From an attachment to a letter from the Office of Management and Budget to the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee:
The Social Security Administration (SSA) is responsible for providing essential benefits to retirees, survivors, individuals with disabilities, and elderly Americans with limited income and resources. The 2022 discretionary request would improve the timely processing of disability claims, expand outreach to vulnerable populations, ensure that SSA makes the correct payments to those who qualify, and modernize information technology to increase the accessibility of benefits for seniors and people with disabilities.
The President’s 2022 discretionary request includes $14.2 billion for SSA, a $1.3 billion or 9.7-percent increase from the 2021 enacted level. This includes appropriations for program integrity activities. It:
- Strengthens SSA Services. Each year, SSA processes over six million retirement, survivors, and Medicare claims as well as more than two million disability and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) claims. The discretionary request provides $895 million in additional funding to provide better service at SSA’s field offices, State disability determination services, and teleservice centers for the retirees, individuals with disabilities, and their families who rely on the agency. The request would address operational challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic by increasing staff to process additional disability claims, to reduce the processing time for disability claims, and to answer calls from those seeking assistance.
- Increases Outreach to Vulnerable Populations. The discretionary request invests an additional $75 million in outreach to ensure that SSI benefits reach the most vulnerable eligible individuals, including homeless individuals, children with disabilities, and those with mental and intellectual disabilities. As part of this work, the request would invest in efforts that simplify and expand access to the program. These efforts include partnering with community-based organizations that work with vulnerable populations and delivering targeted mailers to potential SSI claimants.
- Promotes Program Integrity. The discretionary request includes $1.9 billion for dedicated program integrity activities, including a $283 million increase above the 2021enacted level. This amount would ensure responsible spending of Social Security funds, including by funding work to ensure SSA is providing the correct benefit amounts only to those who qualify. These funds also support actions to investigate and help prosecute fraud.
- Improves Customer Service. The discretionary request fully supports SSA’s modernization plans to maintain and improve its information technology systems, which would reduce customer wait times, improve accessibility and make more services available online, and improve the efficiency of SSA’s operations.
I'll talk about this more later but I'm concerned about how the current leadership at Social Security will choose to spend additional money. There's a history of Republicans using increased Social Security appropriations on contractors, especially on long term contracts that tie up agency funds for many years into the future, thereby avoiding hiring additional employees to get the work done. There needs to be a balance but it was clear in the past that Republicans were not trying to balance; their fixed pole was keeping the workforce down.
5 comments:
This budget is dead in the water. There is no way SSA will get this money. And if they do, they wouldn't be able to be able to clear the increased program integrity workloads with the staff we have. Hire new staff with the increase? Great, but new staff takes close to two years to make an impact on operations.
See above, nothing you do will ever please people here.
SSA needs to restore overtime in the payment centers for CS and DE. PC7 backlogs are going up. We were barely treading water with overtime. When Biden took office it was cut to zero.
Having observed the policy implementation from both Republican and Democrat administrations, the results have not been all that different. Lip service yes, but impact no. For example contract reporters were piloted under Clinton, implemented under Bush and expanded under Obama. Similar initiatives involving IT and security also followed similar paths. One only has to look back at the SSA employment levels over the past 25 years to see the consistency of the trend, no matter what party has control. There is more coordination between the administration and the Agency then what appears in this blog. For example, both outreach and program integrity have clearly ramped up since January, even without the proposed budget increases. There are a lot of dedicated careerists focused on getting this right, despite some of the comments and anecdotes that may suggest otherwise. As for the proposed budget, you get what you pay for.
For some perspective, lets look at some things. 1 in 6 Americans got a check this month, and the month before and the month before, on time like clock work. Filing for Medicare and Retirement takes less than 30 minutes online and you can do it quicker if you do your homework and have everything ready ahead of time and set up your SSA account.
The blog looks at a very narrow slice of all of SSA and it duties. Thousands of claims are processed every day, new cards issued, payments made. The work is constant, there are no down days in the life of a CR, I know, I did it. I didn't care for it and the pay and benefits were not enough to keep me there.
Yep, there are some problems, but for every single problem I can find thousands and even millions of things that go right every single day. Anything like any budget increase is a good thing and should be supported, not picked apart from a bunch of people that have never once in their sheltered and entitled lives ever did the actual workload.
Your mileage may vary, and I will not read the vitriol and unsupported stories that are going to follow. Balance and perspective.
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