New Social Security Chief Asks Congress for Overhaul Funding
What You Need to Know
The SSA technology budget is one-third the size of the Veterans Affairs technology budget.
About 85% of the disability insurance benefits determination workers in some states are trainees.
A closely watched Social Security report should appear in about 30 days.
Martin O’Malley, the new Social Security Administration commissioner, told members of Congress Wednesday that the agency needs more administrative services funding to keep up with program growth and modern service expectations.
O’Malley, who took over as head of the agency in December, said service levels are poor partly because agency staffers are making do with IBM computers from the 1980s, and because employee attrition is so bad that, in some states, about 85% of the workers who handle Social Security disability insurance benefits determinations are trainees.
O’Malley noted that a combination of understaffing and old technology hurt agency efforts to retain experienced employees at its call centers. “You can only image the sort of stress that people encounter on an underperforming system when people have been on hold for 45 minutes or an hour,” he said. “Nobody’s coming in pleasant.”
O’Malley spoke at a hearing the Senate Finance Committee held on the Social Security and President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for 2025.
What it means: The Social Security Administration — an agency that helps people sign up for Medicare as well as for Social Security retirement and disability insurance benefits — is suffering severe customer service problems at a time when many of your clients are becoming eligible for benefits from the programs the agency runs.
The Social Security Administration: SSA is an agency that provides retirement, survivor and disability insurance benefits for about 71 million people.
It pays the benefits using income from a trust funded by payroll taxes from workers and their employers.
The agency will collect about $1.2 trillion in payroll taxes this year and spend about $1.4 trillion on benefits, according to White House budget analysts.
Martin O’Malley: O’Malley is a lawyer who served as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland.
At the Social Security Administration, he succeeded Kilolo Kijakazi, an Urban Institute policy researcher who was an acting SSA head from 2021 through 2023.
The hearing: Both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee blasted the Social Security Administration’s slow call center response times and long field office lines.
Senators also expressed frustration about a “60 Minutes” segment showing that some benefits recipients suffered terrible problems when the agency overpaid the recipients, realized it had overpaid them and suddenly clawed the overpayments back by withholding 100% of the recipients’ benefits until the overpayments were recouped.
The overpayment problem: O’Malley used SSA’s response to the overpayment problem as an example of its ability to take action.
The agency will tackle the problem by putting the burden on the agency to show that the recipient was at fault for any overpayments, rather than requiring the recipients to show that the agency was at fault; limiting benefits interception levels to 10% of the full benefits amount; and increasing the maximum benefits repayment period to 60 months, from 36 months today.
