Social Security Backlogs Have Left Over 1 Million Americans Awaiting Benefits — What’s Being Done for Those Affected?
Written by
Vance Cariaga
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Daria Uhlig
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The Social Security Administration has become so overwhelmed by customer service problems that even officials with the agency admit that their performance is “not acceptable.” That was how Linda Kerr-Davis, the SSA’s acting deputy commissioner of operations, described things during a recent Congressional hearing.
Kerr-Davis was there to explain why more than 1 million Americans are still waiting for initial decisions on disability benefits that currently take an average of 220 days to process.
“Pending levels and wait times for determinations on initial disability claims and disability reconsiderations are at all-time highs,” Kerr-Davis told the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee last month. “For the first time since the programs began, pending initial disability claims have exceeded 1 million. Applicants are waiting on average seven months for a decision. This is simply not acceptable — to the public, to you, or to us.”
Members of Congress — from both political parties — did not dispute that assessment. Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.), chairman of the Social Security panel of the Ways and Means Committee, said the consequences of SSA’s various service failures “are devastating.”
The question now is what the SSA plans to do about it. Kerr-Davis told the committee that her agency has worked to identify issues that led to the backlog and plans to take “immediate steps” to address and resolve them.
Meanwhile, experts and lawmakers who testified at the hearing offered some of their own suggestions, CNBC reported. One of the suggestions was to eliminate what’s known as the “reconsideration process,” which is the step disability applicants can take if they’ve been rejected for benefits.
During reconsideration, applicants meet with an administrative law judge. This can lead to a couple of different outcomes: either the applicant is approved for benefits that were originally rejected, or the judge reaffirms the initial decision, which adds extra time to processing a disability case. Eliminating this step could free up time to process more cases.
Another way to address the backlog problem is to provide more funding for the SSA so it can hire more people and invest in more and better technology. But as CNBC noted, some Congressional Republicans have gone in the opposite direction by proposing a 30% federal budget cut that could mean less money for the SSA instead of more.
If that happens, office hours for SSA field offices would be shortened and disability benefit applicants would see wait times increase by at least two months, according to Kerr-Davis.
Finally, the SSA could also use its resources more efficiently, critics say. Ferguson suggested that the agency continues to rely on data that is decades out of date, CNBC reported. That data includes a jobs list last updated in 1977, according to The Washington Post.
“The SSA is making it harder for claimants and making more work for itself,” Ferguson said.
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