Washington, DC - Republicans are defending their proposed cuts to the Social Security Administration (SSA) budget by seeking to downplay the impact of reducing the SSA’s spending level to $10.7 billion this year.
The facts are clear: this represents a 9.3 percent decrease from Fiscal Year 2010 spending levels of $11.8 billion. It would leave the already cash-strapped agency with fewer resources with which to process claims for seniors and people with disabilities. In fact, SSA says that the GOP proposal is equivalent to up to four weeks of furloughs at the agency.
The Republican budget plan calls for $10.7 billion in overall spending for SSA in 2011, $1.7 billion less than the Social Security Administration needs to fulfill its obligations. They claim their budget represents a 1 percent cut from last year to SSA - but to get there they ignore more than $600 million in additional cuts to the reserve account and funding budgeted for a National Computer Center. The math is simple:
* $10,675,500,000 in general operating expense funding for the Social Security Administration
* $485,000,000 for continuing disability reviews and redeterminations
* $161,000,000 in collected fees
* $500,000,000 cut to Social Security Administration’s reserve account
* $118,000,000 cut to what has been budgeted for the National Computer Center
* $10.7 billion TOTAL
SSA is already operating under a partial hiring freeze because of the current continuing resolution, which is likely to result in nearly 3,500 lost jobs for 2011. According to SSA, the additional cuts made by the Republican continuing resolution (the equivalent of four weeks of furloughs) would leave SSA so short staffed that it could result in the following:
* 400,000 people would not have their retirement, survivors, and Medicare applications processed this year, resulting in a large backlog of unprocessed retirement and survivor claims for the first time in SSA history.
* 290,000 people would not have their initial disability benefit applications processed, which means disabled workers, who already wait months for their applications to be processed, will wait an average of 30 days longer.
* 70,000 fewer people will get a disability appeals hearing this year, which means workers waiting to present an appeal to a judge, who already wait over a year, will wait longer.
* 32,000 fewer continuing disability reviews, which means wasting millions of dollars on improper payments now.
