I received this from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I can't quite interpret it but it certainly seems to be relevant to Social Security. The downloads don't seem to have any data but that data must be somewhere. I'll confess that spreadsheets often mystify me. Maybe that's the problem.
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Bureau of Labor Statistics |
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The ORS program released 2023 estimates on August 15, 2024, that complement those published February 8, 2024. These estimates include:
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One expert is predicting a 2.6% Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) in Social Security benefits this year. We'll know in a couple of months.
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Social Security has recently released its Action Plan 2024. It's a good summary of what has been done during the time that the current Commissioner has been on the job.
Social Security can be proud of what has been accomplished this year but there's going to be no fundamental change for agency employees or those who deal with the agency until the agency gets a significantly higher appropriation. The low hanging fruit has been picked. There's no way to manage the agency out of the hole it's in. As former Commissioner Michael Astrue said, it's going to take "brute force," as in a lot more employees.
... Each year, SSA identifies at least 200,000 (10 percent) of the initial disability applications as priority cases. SSA identifies priority cases for expedited processing through a combination of automated and manual means. Policy requires that SSA develop and process cases identified as priority expeditiously.
We reviewed 668,352 claimants whose initial disability applications SSA selected for priority processing. We also reviewed 153,964 claimants who had initial disability applications that may have been eligible for priority processing.
Generally, SSA properly identified, expedited, and processed initial disability applications that qualified as a priority case. SSA’s selection of cases for priority processing was proper for over 96.1 percent of claimants we reviewed.
However, SSA did not expeditiously develop and process initial disability applications for 11 (6.1 percent) of 180 sampled claimants. Delays occurred because SSA did not always monitor the processing of the 11 cases that were selected for priority processing to ensure they were processed expeditiously. Further, SSA’s policy does not specify overall processing timeframes and/or goals for priority cases. As a result, we estimate SSA delayed case development and processing for 40,844 claimants with priority cases.
A statistical report from Social Security on performance at its Office of Hearings Operations:
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