Social Security field offices across the country may have lost a whopping 20 percent of their staff since March of last year, according to estimates by Axios and the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions.

The unions estimated that field offices — where Americans can apply for benefits and deal with the agency face-to-face — had altogether lost about 5 percent of their staff by March. Hawaii (11 percent), Montana (14 percent), and New Mexico (10 percent) were among the states most impacted.

Tack onto that the nearly 2,000 field workers who took the Trump administration’s voluntary buyout, along with the reassignment of about 1,000 local call center representatives to staff the agency’s overwhelmed national hotline. Axios estimated that the total reductions account for a

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