Congressman Sander Levin

Dear Mr. Obey and Mr. Walsh:

We greatly appreciate your support last year for providing the Social Security Administration (SSA) with a much-needed $451 million increase over the amount appropriated for FY 2007.  The additional funds were a step in the right direction, yet SSA remains burdened by an enormous backlog of disability claims and significant understaffing.  As you develop the FY 2009 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations (LHHS) bill, we ask that you include sufficient funding to allow SSA to further improve the service they provide to the public. 

We support an additional $240 million for SSA – in addition to the $10.327 billion requested by the President – as provided in the House-passed FY 2009 Budget Resolution.  While this funding level would not be sufficient to completely prevent further staffing losses in SSA’s field operations, it would reduce those losses and allow the agency to make some progress toward shrinking the backlog.  The additional funding would also enable the agency to invest in information technology that would make the processing system more efficient and cost-effective, offering further advantages. 

As you are aware, SSA’s workload has grown significantly in recent years due to an aging population and new obligations related to Medicare and homeland security.  While productivity within the agency has increased more than 15 percent since 2001, this achievement has not offset the impact of underfunding and declining staff.  The backlog of disability claims has reached an unprecedented level: the number of people denied benefits who are waiting for a hearing before an administrative law judge has surpassed 750,000 – nearly double the number just seven years ago.  Meanwhile, the average wait to receive a decision at the hearing level has gone from approximately 10 months to nearly a year and a half.

The problems are particularly acute in Michigan, where all five hearing offices in the state rank in the bottom fifteen percent nationally in terms of processing time for hearings and the number of pending cases per administrative law judge.  Three of the offices are in the bottom ten percent.  Hearings may take nearly two years to complete, and the average number of cases awaiting adjudication by an individual administrative law judge may be more than twice the national average.  SSA offices in Michigan have been continually overburdened and understaffed, and additional funding is absolutely crucial to improving their performance. 

Social Security must be one of our highest priorities, especially in the shadow of the current economic downturn.  We appreciate your ongoing commitment to restoring adequate resources for SSA, and look forward to working with you toward this goal. 

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