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Inside Social Security Disability Hearings: ‘It’s Difficult Listening to the Stories’

Backlogs and wait times for decisions have come down, but advocates say a slew of retirements by disability judges could strain the system

7-minute read

Deirdre Shesgreen,

AARP

Published November 13, 2026

A judge's gavel strikes a sounding block featuring the blue accessibility symbol to represent disability hearings.

Daniel Hertzberg

Key takeaways

Social Security has seen an exodus of its disability judges since January 2025, and advocates warn the trend could worsen hearing backlogs.
Retired judges say the workload could be overwhelming, as they sorted through complex medical files and weighed Social Security’s rigorous criteria.
By the time claimants get a hearing, many are often desperate after coping with a medical crisis and the loss of work income.

After 20 years as a Social Security disability judge, Christine McCafferty felt the cumulative weight of the job: the gut-wrenching decisions, the desperate claimants, the tremendous caseload.

It all added up to a “vicarious trauma,” she says. “It’s difficult listening to the stories — the sad stories — day in and day out.”

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Especially when she had to find that an applicant with little education, few skills and serious health problems didn’t meet Social Security’s legal definition of disability and so had to deny their claim.

“I’ve come to the conclusion … that 99 percent of the people that came before me were unemployable,” says McCafferty, who handled cases in the Philadelphia area. “But that didn’t mean that they were disabled under our systems and policies.”

McCafferty was one of about 150 Social Security administrative law judges (ALJs) who left their jobs between January 2025 and January 2026. A recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit think tank, found that over that period, the Social Security Administration (SSA) lost 13 percent of its ALJs who handled disability cases, the largest one-year drop on record.

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Kathleen Romig, a senior fellow with the center who coauthored the analysis, says the exodus could exacerbate existing backlogs in the disability hearing system: “This really raised a red flag.”

Amid the wave of retirements, Romig notes, the number of disability claimants waiting for a hearing decision rose by about 87,000 from January 2025 to September 2026, to nearly 358,000, reversing a decade of progress in reducing the backlog. “These problems can spiral,” she says.

The SSA has recently filled some of the vacancies; as of September 2026, there were 969 ALJs working in about 160 hearing offices across the country. An SSA spokesperson said the agency has “implemented new technology and improved processes” to ramp up ALJ productivity and issue more decisions in less time, and that those efforts have reduced wait times for hearing decisions to “historically low levels.” As of September, the wait time was 287 days, compared to 450 days in 2023.

SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano “has consistently pledged to have the right level of staffing to ensure Social Security operates at peak efficiency, meets customers where they want to be served and delivers best-in-class customer service,” the spokesperson said.

Years to get to a judge

It often takes upward of two years for a claimant to get to the stage of a Social Security disability hearing. It comes only after the SSA has denied the person’s initial claim as well as a request for reconsideration.

Hearings represent the first chance for an applicant to make their case directly to an independent arbiter, as opposed to submitting paperwork that’s reviewed by SSA officials or internal medical experts. By the time applicants reach that step, they have often suffered a prolonged period of unemployment, while also coping with a debilitating and costly medical crisis.

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“They’re desperate,” says Howard Wishnoff, a Philadelphia-area ALJ who retired in July 2026. “They’ve waited and waited and waited, and here’s their chance.”

Because the stakes are so high, he says, applicants’ anxiety is often off the charts. “There’s some people who can barely talk — they’re just so worked up.”

Wishnoff says many of his cases involved claimants who were denied at earlier stages for logistical reasons. They filed a claim, and then their phone died and the SSA couldn’t reach them. Or they didn’t have access to the kind of medical care that generates the records needed to submit a fleshed-out, provable claim, such as written diagnoses and doctor’s notes. “A lot of them only get treatment in emergency rooms,” he says.

“I found a lot of cases that slipped through the cracks,” agrees Malcolm Ross, an ALJ who worked in the Seattle area and retired in January 2026.

“These people could not work a full-time job. They truly were disabled, and it just couldn’t be seen on a paper review,” Ross says. “You had to listen to them, you had to hear what they were saying, you had to look at the medical evidence, and then you could really get a feel for who this person was and how their conditions were affecting them.”

In 2025, about 7.1 million U.S. workers received Social Security Disability Insurance benefits; about 13 percent were in their 40s, 32 percent in their 50s and 48 percent in their 60s. (SSDI benefits automatically convert to retirement benefits when a recipient reaches full retirement age, which is 67 for people born in 1960 or later.)

Complex cases, quick reviews

The SSA doesn’t set official quotas for how many cases ALJs need to process or how fast, but the three retired ALJs interviewed for this story said judges would get a nudge or a directive if they took too long to issue a ruling.

“There’s always been pressure,” says Wishnoff — not about how to decide a case but how quickly to decide it. For example, if he postponed a case, the SSA would want to know why.

He would try not to let the agency’s timelines influence him. “If a person comes to me and they need help and they want to find a lawyer, I’m going to postpone the case every single time,” he says.

Ross says some judges felt the volume of cases and the pressure to keep things moving affected their decisions because they didn’t have adequate time to read the file or sift through the evidence. He said he issued upward of 400 decisions per year, and judges were expected to hold about 50 hearings per month. During the 2026 federal fiscal year, many judges handled 500-plus cases, according to SSA data.

Ross says he generally allotted three hours for each case: one hour to review the legal file, which often included thousands of pages of medical records; another hour for the hearing, with testimony from the applicant and outside experts; and a final hour to sketch out a decision, which would be finalized by a law clerk.

He saved his toughest cases for Sunday mornings, when he was off the official clock and could thoroughly review the evidence, think through the testimony and come to a decision. “These cases can be very complex,” he notes.

Judges generally examine five criteria to determine whether someone’s condition meets the SSA’s definition of disability. Even if they find a person has a sufficiently severe physical or mental impairment to prevent them from doing the work they were doing, they must then determine if the person has the capacity to do some other kind of work.

‘Nobody to do the work’

Like the other former judges interviewed for this story, Ross says he was ready to retire but also had concerns about continuing as the SSA moved to shrink its staff. The agency reduced its workforce by about 12 percent in 2025, from 57,000 to 50,700.

McCafferty says the attrition that began in 2025 is concerning and will make the workload even worse. “There’s so many cases, the volume is ridiculous,” she says.

Wishnoff says it’s not just about the number of judges who have retired but also the dwindling of support staff. When he started in the Philadelphia hearing office 11 years ago, there were 50 employees; now there are 12. “There’s nobody to do the work,” he says.

Ross says that even before the wave of retirements, he felt he needed more time to review each case. Still, he adds, the system “absolutely works.”

“The process is flawed but still very valuable, very meaningful,” he says. “It helps people who couldn’t get help otherwise.”

Deirdre Shesgreen is an AARP writer and editor covering Social Security. She previously worked as a state news editor for the AARP Bulletin and as a reporter and editor at USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other publications.

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