From Government Executive:
The House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines Wednesday to advance appropriations legislation that would cut the Social Security Administration’s administrative budget by $450 million next fiscal year. ...
During Wednesday’s committee markup, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., who will retire at the end of this year, filed an amendment restoring the $450 million in cuts, which would bring SSA’s funding flat with its current annual appropriation of $14.2 billion. He warned that, if enacted, the GOP’s proposed cuts would further exacerbate the agency’s customer service crisis. ...
Rep. Robert Aderlholt, R-Ala., who chairs the subcommittee responsible for the bill, defended the cuts, claiming that they would only affect headquarters staff and not any field offices.
“Despite what you may have heard, no field offices will be closed because of this bill,” Aderholt said. “The 4% cut to SSA would come from the $3 billion that Social Security has budgeted for its Baltimore and Washington, D.C., offices, where 61% of the workforce is fully remote. SSA’s mission is customer-facing and it serves America’s most vulnerable population and this egregious use of telework is insulting to them.”
But Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Aderholt’s assurances ring hollow.
“Now, the chairman says that no field offices will close,” he said. “Why does he say that? Because he directs, in the bill, that ‘no field offices will be closed.’ Poof, magic! He didn’t ask SSA whether that would be, he just directed it in the bill . . . The population keeps going up, and the senior population certainly keeps going up, and your assertion that somehow the expenditures to service those rising numbers is static is incorrect. Your math doesn’t work.”
Ruppersberger’s amendment failed by a 31-23 vote.
4 comments:
It doesn't matter how many offices there are but whether or not they have the staff and resources to do the job as intended.
Right now, they don't. They cannot reliably answer the phones. If you get through, they can't reliably answer basic questions like where is the case or why haven't you processed the appeal or application in the more than thirty days that you have had it. And, when things go wrong, cannot get a supervisor to talk to you or communicate with any of the payment centers directly to get things done.
$450 Million in cuts, a pittance in Government spending, will only make things worse. But, if the goal is to prove that Government can't work by making it impossible for it to work, then in their eyes, that is a plus.
The payment centers process favorable ALJ decisions to payment. It's already taking too long for this to happen. Please no more funding cuts to the payment centers. Actually more overtime is badly needed there.
You can have the OT from my office. I wish we could transfer those hours to offices in need. We have few cases, not enough to schedule full dockets for our ALJ's and few employees sign up for the OT as morale is so bad.
YES! YES! YES! it seems like it's going to back to the olden days when it took 9 months or more to pay the rep, the payments centers need help badly!!!
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