Feb 1, 2010

Astrue On President's Proposed Budget

A press release from Social Security:

By requesting $12.5 billion for Social Security's administrative expenses, an eight percent increase over the previous year, President Obama has again shown that he clearly understands the workload challenges we face. The additional funding is critical to our efforts to continue driving down the hearings backlog, something we were able to do in fiscal year 2009 for the first time in over a decade. This funding also will allow us to process an increasing number of retirement and disability claims, and improve our aging infrastructure.

For seventy-five years, Americans have depended on Social Security. We know that millions of Americans continue to count on us to provide them with the service they need and deserve. It is critical that Congress enact President Obama's budget proposal in a timely manner.

For more information about the President's 2011 budget request for Social Security, visit www.socialsecurity.gov/budget.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, well, no. I reviewed the SSA portion of the budget. The increase in SSA's budget is mostly to address the CDR's and SSI redeterminations, which are woefully behind. There is an increase in staffing from FY 2010 to FY 2011 of fewer than 800 FTE's, which is far short of the 3000-5000 per year that SSA needs to be increasing its staffing over and above attrition to even hope to address the current backlogs and expected increased workloads.
And consider that the budget for SSI payments is allocated to be $61 Billion for FY 2011--probably 25 percent or more of that is erroneous payments due to understaffing and mismanagement, which is more than SSA's entire administrative budget. SSA is a complete train wreck and is not getting better.

LegalBystander said...

With the increased budget, SSA can now hire more people to help in its operations. It would mean less backlogs and fact claim processing.

Anonymous said...

Not sure where commenter #1 saw the big increase in SSI re-dets; looked to be the same level between 2010 and 2011 to me.

Nice bump up in Workyears for the DDSs. Should help processing some.