I thought I had posted this earlier, but i may have only posted it to Facebook or my professional page which is down at the moment.
I’ve been working in Social Security Disability law since 2008, and as a solo attorney since 2014. Among my peers we monitor various numbers like “grant rates” and “backlogs” at different offices, but to my knowledge there isn’t a published central compendium I could link here.
Historically, though, backlogs have always been a problem. When I started in 2008, the biggest backlogs were in hearing offices, where a claimant could wait over three years for a hearing to be scheduled, and at the Appeals Council, where cases could languish untouched for even longer. The main factor in these backlogs has always been staffing, specifically the alignment between the specific office’s staff and their capacity to process claims per day/week/year, and the number of cases they have to deal with. When I started in 2008, the government was “experimenting” with telepresence to attack some of these backlogs by using video teleconferencing to allow judges who had no backlogs to handle cases for others who were buried. This helped hearing offices nationwide to get backlogs down to consistently below two years, though it came with other problems. But, progress was being made.
In 2010, the “TEA Party movement” swept the country and the “Freedom Caucus” as we now know it came into play, with radical right wing extremists in Congress obstructing routine government work like basic funding and staffing of administrative agencies like SSA. So beginning in 2011, the SSA budget became a continual hostage in every budget discussion. We were already a decade past the last “regular budget” passing Congress, but this began the new normal of governing from crisis to crisis and using things like shutdown threats to keep essential agencies like SSA perpetually fighting for mere survival. By refusing to pass a meaningful budget until an 11th hour “shutdown threat” negotiation, congressional Republicans have been able to avoid even discussing any real funding requests such as increasing staffing levels to match the growing US population, instead usually having to settle for an “emergency” measure that simply matches last year’s funding, effectively cutting the budget by the inflation rate every year. Most SSA workers have not had raises in many years, and most parts of the Administration have been in a perpetual hiring freeze. The result of this has been staff losses “by attrition.”
Staff loss by attrition: In any workplace, “turnover” is a part of life. In a healthy workplace without major issues, it’s typical for a few percent of workers to leave for routine reasons like a better job offer elsewhere, returning to school, having a child, getting married, or even just retiring or dying. There’s nothing odd about this; the best run business on earth still expects 5% or so of workers to leave each year for these various reasons. But when there is a hiring freeze, the result is your staffing drops. The first year of this is fine; when staff drops by 5%, workload increases by around 6% which only means two extra hours of work each week per worker, and that can be made up in various ways. But after two or three years of that, each remaining worker basically needs to work an entire extra day to stay caught up. This has been happening now for 14 years, so we have offices within SSA that are operating with half or fewer of the staffing they need.
There is a death spiral effect to this as well. As I said, after a couple years of this, we get to where each worker is basically looking at a nearly doubled workload, but there are no raises to make this worthwhile. The customers (general public) aren’t happy and don’t understand the problem, so the workplace becomes hostile with each worker being attacked in every interaction with the public. This eventually leads to even greater attrition.
As an attorney in this area, i’ve seen the backlogs shift here and there. SSA has made triage moves like the video hearings to shift work to less strained offices, and has moved workers around as well. But overall the situation has continued to decay. The pandemic actually helped in some ways, because adding remote work options made some offices, especially hearing offices, more efficient. In fact there is no longer a significant hearing backlog at all. But other parts of the agency have gotten dramatically worse. Initial claims were once routinely handled in 60 days or less; now it’s not uncommon to wait over a year for an initial decision. And “payment centers” used to be invisible even to my peers. I remember a decade ago explaining to a client that we have never once had to follow up on backpay at the payment center because they always fix their own mistakes within a few months; now, i’m seeing claimants remain homeless for a year or more after resolving claims because of backlogs at payment centers.
As attorneys, we have sought workarounds such as billing cases through alternate channels to bypass the worst delays. Recently, I billed a case through the District Court in hopes of bypassing a hopelessly delayed payment center, only to learn that the District Court’s payment center has become just as backlogged.
For me personally, the main result of this is absolutely extreme delays in payment. I am now looking at a likely average of two or more entire years after resolving a case to get paid my fee on my most lucrative categories of case, while the most “routine” cases are now taking six months or more on average to be paid after full resolution.
As of about a year ago, it was crystal clear that this problem was going to keep getting worse until a political solution happened. We have a handful of allies in Congress, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who both believe that the US Government should be able to keep its promises to the American People. But Republicans for the most part don’t seem to believe that anymore, and they have been mostly i. control for a while now.
I had a lot of hope tied up in this past election, and not just the Presidency but Congress as well. If Democrats took back the House as well as the White House, then I could expect that some of Warren’s bills to restore the SSA could pass, along with perhaps a comprehensive budget that restores subsistence funding to all essential agencies like SSA. But the opposite happened; Trump won, and the Freedom Caucus retained control of the House agenda. There is now zero hope for any fixes to this in the next four years.
SSA staffing is now at its lowest level since the 1990s with fewer than 58,000 workers. Elon Musk has vowed to make life worse for those workers in hopes of getting even more to quit, which will mean more delays for disability claimants and retirees. There has been a lot of political discussion of “the trust fund running out” as the threat to Social Security, but that actually isn’t true; the SSA trust fund is doing just fine. The real problem is that there is nobody left to actually run the thing. It won’t matter whether or not the money is there if there is no staff to issue the payments, and that is where we are headed.