Social Safety “faces a customer support disaster,” former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who was nominated in late July to function the subsequent commissioner for the Social Safety Administration, informed senators Thursday.
Throughout his testimony earlier than the Senate Finance Committee, O’Malley stated that for all its historic strengths, “we should acknowledge that Social Safety faces a customer support disaster. The reality is, as we speak, the Social Safety Administration is serving a 50% improve in beneficiary prospects with the identical ranges of staffing they’d in 1995.”
Because it stands now, a ”senior citizen who calls the 800 variety of the Social Safety Administration will face a mean maintain time of 37 lengthy minutes,” O’Malley testified. An American in want of incapacity advantages, he stated, “will wait 220 days for an preliminary choice, and maybe so long as two years for an enchantment. This isn’t the greatness of America. This isn’t acceptable.”
Somebody who needs a face-to-face assembly with a Social Safety worker to assert advantages “ought to be capable to get one,” O’Malley informed the senators.
“If you’re an individual already residing with a extreme incapacity, you shouldn’t must be dragged by means of two years of ‘due course of’ to obtain the advantages for which you have got already spent a lifetime working,” O’Malley stated.