April 21, 2021
The Honorable John B. Larson
Chair, Subcommittee on Social Security, Committee on Ways and Means
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Subcommittee Chair Larson:
I am writing because I want to be clear about the
negative impact to Social Security services due to the ongoing pandemic
and our funding level in fiscal year (FY) 2021. Our FY 2021 annual
appropriation was nearly $900 million less than my original request. It
is effectively level with the funding we have received for each of the
last four years, despite significant increases in costs that we do not
control – such as the Government-wide pay increases.
The pandemic has resulted in unprecedented changes. The
safety of the public and our employees has been the paramount driver of
how we deliver services during the pandemic. To protect the public and
our employees, we have necessarily limited in-person service to critical
situations that can only be resolved in-person. While we continue to
serve the public over the phone and online, we are still experiencing
issues receiving and verifying documents and medical evidence we need to
make decisions. Even with fewer applications in FY 2021,
pandemic-related challenges and operational constraints present numerous
barriers to employees completing workloads timely. In FY 2020, the
average time it took us to complete an action in our field offices
increased by 20 percent, significantly reducing our productivity. We are
working diligently to address these challenges, but the abrupt changes
to the way we do our work has caused bottlenecks in certain workloads
and service deterioration beyond our control. On February 23, 2021, we
shared with your staff the potential implications of our FY 2021 funding
level to further harm services.
However, our operational challenges have been aggravated
by our inability to fully use our program integrity funding. To use this
funding, we must complete cost-saving continuing disability reviews
(CDR) and Supplemental Security Income redeterminations. We have had to
reduce our planned full medical CDRs by 30 percent due to the pandemic,
the lowest level since FY 2013. We deferred these workloads in the early
part of the pandemic to protect beneficiaries’ income and healthcare
and to reduce the burden on the medical community, which had stopped
most elective services.
While we restarted these workloads at the end of FY 2020,
we are handling them through the mail and over the phone. During the
pandemic, these complex workloads often require multiple contacts with a
beneficiary, which slows our ability to complete this work. In
addition, over 30 percent of our initial disability claims and CDRs
require a consultative exam (CE) with a medical provider so that we can
obtain enough medical information to make a decision. Right now, just
over 70 percent of our CE providers are scheduling in-person exams. We
have focused our limited CE capacity on initial disability claims to
ensure that we can provide benefits to people who qualify. Even with
that focus, the average processing times for initial disability claims
increased about 45 days in the last year. Ultimately, we currently
estimate the constraints on our program integrity funding deepens our
shortfall by approximately $200 million.
Since becoming Commissioner, I have focused our actions
and our resources on efforts to improve the service we provide to the
millions of people who turn to us for help. I have been clear in my
budget requests about what it takes to improve service and maintain the
integrity of our programs: both additional frontline staff to help
people now, and information technology (IT) investments to improve our
future. IT is fundamental to offering the public more electronic and
online options they expect from organizations today, improving the
technology to make it easier for our staff to help the public, and
ensuring we have a safe, modern platform to support over $1 trillion in
benefits payments each year.
I have frozen hiring in non-frontline positions so that
we can push all available resources to the offices that directly serve
the public. I have increased the staffing in our field offices, national
800 number, processing centers, and State disability determination
services (DDS) by nearly 3,000 people since 2019. I have increased IT
investments to accelerate our modernization and increase online service
options.
We are working with the advocate community to help ensure
that the most vulnerable populations can access our services. Our
efforts include a robust communications campaign, in combination with a
wide range of online resources, to provide information on service
options for the beneficiary and individuals or organizations that help
them.
I also decided to pay employee awards so they know that
we appreciate their hard work and dedication, especially during this
difficult time. I have pushed the agency to find creative ways to
maintain these efforts despite the significant cut to our budget request
this year.
We have explored all possibilities to eliminate our
budget shortfall but we are unable to overcome it. I have no other
option but to delay our planned hiring to operate within our
appropriated resources. Further, we will not be able to compensate for
fewer employees with additional overtime. We are operating with the
lowest level of overtime in the last decade. These decisions have a
lasting negative impact on the service we can provide to the American
public. It will increase waits for service from our field offices and on
our 800 number as we begin to emerge from the pandemic. The number of
pending actions in our processing centers will grow from about 3.7
million actions pending at the end of FY 2020 to more than 4.2 million
actions pending by the end of FY 2021. It will delay our plan to
eliminate the backlog of cases in the DDS, which currently has about 20
percent more pending cases than prior to the pandemic, as we anticipate
an increase in disability receipts into FY 2022.
The pandemic has changed the way we do work at SSA in
unprecedented ways. At the start of the pandemic, we transitioned to
remote work, focused on critical service workloads through online and
telephone options, and suspended some adverse actions to protect the
public during an especially critical time. The pandemic required
necessary operating adjustments to safely serve the public, reducing our
ability to complete our workloads and contributing to increased
backlogs and wait times in some priority service areas. These novel
factors prevented us from achieving some of our goals in FY 2020 and put
our goals for FY 2021 and future years at risk. FY 2021 is a critical
year to shape the agency for post-pandemic success, but our resource
constraints will delay our recovery.
I appreciate President Biden’s support of our needs with
his FY 2022 budget request of nearly $14.2 billion for us, which is $1.3
billion more than what we received this year to operate our agency. No
one anticipated the duration of the pandemic and the ongoing challenges
it presents. I hope you will consider these challenges and support his
request to help us improve service.
Sincerely,
Andrew Saul
Commissioner
