SSA has a plan, but wants more funding to get it done

The Social Security Administration has a plan to improve its operations.  

Released yesterday, the agency’s 2024 agenda has over 170 to-do items meant to cut down wait times for disability benefits, improve service on its phone line and more. 

SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley says the agency can do it — with the right funding. 

“These efforts will require important investments, including enactment of the President’s FY25 budget request for the Social Security Administration,” he wrote in a letter at the top of the agency’s 2024 “action plan.” 

Lawmakers are still working on funding packages for the upcoming fiscal year. So far, senators have advanced a proposal to increase the agency’s administrative budget, while Republicans in the House have pushed cuts. 

O’Malley has argued that SSA needs investment, as the operating budget of the agency has gone down over the last decade, resulting in what the commissioner has described as a “customer service crisis.”

The plan’s top priorities for the remainder of the year stem from over 5,000 recommendations from employees, in addition to other stakeholders, the commissioner writes. O’Malley himself toured SSA facilities nationwide after being confirmed late last year. 

The document features items on technology, customer experience and more, improvements aimed both at helping SSA employees as well as at Americans seeking assistance from the agency. 

It’s sorted by 27 strategic initiatives across the commissioner’s top priorities, which include investing in the SSA workforce and reducing over-and under-payments for benefits.

Among the to-do items are efforts to reduce requirements for signatures and offer e-signatures when they are needed, as opposed to wet signatures.

In March, the agency launched an e-signature and document upload tool across local offices. 

So far, 50 forms and 79 other “evidence types” are available for an electronic signature and upload. SSA has also approved the removal of wet signatures on 13 forms that account for 1 million submissions annually, it says in the new plan.

The agency now wants to offer that option to self-service — currently, doing an e-signature requires the help of an SSA technician — and expand the service to additional forms. 

Broadening what Americans can use their online accounts at SSA for also features as a goal throughout the plan.

The agency wants to provide online self-service appointment management, secure messaging with SSA staff and more. Another objective is to improve the agency’s online claim status tracker for benefits by adding more details. 

Making more applications available online is also in the plan. Moving the application for the Supplemental Security Income online has long been an SSA goal. 

The agency also wants to make improvements to internal systems so that when someone’s address is updated in one application, that update is shown in all other relevant systems automatically.

Finally, the 2024 action plan also features efforts to improve the notices SSA sends people by requiring customer experience and plain language reviews as part of the agency’s existing clearance process for new notices. Expanding language access is also an initiative under the plan.

Beyond tech and customer experience efforts, the agency has already pursued rulemaking to simplify programs such as disability insurance, and implementing these rules also features in the plan.

As far as how all this will get done, the agency’s Office of Transformation will be coordinating and tracking progress across SSA, according to O’Malley, who also wrote that work has already started on all of the initiatives.

Those looking to track progress may want to look to the agency’s page for SecurityStat, O’Malley’s performance measurement tool, that houses data about top priorities.