Social Security Says Customer-Service Upgrade Unlikely This Year

As case backlogs soared and staff size shrunk during the pandemic, the average time to get an initial decision on a disability claim stretched from about four months in early 2020 to seven months at the end of 2022, and the SSA estimates it will remain around that level for this year. The estimated average wait for a hearing on a disability appeal is expected to reach more than 15 months, up from 11 months last year.

“It will take a multiyear effort and sustained funding to restore our average initial disability claims wait times to pre-pandemic levels," SSA officials say.

“With 10,000 Americans dying every year while waiting for Social Security to administer their disability claims, this should be a matter of the utmost urgency,” LeaMond says.

‘Muddling through’

Following a short-term influx of funding Congress provided last fall, Social Security was able to lift a hiring freeze imposed in 2019. The SSA says the new budget will further “support our efforts to increase staffing” within its own ranks and at the state-level Disability Determination Services that make initial decisions on disability benefit claims.

But the agency is digging out of a deep hole after losing more than 4,000 jobs — 7 percent of its workforce — during the freeze. By October 2022, staffing was at its lowest level in more than a quarter-century, but Tiggemann says the SSA has hired about 2,600 employees since then.

“They really didn’t receive enough [money] to make substantial improvements in service levels,” says Jack Smalligan, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank and a member of the Biden-Harris transition team that reviewed Social Security operations for the incoming administration in 2020.

Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C., and a former SSA employee, says she expects the agency to “keep on muddling through like last year.”

Lifting the hiring freeze will at least allow Social Security to keep services from deteriorating further, she says. “If they couldn’t replace staff, things would have gone from bad to worse.”

In a tight labor market, Romig adds, Social Security has difficulty competing in terms of salary or work conditions. Union officials echo those concerns.

“Honestly, the environment in Social Security needs to change,” says Sherry Jackson, a vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 220, which represents more than 26,500 SSA employees in field offices, teleservice centers and workload support units, which process online benefit claims.

The union has called on the SSA to take measures such as expanding remote work and telework options to be more competitive in retaining and recruiting staff.

“The environment needs more flexibility, better pay and more staff. IT should be better, but at the end of the day, we need staff to run” the technology, says Jackson, a claims specialist at the SSA field office in Waterbury, Connecticut, and an 18-year veteran at the agency.

Hearing backlog down, phone upgrade on hold

Social Security has had some success reducing its huge backlog of disability hearings, named in the operating plan as a key priority. The number of pending hearings declined from more than 1.1 million in September 2017 to 355,000 in December 2022, a 22-year low. Some $55 million in the new budget is dedicated to addressing the remaining backlog.

Waits for hearings, which had reached nearly 21 months in 2017, dropped to less than a year in 2022 before ticking back up in recent months. The SSA has set a goal of eliminating the backlog and reducing the average wait to nine months by fall 2024.

Meanwhile, improvements in phone service have been put on hold by “unanticipated delays in the systems upgrades necessary to reduce customer wait times,” according to the operating plan. “Once our new hires are fully trained and productive, and with successful implementation of our new telecommunication platform, we anticipate noticeable improvement in our performance beginning in FY 2024.”

The SSA has made strides in other areas of customer service, including a redesigned website that offers users a clearer path to accomplish common tasks like applying for benefits, updating records or obtaining documents. The agency is promising additional online improvements aimed at reducing people’s need to seek help by phone or at a crowded field office.

Bill Zielinski, a longtime federal technology official who was the SSA’s chief information officer from 2013 to 2015, says the agency faces a tough balancing act in maintaining an expensive network of more than 1,200 local offices in a “world that’s more and more digital.”

“It’s really, really politically difficult to actually close a Social Security office” because members of Congress object to shutting down offices in their districts, says Zielinski, who now serves as CIO for the Dallas city government. “That forces them to continue to maintain that very large network of field offices, while at the same time they could be shifting to more virtual delivery of services.”

But Jean-Pierre Aubry, an associate director at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, says the nature of the SSA’s work requires robust customer service at all levels.

“No matter how efficient your online system is, people want to look someone in the face or hear a voice on the other line,” he says. “A significant portion of people prefer personal interaction because their circumstances are complicated, and no amount of online tools will solve that. They want to explain the complicated situation to another human.”

LeaMond’s letter notes that the operating plan “is silent” on service levels at the local offices, which struggled to return to normal operations after fully reopening In April 2022.

“The plan provided no information regarding in-person services at SSA field offices, particularly regarding any challenges the field offices are currently facing beyond staffing shortages, and how SSA is planning to address those challenges,” she writes.