A subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to consider a large appropriations bill for fiscal year (FY) 2019 today. That FY begins on October 1, 2018. This bill includes the Social Security Administration's Limitation on Administrative Expenditures (LAE), which is, in effect, the appropriation for Social Security. Here's some highlights of the chairman's "mark" (beginning at page 142). That's the subcommittee's starting point:
- LAE $12,422,045,000
- "$100,000,000 shall remain available through September 24, 2020, for activities to address the disability hearings backlog within the Office of Hearings Operations" but any of this not expended by the end of FY 2019 (September 30, 2019) must be spent on IT and telecommunications. This all comes out of the LAE.
- "[N]ot more than $1,683,000,000 to remain available through March 31, 2020, is for the costs associated with continuing disability reviews ... or the cost of co-operative disability investigation units, and for the cost associated with the prosecution of fraud in the programs and operations of the Social Security Administration by Special Assistant United States Attorneys ..." Again, this comes out of the LAE.
The LAE proposed is slightly higher than the $12.393 billion proposed by President Trump but still only marginally higher than the figure for the current FY of $12.236 billion. It probably won't be enough to even keep up with inflation. It's less than what Social Security was given in FY 2017, $12.482 billion.
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The total amount for the LAE account authorized by the House Appropriations Subcommittee is $12,557,045,000, which is the sum of the main LAE ($12,422,045,000), user fees charged to states for federal administration of their SSI state supplements ($134,000,000), and user fees charged to non-attorney representatives for certification ($1,000,000).
The total amount for the LAE account under the FY2018 omnibus is $12,872,945,000.
https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hr1625/BILLS-115hr1625enr.pdf#page=414
This amount is higher than the amount for FY2018 in SSA's FY2019 budget justification ($12.236 billion) because SSA was operating under a continuing resolution (CR) at the time, which kept its LAE funding at FY2017 levels minus a small rescission. Thus, all the FY2018 amounts for the LAE account in that document assume CR funding levels (with some adjustments)--not the amount that was actually enacted under the FY2018 omnibus.
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