Why Social Security Disability Claims Are Taking So Long

Unlike Social Security benefit payments, which are codified in law, spending on SSA operations is subject to the annual federal budget process. In March, after a months-long budget fight, Congress approved  $14.2 billion for the agency for the 2024 federal fiscal year, which runs through Sept. 30. That’s $100 million more than the agency was authorized to spend on operations in fiscal year 2023 but nearly $1.3 billion less than it requested.

Tight budgets and staff attrition have had “disastrous effects on customer service,” the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union that represents more than 42,000 federal SSA workers, says in a January statement urging Congress to enact a long-term funding increase.

AARP has long campaigned for customer-service improvements at the SSA, meeting with senior agency leaders and calling on Congress to adequately fund Social Security operations and ensure those dollars are used to upgrade service. Since late 2022, AARP members have sent nearly 1.2 million messages to members of Congress urging them to boost spending on SSA customer service. 

“Ridiculously long wait times for decisions can be devastating for families across the country,” says Tom Nicholls, an AARP government affairs director focusing on Social Security. “It’s wrong, it’s frustrating, and it has been going on for far too long. Americans have paid into Social Security their whole working lives. They have done their job, now it is time for Congress to do theirs and fix this now.”

SSA officials say appropriations over the past decade have only been sufficient to cover rising fixed costs such as rent for office space, postage and cost-of-living adjustments to federal workers’ pay, leaving little or nothing to alleviate the growing customer-service problems. But they also point to a deeper, structural problem in how disability claims are handled.

State disability offices struggling

When someone applies for SSDI or SSI, the decision on whether they qualify on medical grounds is made by state-level agencies called Disability Determination Services (DDS). Federally funded but state-run, DDSs make the initial call on a disability claim and handle reconsideration if it is sought. And they, too, are hemorrhaging staff, with the rate of employee departures reaching 25 percent in 2022, according to the SSA.

“We have been scrambling to try to backfill against what is one of the worst attrition rates anywhere in any department funded by the federal government,” O’Malley says. “Unless Congress helps us by restoring our funding back to the traditional levels, it's going to be very hard to reduce that backlog of disability claims.”

It isn’t just the quantity of personnel lost. High attrition is costing the state agencies expertise, “with many losses being experienced in the disability examiners,” says Mark Hinkle, an SSA spokesperson.

Examiners weigh the medical evidence to determine if an applicant meets Social Security’s definition of disability. “Although DDSs continue to hire, the full development and training for a new disability examiner can take two to three years,” Hinkle says.

Changes in the process for assessing claims have also contributed to the slowdown, he says. Legislation passed by Congress in 2015 required that a medical or psychological consultant review every disability claim (previously, some cases could be handled solely by DDS examiners). The advent of electronic medical records expedited information-gathering but also significantly increased the amount of evidence to be considered for each claim.

And ongoing modernization of the national case-processing system has meant “a learning curve at the DDSs,” Hinkle says.

“DDS is a major bottleneck in the process — both at the initial claims level and reconsideration,” says Rich Couture, chief negotiator for the AFGE.

While DDSs are funded with federal dollars and make decisions on federal benefits, their workers are state employees. Staffing and wages are determined by the states, and DDSs can be affected by state-level hiring freezes and furloughs. And when the DDSs have problems, the effect ripples throughout the Social Security disability system.

“The challenge there is that the hiring has to happen by the states. There are 50 state offices,” O’Malley says.

“Each one has its different challenges. In some places they might not have enough open slots in the state budget, so that's an administrative change that can be delaying [hiring]. It might be that the state does not offer competitive enough salaries to get people to do those complex jobs.”

Backlog balloons

With the growing delays in disability decisions, the SSA’s caseload of pending claims has swollen. In 2019, just before the start of the pandemic, about 600,000 applicants were awaiting initial determinations on their benefit requests; in 2023, for the first time, the backlog crossed the 1 million mark.

One of those caught in the logjam was Mike, 49, a security systems analyst and Army veteran from the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Mike (who, like Jose, agreed to speak if his last name was withheld) was diagnosed in 2021 with two forms of cancer. No longer able to work, he filed a claim for SSDI in March 2022, getting legal help right from the start.

“I did a little bit of research and found it was much easier to pay a lawyer to get it done right,” he says.

Mike got what qualifies these days as a relatively quick decision, in four months, but it was a denial. He requested reconsideration in August 2022, but the SSA told his attorneys that the case went unassigned for seven months, until March 2023. He was awarded benefits in August, 17 months after his initial application.

Hinkle says the SSA is taking steps to ease the gridlock. The agency has dispatched about 300 of its federal employees to DDSs across the country to help process claims. It’s boosting funding for salaries at the state offices, offering hires more training and mentoring, and reducing the time it takes to complete background checks to get staff on board faster.

Still, there are no quick fixes. For SSDI and SSI applicants, shorter wait times for determinations depend on many factors, including “sufficient and sustained funding by Congress,” Hinkle says.

The SSA portion of President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2025 budget proposal, submitted in March, seeks an 8.5 percent funding boost for the agency, to $15.4 billion. The DDSs would receive $2.8 billion under that plan, an increase of more than $178 million from the current budget.

“We are making improvements through technology modernization, policy and notice simplification, and other efforts, but there is no way around the fact that we are serving more and more customers with the lowest staffing levels in 25 years," O'Malley says. "The president's budget would be a big step in the right direction of restoring customer service.”

AFGE contends it will take more than that to right the ship. The union is calling on Congress to approve an additional $20 billion in supplemental funding for the SSA, spread out over 10 years, including $2.5 billion to bring staff back to 2010 levels and $3.2 billion to improve employee benefits to aid recruitment and retention.

For now, though, “the system is what it is,” Mike says. “If you don’t have the patience, it’s going to be a painful wait.”