Social Security needs a budget boost post-pandemic to serve the public

Our worries about Social Security often focus on the program’s solvency issues, which threaten benefits if left unresolved. But right now, we face a more immediate challenge: how to fund the Social Security Administration (SSA) as it climbs out of the COVID-19 crisis so that it can serve the public efficiently and equitably.

Social Security’s customer service has suffered from more than a decade of budget cuts imposed by Congress, and its operating budget dropped 13% from 2010 to 2021, adjusted for inflation. Over that same period, the number of Social Security beneficiaries grew by 22%, SSA data shows.

The cuts have hurt the agency’s ability to serve the public, and some problems worsened during the pandemic. The SSA shut down its sprawling national network of more than 1,200 offices in March 2020 in order to protect the public and its employees from the coronavirus. The offices served 43 million visitors in 2019 and the agency has been providing most services since then through its website bit.ly/2SEeJpC and toll-free number (1-800-772-1213).

The challenge now is not only to bring SSA’s customer service operation back up to snuff, but to address inequities in how the pandemic has affected beneficiaries.

President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget proposes a 10% boost in the agency’s funding, and its commissioner, Andrew Saul, has recommended a 12% bump. That spending has nothing to do with the problems of the retirement and disability trust funds, which pay for benefits and are projected to run out of money reut.rs/3xylGY5 in 2034 (reut.rs/3xylGY5). At that point Social Security would have sufficient income from current tax payments to meet roughly 80% of promised benefits – a disaster that must be averted through injection of new revenue.