30,000 People Died Waiting on Disability Decisions in 2023, SSA Estimates

Martin O'Malley. Credit: Social Security Administration

While Social Security "is serving more customers than ever with staffing levels Congress has reduced to nearly 50-year lows," due to processing backlogs, nearly 30,000 people died in 2023 while waiting for their disability decisions, Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley told lawmakers, citing an estimate from the agency.

In recent testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, O'Malley said that while the 30,000 "is a small percentage of the average number of people waiting for a decision, it remains imperative that we issue decisions faster at every level."

Disability applicants now wait on average nearly eight months (231 days this fiscal year through August) for an initial decision and almost eight additional months (230 days) for those who request a reconsideration, O'Malley told lawmakers. "In some States, these numbers are a year or more."

The fact that Social Security "is serving more customers than ever before with one of the lowest staffing levels in 50 years," O'Malley said, "is a self-inflicted wound."

The gap "between growing numbers of beneficiaries and dwindling numbers of customer service staff will only get worse unless you act," O'Malley told the lawmakers. "In fact, SSA's Chief Actuary projects the number of new applicants and total beneficiaries we serve will only continue to rise in the coming years."

At Social Security, "if we have more and more applicants and beneficiaries and fewer and fewer staff to serve them, the result is that people will wait longer for their benefits and for their calls to be answered," O'Malley told lawmakers.

Phone Wait Times

For instance, as the agency's staffing levels dropped from FY 2017 to FY 2023, "wait times on our national 800 number nearly tripled and wait times for initial disability decisions have now doubled — particularly in some hard-hit states like Maryland, Florida, Texas, and Illinois, where the wait times for disabled Americans are close to a year," O'Malley relayed.

While "modernization and other productivity gains have helped Social Security keep its nose above water, we cannot sugar-coat the severe damage that decades of staff reductions have done to Social Security's customers," he said.

Since fiscal 2018, Social Security's budget "has essentially been flatlined even as fixed costs increased like they do for everything else in the real world," O'Malley said, adding that every year the Social Security Administration faces $600 million in fixed cost increases.

President Joe Biden's 2025 budget request of $15.4 billion for SSA would allow the agency to restore staffing to fiscal 2023 levels, O'Malley testified, as well as:

Reduce wait times on the 800 number by over 20 minutes, to 12 minutes
Reduce wait times on initial disability claims to an average of 215 days
Reduce the claims backlog by 15%
Improve the timeliness of retirement and Medicare applications for over 200,000 seniors
Continue to address overpayment and underpayment injustices
Increase SSA's information technology budget to help the agency modernize its service.

Martin O'Malley. Credit: Social Security Administration