O’Malley makes last ditch effort to secure Biden’s budget proposal for Social Security

Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley this week urged lawmakers to adopt a budget anomaly requested by the Biden administration to increase funding for the Social Security Administration in any stopgap deal to avert a government shutdown on Oct 1, warning that flat funding could endanger recent improvements to customer service.

The request from the Office of Management and Budget, part of a laundry list of proposed provisions to include as part of a continuing resolution to ensure continuity of operations in the absence of full-year appropriations legislation, would effectively fund Social Security Administration operations at an annual rate of $15.4 billion—as Biden requested in his fiscal 2025 budget—for the duration of the CR.

Thus far, neither chamber in Congress has shown a willingness to meet the administration’s request. The Republican-controlled House has advanced legislation that cuts Social Security administrative funding by nearly $500 million from current levels, while a bipartisan Senate spending bill proposes a $500 million increase, which if enacted would put the agency’s funding level at $14.7 billion.

In a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., O’Malley warned of dire consequences if SSA is flat-funded past September, as proposed in the House GOP’s six-month continuing resolution. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday cancelled a planned vote on the measure, after dissent within his caucus threatened to derail its passage.

“If enacted, a six-month CR without any additional funding for the Social Security Administration would be devastating,” O’Malley wrote. “We would be forced to implement a hiring freeze with minimal exceptions. We would lose over 2,000 staff in the first half of the year alone and reach a new 50-year staffing low by the end of December. We would need to significantly reduce overtime to historically low levels, decreasing processing capacity for our most critical workloads.”

And in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, O’Malley laid out how both the House and Senate funding proposals for SSA would fall short of the agency’s needs. Under the House plan, employees would be furloughed by 20 days, while the agency would see its headcount fall by 3,400 staff, not including the 1,500 decrease in staff at state Disability Determination Services offices. And funding for the agency’s IT infrastructure would be “barely” enough to “keep the lights on.”

Conversely, the Senate proposal would see the SSA workforce shrink by 1,000 workers and DDS staffing would decrease by 500 employees. But it preserves $50 million in IT modernization investments and would allow the agency to maintain its current overtime posture, which management deploys strategically during peak service periods.

“We’ve seen 10 years of steady declines in customer service to the American people, and the fundamental reason for this precipitous decline isn’t the pandemic, and it’s not telework,” O’Malley said. “It’s this: SSA today is struggling to serve more customers than ever, with staffing that Congress has reduced to a 50-year low . . . I do not believe for a moment that this was the intention of Congress, but the cold result is that customer service, for which Americans have already paid for by working their whole lives, has been reduced to crisis levels.”

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fl., asked why O’Malley has not reduced telework for field office employees to meet customer demand for in-person service. Although the commissioner in February mandated that regional and national headquarters staff work in-person at least three out of five days per week, field office workers already were on that schedule.

“I regularly hear from Iowans who struggle to get in contact with SSA, but despite increased staffing needs, the Social Security Administration continues to allow flexible telework for employees such as field office workers,” Grassley said. “A field office manager told me in June that only five of their employees came into the office five days per week. What steps are you taking as commissioner to ensure more employees do show up to the office?”

O’Malley noted that his agency is in “the middle of the pack” when it comes to federal sector telework, and stressed that field office employees have more responsibilities than simply taking appointments from the public, many of which are better suited to telework.

“We are not only an entity that receives customers when they walk in or answers their calls when they call on the 800 number,” he said. “The same people in those field offices also process the insurance claims, and that means they need time away from the windows and the conversations to actually make real and effectuate the things for which people are applying, whether that be a waiver on [benefits] overpayments, or to apply for retirement or Medicare. Time is required to process and put those things through.”

O’Malley said that the House spending plan in particular would cause the agency to regress on many of its customer service crises, particularly the agency’s recent overpayment—and recoupment of those overpayments—scandal and reducing wait times for initial disability determinations.

“We’re actually making some good progress: we’ve cut in half the wait times on the 800 number—that would be undermined,” he said. “We’ve reduced the backlog at the [administrative law judge] level [of disability determination appeals] at a lower rate than we’ve seen in modern memory. We talked about overpayments. But at the DDS level, and nothing underscores it more than this, our chief actuary estimates that more people die today awaiting their initial disability determination than ever before in the history of the program . . . The House mark would be devastating.”