House GOP defeats effort to restore SSA funding to appropriations bill

The House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines Wednesday to advance appropriations legislation that would cut the Social Security Administration’s administrative budget by $450 million next fiscal year.

Although the Social Security Administration is funded directly through Americans’ payroll taxes, Congress has stipulated how much of that money can be used on the agency’s overhead each year since President George W. Bush added the agency to the discretionary budgetary process.

The fiscal 2025 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies spending bill, unveiled last month and advanced to the House floor by a 31-25 vote Wednesday, would slash SSA’s administrative budget by nearly half a billion dollars, purportedly due to “reduced in-person staffing” at the agency’s Maryland headquarters. The money set aside for SSA in the bill amounts to an even steeper cut of $1.7 billion compared with President Biden’s budget request.

During Wednesday’s committee markup, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., who will retire at the end of this year, filed an amendment restoring the $450 million in cuts, which would bring SSA’s funding flat with its current annual appropriation of $14.2 billion. He warned that, if enacted, the GOP’s proposed cuts would further exacerbate the agency’s customer service crisis.

“With these cuts, 3 million Americans would see their Social Security field offices close or reduce their hours of operations,” Ruppersberger said. “These cuts would mean that it takes even longer to get new or replacement Social Security cards. Employers would have to wait longer to verify new employees’ information. And despite serving more Americans than before, it will have the lowest staffing level in 50 years. For staff who are already overwhelmed by work-related stress, this is totally unacceptable.”

Rep. Robert Aderlholt, R-Ala., who chairs the subcommittee responsible for the bill, defended the cuts, claiming that they would only affect headquarters staff and not any field offices.

“Despite what you may have heard, no field offices will be closed because of this bill,” Aderholt said. “The 4% cut to SSA would come from the $3 billion that Social Security has budgeted for its Baltimore and Washington, D.C., offices, where 61% of the workforce is fully remote. SSA’s mission is customer-facing and it serves America’s most vulnerable population and this egregious use of telework is insulting to them.”

But Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Aderholt’s assurances ring hollow.

“Now, the chairman says that no field offices will close,” he said. “Why does he say that? Because he directs, in the bill, that ‘no field offices will be closed.’ Poof, magic! He didn’t ask SSA whether that would be, he just directed it in the bill . . . The population keeps going up, and the senior population certainly keeps going up, and your assertion that somehow the expenditures to service those rising numbers is static is incorrect. Your math doesn’t work.”

Ruppersberger’s amendment failed by a 31-23 vote.