Previous blog posts have reported on Social Security’s stagnate operating budget since the year 2010. Actually, info published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities highlights this fact better than any as it recently showed how much better things were in 2010.
Social Security faces increased workload with fewer resources than it did more than 7 years ago. These numbers were adjusted for inflation; even so, an operating budget that has been reduced by 11 percent is not how you deal with increased demand for services. Along with the budget decrease, staffing levels at Social Security are down 10 percent from where they were in 2010. A natural observation might be to guess that the number of people receiving Social Security benefits has decreased since 2010, since the agency’s budget and staffing levels have been decimated, but the opposite is the case. The number of people receiving disability benefits has increased by 5 percent and the number of people receiving retirement benefits by 17 percent since 2010. This increase in demand for services, and reduction of staff and money, has made the backlog for disability hearings the longest in history, but relief may be on the way.
The bipartisan agreement on the recently approved budget increases the spending caps on discretionary spending. Kathleen Romig, a senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, indicated in a recent article, that an increase is discretionary spending in 2018 and 2019 “calls for higher funding for the Social Security Administration’s operating budget, which is starved for resources after years of cuts, to improve customer service.”
Anyone who has attempted to obtain services from the Social Security Administration, either directly at a Social Security field office, or via the phone, probably agrees with Romig’s assessment that customer service is extensively lacking these days.
“As workloads and costs grow and budgets shrink, SSA’s service has worsened by nearly every measure. The new budget agreement offers an opportunity to increase SSA’s operating budget and reverse some of this damage,” Romig said.
Hopefully, a year from now, we are talking about improvements to Social Security’s current backlog.
