From President Biden's budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025, which begins on October 1, 2024:
... The Budget provides an increase of $1.3 billion, nine percent over the 2023 enacted level, to improve customer service at SSA’s field offices, State disability determination services, and teleservice centers for retirees, individuals with disabilities, and their families. The Budget also improves access to SSA’s services by reducing wait times. ...
Nothing like this can be passed until after the election and only then if Democrats control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives -- and Senate Democrats are willing to scrap the filibuster, at least in part.
In the lengthy supplement to the budget, the detailed explanation shows that program integrity would not increase. One complaint about recent appropriations is that there has been lavish funding of program integrity while basic operations have suffered greatly.
The Commissioner of Social Security gets to include his own proposed budget for the agency in the supplement to the budget. Commissioner O'Malley's proposal is for the agency to be funded at $16.45 billion, about three quarters of a billion dollars higher than the President's budget but O'Malley has issued a statement praising the President's budget.
The proposals of the President and the Commissioner are nice but restoring acceptable service at the Social Security Administration will have to be a multi-year effort.
By the way, the Biden budget also calls for extending SSI to U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico.
Trump was asked about Social Security and did his usual mind dump of answering. But he hit on "bad management" and "waste, lots of waste" as key points. If budget hawks of the GOP have their way, next years budget would likely see an increase in program integrity and cuts in other things in response to "waste and bad management". This Biden budget may be the best one could hope for.
ReplyDeleteIn response to 9:20
ReplyDeleteThere is bad management and waste at SS but that has absolutely nothing to do with the projected shortfall in SS funding. But, the hosts of that interview on CNBC, which I had the misfortune to listen to while driving, never challenged Trump on this or any other point. I suppose it is difficult to break into the word salad, but his comments on Social Security just reflect his complete lack of understanding of the issues such as long term funding of Social Security, and a retreat to the usual nonsense about Government wast being the issue.
The irony of Trump saying SSA is mismanaged is actually pretty humorous, but not in a way that Trump intended. Internally, SSA has been absolutely mismanaged by clueless and inept managers, but that's not what Trump is saying. Trump has the intellectual depth of a shot glass and is absolutely spouting that SSA is being mismanaged by Congress in its administration of SSA, which is very different than the former statement.
ReplyDeleteThis would be a nice increase in funding for SSA, but from now until then, SSA will continue to lose employees left and right to other agencies, myself being one of them. The agency is currently an absolute dumpster fire with no end in sight. Management of the agency need to reap the stupid decisions they sow.
I think one of the biggest takeaways from O'Malley's statement is that SSA is supposed to administer the Family and Parental leave program? Those are valid and great programs, but currently SSA can't even quickly administer the program's it handles now, imagine throwing that workload onto an already drowning agency. That's a BIG yikes coming...
ReplyDeleteManager here - not sure 20% could saveour agency anymore - we are a rudderless ship on fire and sinking . We don’t have staff anywhere and the ones we have are weak due to lack of training bc we are short handed. Even with 8k hires we would
ReplyDeleteBe 3 years or more away from any positive movement. We are doomed - everyone jumping ship to other agencies and jobs. The rest of us are being held hostage with no early out - it’s laughable