The Tough, Necessary Work to Reduce Disability Wait Times

We strive to provide the high level of service our customers expect and deserve, but it still takes too long for the Social Security Administration and state-level Disability Determination Services offices to make initial decisions for those applying for disability benefits.

As part of determining whether an applicant is eligible, SSA provides DDS offices with the resources and technologies needed to make medical determinations. Unfortunately, despite a record high number of customers, SSA is facing significant underfunding, leaving too many DDS offices understaffed and behind schedule.

Consider this: As recently as 2018, SSA’s operating budget represented 1.2% of the annual benefits it pays, an overhead rate much lower than insurance companies. At that time, DDS offices could make an initial determination, on average, in less than four months. Today, though, SSA’s budget has shrunk to 0.94% of annual benefits, leading to challenges such as hiring and keeping state-level staff at DDS offices. As a result, turnaround times on initial determinations have roughly doubled. We want to work with Congress to secure the increases in the President’s 2025 budget, which is a big step in the right direction to help SSA to improve service levels and reduce wait times.

In total, over the past four years, Congress has funded SSA’s operating costs at a level almost $3 billion below budget requests. This underfunding – which began in 2018 – led to an increase in pending disability claims by 94%, a processing backlog jump of 60%, and a tripling in the time it takes to answer calls on our 800-number.

That’s why, since joining SSA nine months ago, I have made reducing disability processing times one of the agency’s top three customer service priorities. We’ve brought together agency’s top executive team every two weeks to deeply explore all available policies and tools that could stretch existing resources and address disability processing times within legal and regulatory constraints. The agency has also for the first time provided transparency on backlogs on a state-by-state basis.

So far, the agency this year has:

• Deployed teams from SSA to help DDS offices in states in greatest need of help
• Established partnerships with DDS offices with low attrition rates and high performance to help other states
• Expanded the national pool of medical consultants to help DDS offices with case reviews
• Reduced the “lookback” period (from 15 years to 5 years) that applicants must provide and decision-makers must consider regarding past relevant work experience of an applicant
• Enacted a change that allows the DDS office and beneficiaries to use a medical decision from a previous SSA disability program (SSDI or SSI) to also be acceptable for DDS decision-making
• Increased the use of a new platform – called IMAGEN – that quickly analyzes claimant’s medical records to help DDS offices make adjudications. More than half of cases now use this platform, double the rate from a year ago.

The agency also continues to prioritize applicants with the most severe disabilities and/or terminal conditions in order to provide them benefits as quickly as possible.

Even under difficult funding circumstances, the agency is seeing some positive signs of these efforts:

• The agency has already reached its Oct. 1, 2024, goal of processing more than 92% of our oldest cases.
• Initial claims in pending status have dropped by over 70,000 since mid-June.
• The average age of an initial disability claim in pending status is down nearly 10 days since July.
• For 11 consecutive weeks, the DDS offices have now closed out more initial cases each week than they have received.

SSA will continue to work to drive down disability processing times while calling on Congress to fund the President’s FY25 Budget request which would greatly help in meeting the needs of people with disabilities throughout the country.