This year’s Social Security Fairness Act represents the largest change to Social Security in decades, increasing benefits for 3 million government retirees at a cost of $190 billion over 10 years. But the chaotic process that brought the bill to fruition, and the failure of Congress to sufficiently fund the administrative costs of the new law, have placed a heavy burden on the already-struggling Social Security Administration.
Indeed, the SSFA contained what was likely a technical error — and one that has made the implementation of the new law very difficult.
The effective date of the legislation was never updated during the two years of the 118th Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to move the date forward in the closing hours of the 118th Congress, but time ran out. As a result, the Social Security Administration has had to retroactively entitle millions of individuals to benefits for a period that actually predates the enactment of the legislation.
The start-up administrative costs of the Social Security Fairness Act are plausibly about $200 million. When Congress was considering the full-year continuing resolution in March, it simply chose not to provide the Social Security Administration with sufficient funding to implement the law. As a result, Congress has created a zero-sum environment at the agency: additional service to one group means less service to another.
In the months since enactment of the SSFA, the Social Security Administration has taken an additional 146,000 new benefit applications related to the new law. That means 146,000 other Americans did not have their applications considered. Additionally, the agency has had to field 450,000 calls (6,000-7,000 per day) from the public requiring agency staff to explain the new law and resolve benefit problems. That means 450,000 other Americans did not get their Social Security problems resolved.
Most alarmingly, the agency’s automation efforts for retroactive payments fell short. Social Security indicated that automation would result in these payments being deposited in bank accounts “by the end of March.” After its automation runs in March, however, there were still 500,000 to 700,000 cases to be processed. These will have to be handled manually over time.
The Social Security Administration plans to prioritize this manual workload, but all that means is that up to 700,000 other Americans in the agency’s very large payment backlog will not have their benefit payments processed.
Shortly after the law’s enactment, the Social Security Administration was effectively taken over by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. While DOGE’s stated mission is related to technology, DOGE engineers have struggled to get even a basic understanding of Social Security’s data systems and structures. Their confusion over the agency’s death data, for example, led to wild claims of tens of millions of people over the age of 100 receiving benefits; the claims were easily debunked by the press.
DOGE’s failure to improve the technical capacity of the Social Security Administration has led management to simply focus on reducing agency staff and cutting funding for IT infrastructure. This has led to widespread breakdowns in service delivery, which will impair the agency’s ability to deal with the SSFA or other workloads.
DOGE has also brought a work culture to the Social Security Administration that devalues privacy and data security. It recently released a data file to the public showing total SSFA retroactive payments by ZIP code, including cases where only a single beneficiary in a given ZIP code received a payment. That almost certainly violates agency disclosure guidelines that have been applied in the past — and leaves some beneficiaries potentially exposed to fraudsters.
Congress should learn a few lessons from this experience.
First, large-scale legislation needs to go through an orderly legislative process and any implementation costs need to be explicitly covered. Second, congressional oversight needs to examine all workloads, not just new ones. Finally, Congress should realize that DOGE, which has struggled in recent weeks even to keep Social Security’s websites operational, is not a technology effort. When DOGE proposes technology initiatives, Congress should realize that is just misdirection.
Congress should, instead, focus on real-world issues: how to provide the Social Security Administration with sufficient staff and how to improve the management and leadership skills of DOGE executives.
David A. Weaver, Ph.D., is an economist and retired federal employee who has authored a number of studies on the Social Security program. His views do not reflect the views of any organization.
