that, among other things, an office be consolidated with another office or move location. Recommendations to change location or consolidate, made by the area director, must be approved by the regional commissioner and, as needed, headquarters officials. Headquarters officials would approve, for example, a recommendation to establish a new field office or change the location of an existing field office to a new congressional district. For approved location changes or consolidations, SSA then works with GSA as described above to identify sites for its potential use. (3) Space reduction initiatives. Two OMB government-wide initiatives also guide SSA’s facilities planning. The Freeze the Footprint (2012) and Reduce the Footprint (2015) policies were developed to help federal agencies more efficiently use their excess and underutilized properties in light of a fiscally-constrained environment and changes in how agencies conduct business, including the utilization of technology to deliver services to the public. The policies required SSA to initially avoid increasing the square footage in domestic offices and warehouses beyond a baseline established in 2012, and then to set and meet annual reduction goals. The Freeze the Footprint policy was in effect until 2015; the Reduce the Footprint policy took effect in 2016. SSA determines its annual reduction goals in consultation with GSA and OMB. In fiscal year 2015, OMB and GSA re-categorized over half of SSA’s facilities as “public-facing”—primarily used to serve and interact with the public—and exempted these facilities from its Reduce the Footprint baseline and reduction targets. As a result of this change, the fiscal year 2016 reduction target for SSA’s facilities was lowered from 260,000 to 120,000 square feet. SSA reduced its square footage and the number of its facilities from fiscal year 2012, when the overall federal effort began to limit agencies’ physical footprint, to fiscal year 2016. SSA is continuing to reduce its footprint to align with these federal efforts and to reduce costs, according to agency documents and interviews with agency officials. SSA reduced its footprint by about 1.4 million square feet (or 5.2 percent) from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2016, according to our analysis (see fig. 1). These space reductions met both its Freeze the Footprint and Reduce the Footprint goals, according to SSA. SSA officials said over 600,000 square feet of its space reduction since 2012 was in field offices, with the remainder in headquarters space. According to SSA, the agency issued revised space standards for its field offices in 2012 in response to OMB’s Freeze the Footprint policy; the revised standards contributed to these reductions. The application of the revised standards as field office leases come up for renewal has helped reduce SSA’s overall field office space. While the revised standards expand the space in public reception areas, the standards’ larger reductions in space for personnel and support space reduce the overall field office footprint. For example, the 2006 space standards allocated 125 square feet per SSA staff member, which the 2012 standards reduced to 120 square feet; the 2006 standards allocated 7 square feet per filing cabinet, while the 2012 standards include no space for filing cabinets as SSA’s digitization of data has reduced the need to store paper.