May 29, 2022

Not That Many Claimants Asking For Congressional Help

     From a Social Security newsletter:

... Our Congressional Constituent Relations Staff (CCRS) expedites critical casework
and special handling requests and inquiries from district, State, and Capitol Hill offices. ...  
In FY 2021, CCRS assisted with over 6,600 congressional staff inquiries. This includes the
work of our Congressional Liaison office, which took over 330 claims and post-entitlement
actions, responded to almost 1,700 congressional and public inquiries, and handled over
100 direct contacts with current and former Members of Congress. ...
    Only 6,600 Congressional staff inquiries in a year for 535 Senators and Representatives? Considering the number of people having problems with Social Security that sounds quite low to me. Sounds like our members of Congress need to hear more from their constituents about the sorry state of service at Social Security.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is just CCRS. Our region and area get contacted frequently by congressional staff regarding issues.

Anonymous said...

In my experience plenty of congressmen and women are unresponsive.

The service with them mirrors the SSA public service, which results in few referrals.

Although telework has allowed SSA to recruit more staff and retain staff which could result in work getting processed more expeditiously.

Anonymous said...

As 6:38am pointed out, this is only one small office. The majority of all congressional inquiries will be made to: the local FO, the regional Program Service Center I&E, the Regional Public Affairs Office or (more uncommonly) to the regional commissioner's office.

Anonymous said...

This newsletter is for a Congressional staff audience - there is one very small office in the congressional buildings that takes on casework for Congress, which is what this number indicates. The agency as a whole probably gets more than 10 times that number casework referrals from Congress via regional public affairs and local field office managers. In fact, the same page you pulled that excerpt from refers congressional staff to the regional offices as the "first call" for casework.

Did you buy a "jump to conclusions" floor mat?