Several areas in which SSA has made management progress in recent years and has achieved savings are in danger of losing momentum due to budgetary cutbacks, a Congressional Research Service study has found.
CRS noted that SSA has been working to reduce its backlog of hearings for disability and supplemental security income benefits, which had peaked at a 532-day average processing time in 2008. The agency has increased the number of administrative law judges and support staff, eliminating almost all of the cases that have been pending for more than 825 days, and cutting the average processing time to 390 days; the agency also projected that it was on track to cut the backlog to below 500,000 by 2013.
However, extended continuing resolutions that largely fund the agency at previous year levels, appropriations that are below the President’s budget request, and rescissions like those passed by the House of Representatives in H.R. 1 may make this goal difficult to attain," CRS said.
Similarly, SSA has been putting more resources toward continuing disability reviews, or CDRs, which reexamine whether beneficiaries still meet the legal definition of disability, and SSI redeterminations, which determine if recipients still are below the program’s income and asset limits. SSA estimates that every $1 spent on the former saves $10 in lifetime program costs and that every $1 spent on the latter saves $7 over ten years.
"However, because appropriations are made annually and their costs are applied to each fiscal year’s annual budget, the long-term savings from these program integrity activities does not fully offset their costs in the fiscal year of the appropriation. As a result, the SSA has not traditionally been able to secure enough funding each year to gain the maximum potential program savings from CDRs and SSI redeterminations," said the report.
