Social Security’s customer service crisis has deadly consequences.

“We now estimate that more Americans are dying than ever while waiting in line for a disability benefit determination,” Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Martin O’Malley said Oct. 22 during of an online discussion sponsored by AARP on the challenges facing society. agency and the impact on those who depend on it for benefits and services.

The virtual event, which you can watch in its entirety above, included a fireside chat with O’Malley followed by an expert panel moderated by Joel Eskovitz, senior director of Social Security and savings at the AARP Public Policy Institute. The discussion drew on findings from a recent AARP-funded Urban Institute report on the root causes of the crisis and ways the SSA could improve its performance.

AARP called on Congress to allow the SSA to leverage more of its payroll tax revenue to strengthen customer service. Although the agency has reduced wait times for callers to its toll-free national hotline — from more than 42 minutes at the end of last year to 11.3 minutes by September 2024, O’Malley said – it has made no progress in tackling the growing backlog of disability benefits. case.

Chantel Boyens, senior policy associate at the Urban Institute and co-author of the new study, said that since 2017, the number of people waiting for an initial decision on a disability claim has more than doubled, from 523,000 to almost 1.2 million. The time required to obtain a decision has almost doubled, from 110 days to 218 days.

Over roughly the same period, the SSA’s customer service funding—which, unlike its annual expenditures for benefit payments, is subject to annual congressional approval—has declined by 9.2 percent in terms of real.

Budget is a contributing factor

The SSA’s administrative budget for fiscal year 2024, which ended Sept. 30, was $14.2 billion, or about 1 percent of the agency’s annual revenue. That’s an increase of $100 million from the previous year — a 0.7 percent increase in dollar terms but a 5.5 percent decrease when adjusted for inflation, according to the Urban Institute.

Adding to the budgetary stress, the report said, the number of new SSA disability claims has begun to rise in recent years, following a decade of decline during the 2010s. Researchers estimate that security Social Security would need an additional $1.8 billion over three years to fully address the disability case backlog.

“SSA can no longer settle for very modest, nominal budget increases in the short term – not without the very real impacts we are seeing now,” Boyens said.

It’s not just current beneficiaries who will pay the price, Eskovitz noted.

“This is a pretty widespread problem,” he said. “You will need to interact with SSA at some point, perhaps several times in your life. This will impact almost everyone.

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