Social Security’s customer service crisis is taking a deadly toll.
“We now estimate that more Americans die waiting in line than ever before for a disability [benefit] determination,” Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Martin O’Malley said Oct. 22 during an AARP-sponsored web discussion on the challenges facing the agency and the impact on those who rely on it for benefits and services.
The virtual event, which you can watch in full above, featured 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 the findings of a recent, AARP-funded report by the Urban Institute on the root causes of the crisis and ways the SSA could improve performance.
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AARP has been calling on Congress to allow the SSA to tap more of its dedicated payroll-tax revenue to bolster customer service. While the agency has reduced hold times for callers to its national toll-free helpline — from more than 42 minutes late last year to 11.3 minutes in September 2024, O’Malley said — it has not made headway in tackling a ballooning backlog of disability benefit cases.
Chantel Boyens, principal policy associate at the Urban Institute and a 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 nearly 1.2 million. The time it takes to get a decision has nearly doubled, from 110 days to 218.
Over roughly the same period, the SSA’s funding for customer service — which, unlike its annual outlay for benefit payments, is subject to annual congressional approval — has declined by 9.2 percent in real terms.
Budget is a contributing factor
The SSA’s administrative budget for the 2024 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, was $14.2 billion, about 1 percent of the agency’s annual revenue. That was up $100 million from the previous year — a 0.7 percent increase in dollar terms but a 5.5 percent decline when adjusted for inflation, according to the Urban Institute.
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Adding to the budget stress, the report says, the SSA’s caseload of new disability claims has begun ticking up in the last few years after a decade-long decline through the 2010s. The researchers estimate Social Security would need an additional $1.8 billion over three years to fully address the disability case backlog.
“SSA can no longer get by with really modest, nominal increases in the budget in the near term — not without the very real impacts that we’re seeing now,” Boyens said.
It isn’t just current beneficiaries who will pay the price, Eskovitz noted.
“This is a pretty widespread issue,” he said. “You’re going to need to interface with SSA at some point, maybe many times in your life. This will impact just about everybody.”
Keep up with AARP’s coverage of Social Security, and use AARP’s Social Security Calculator to find out how to maximize your benefits.