The Washington Post published an opinion piece last month urging Congress to fix the backlog of disability claimants who are waiting for hearings based on a news story the newspaper published Nov. 21. In this story, one man’s frustration with waiting more than 600 days for a hearing was chronicled and The Washington Post also announced that 10,000 people died last year while waiting for a disability hearing. It is these types of stories that do increase calls for action, but don’t expect Congress to do much to improve this backlog.
Unfortunately many Americans give little thought to Social Security disability or how long applicants have to wait. It is the type of program many people don’t care about until they need it. The opinion piece, which was authored by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), makes many valid points of why Congress should act to help the more than 1 million people in this country who have been waiting years for a disability hearing, but even Wyden knows that with a Republican-controlled Congress, improving things at Social Security is a pipe dream.
There is little Congress can do to shorten hearing wait times for disability applicants with the exception of increasing funding for Social Security, and considering funding levels for Social Security are less than what they were in 2010, that seems like a long shot.
The backlog for hearings has, and will continue to increase each month due to a lack of Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) and a reduced Social Security staff.
We are seeing many more articles and stories about Social Security’s backlog, maybe because it has increased substantially over the last year and maybe because it has impacted more than 1 million Americans, but this backlog is nothing new. Even before the increases, the wait time for a hearing at 90 percent of hearing sites or more was at least a year or longer.
