Payment Center Processing Times Improved But Is Service Really Better?

     From Social Security's explanation of the Trump Administration fiscal year 2020 budget proposal:

Currently, the PCs [Payment Centers, where Social Security, but not SSI benefits, are authorized] are working through a backlog of pending actions. Our PCs reduced the number of pending actions to 3.2 million as of September 2018, a 37 percent decrease from an all-time high of more than 5 million in January 2016. We targeted hiring and overtime in the PCs, and we continue to focus on automation, workflow enhancements, and quality initiatives to improve PC performance. Through our IT [Information Technology] modernization initiative, we will continue to pursue opportunities to reduce the PC backlog by streamlining and automating manual PC workloads. These efforts will help us work towards reducing the number of pending actions to 2.5 million by the end of FY 2020. However, the outcome of the court case, Steigerwald v. Berryhill [a class action that will probably require recomputations of benefits for a large group of claimants who had been underpaid], could impede our progress in reducing the PC backlog.

     What I'm seeing is some small improvement in speed of payment -- but only for the simple, easy cases. The PCs seem to be fast tracking, that is doing the quick, easy stuff first but God help you if your case involves any level of complexity because it's going to take forever. Fast tracking leads to better looking numbers but is it a fair trade-off to improve service to a lot of people by a few days by imposing many months of delay on a smaller group of people?