If you call Social Security, you could wait even longer

Few government agencies touch the lives of more Americans than the Social Security Administration: The agency pays out $1.4 trillion in benefits annually to more than 71 million people.

But Social Security is facing a customer service mess that threatens to get worse before it gets better. The problems include long wait times on the agency’s toll-free phone line, a large backlog of disability claims and a growing problem with overpayments to low-income beneficiaries.

Many of the problems stem from the austere administrative budgets imposed by Congress over the past decade. Since 2011, Congressional cuts to the agency’s customer service budget total 17 percent, after adjustments for inflation, and staffing fell last year to the lowest level in 25 years, according to a analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research and policy organization. At the same time, the number of beneficiaries has increased by 22 percent over the past ten years.

The current budget battle in Congress could worsen the situation. The Biden administration has requested a $1.3 billion increase in the SSA’s customer service budget for next year, while Republicans in the House of Representatives have proposed a $250 million cut. Decisions on federal spending have been pushed back to early 2024 under an agreement reached last month.

Even a decision to keep funding stable next year would translate into slower service as the SSA uses more of its resources to cover rising fixed costs, such as planned wage increases, employee benefits and office rents. The agency’s fixed costs are increasing by $600 million to $700 million annually.

“The budget situation is bad now, and it’s safe to say it will get worse next year,” said Kathleen Romig, CBPP’s director of social security and disability policy. “The problems are getting worse and worse over time.”

The funding issues come as SSA leadership is in transition. President Biden has nominated Martin O’Malley, a former Maryland governor and former presidential candidate, as the agency’s permanent director, and Mr. O’Malley is awaiting Senate confirmation. He would replace Kilolo Kijakazi, who has been acting director since July 2021, when the president fired Commissioner Andrew Saul, an appointee of President Donald J. Trump.

Dr. Kijakazi is a public policy expert who has written extensively on income, wealth and race. In an interview, she pointed to several areas of progress during her tenure, including restoring walk-in traffic at the agency’s 1,230 field offices after a pandemic shutdown, using this year’s $707 million increase in customer service funding to add 7,900 employees to add.

But Dr. Kijakazi said administrative budget issues remained a central problem.

“It will take years of sustained, adequate funding and collaboration, both within the agency and with external partners, for the agency to recover from a staffing and services crisis that has been brewing for years,” she said.

Training new employees usually takes more than a year because the social security rules are so complex. And the current short-term expansion in spending forced the agency to freeze hiring.

“If the final budget for SSA maintains funding, the hiring freeze will remain in place throughout the year,” she added. “Given the expected turnover during the year, we will not be able to replace the people who leave.”

Further cuts were the result proposed earlier this year by Republicans as part of a broader budget plan that they said was aimed at “curtailing wasteful bureaucracy and improving oversight and accountability.” But Dr. Kijakazi said the cuts would force more painful choices, including furloughs and reduced duty hours, field office closures and the halting of a much-needed modernization of the agency’s information technology.

All of this would happen because the agency already faces major challenges.

The average wait time on SSA’s phone line, which is crucial for people with benefits questions or benefit applicants, is 36 minutes. Average wait times have fluctuated over the past decade, but in 2013 the average wait time was 10 minutes. The agency recently began using a modernized toll-free phone system, but noted that more trained employees will be needed to reduce wait times.

There is a backlog of more than a million people waiting an average of seven months for initial decisions on disability benefits claims — a process that has been slowed by staffing issues at the agency and at state governments, which receive SSA funding to determine applicants’ eligibility come. at local level.

So is the desk under fire about benefits overpayments that have resulted in the agency recovering billions of dollars, with some people receiving notices that they owe tens of thousands of dollars to the SSA. they believe the overpayment was not their fault and they cannot afford to pay it back. The problem of overpayments has hit some of the most vulnerable beneficiaries: recipients of disability benefits and Supplemental Security Income, the program that supports very low-income Americans.

A major source of the problem is adjustments to benefits required under the law when a beneficiary’s income, employment status, or size of assets change. The SSA is developing a system to tap third-party payroll data, reducing beneficiaries’ reporting responsibilities and improving efficiency. But progress has been slow: The project was approved by Congress in 2015 and a proposed rule to launch the system won’t be submitted until next month, the SSA said Friday.

But one new report from the agency points to problems with overpayments in the pension and disability programs. The SSA notes that in these programs, only one-half of 1 percent of payments were overpayments, and that the research finding is based on a sample that may not represent a long-term trend.

Dr. Kijakazi notes that a study is underway to determine whether other procedural changes could address the broader problem of overpayments. But she said the error rate related to overpayments was small in the context of a large program like Social Security, and argued that the problem mainly stemmed from changes in people’s income or employment status that were not reported.

“We are legally obliged to recover any overpayments,” she said. “We understand how upsetting this is likely to be for anyone who receives a letter.” She added: “If members of Congress and the public don’t want us to continue the same way we are doing on overpayments, all they have to do is change the legislation.”

However, the law does give the SSA the authority to waive recovery of overpayments under certain circumstances, Ms. Romig said. “They could do a lot to make overpayments less harmful to people, and they’re not doing that,” she said.

The problem of overpayments also underlines the challenges faced by an agency operating with outdated information technology – and a workforce under strain.

Earlier this year, the Social Security Administration ranked last in a ranking of the best places to work in the federal government – ​​down sharply from a decade ago, when the country was consistently rated among the best.

“It’s not getting any better,” said Jessica LaPointe, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 220, which represents workers at Social Security field offices and call centers.

Ms. LaPointe said she hoped the appointment of a permanent commissioner would help. “We believe he will really do what he can with the constraints of our budget, but we need Congress to actually fund SSA’s operating costs,” she said, referring to Mr. O’Malley.

“We are so crippled and demoralized by these proposed cuts,” Ms. LaPointe said. “When the public is waiting for needed services, it creates a very frustrating situation for the customer and for employees who feel like we are failing in the mission that we have.”