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Washington, D.C.—The leader of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said today there is a very great need to address “the unacceptable backlog” of Social Security disability claims, which have resulted in a “crisis of service to the American public.”

At present, there are more than 750,000 pending appeals for Social Security Administration (SSA) disability payments. In 85 percent of the agency’s hearing offices processing times for these appeals can take more than a year, NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said in testimony submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee. She offered a number of suggestions to address the backlog.

NTEU represents SSA employees, mostly attorneys, in its Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR). These employees play key roles in preparing cases for final determination by an SSA administrative law judge (ALJ)—including the drafting of decisions for review by the judges.

“The current SSA disability adjudication process is unconscionably slow, causing untold harm to some of the most vulnerable members of our society,” President Kelley said. The fundamental causes of the problem, she added, are “an inefficient adjudicatory process” characterized by an insufficient number of ALJs, an ineffective use of their time, and insufficient support staff.

In addition to a much-needed increase in funding, the NTEU leader’s principal recommendation is an expansion of SSA’s Attorney Adjudicator Program, a fairly recent revival by SSA of the former Senior Attorney Program which successfully helped to reduce significantly the backlog of claims in the 1990s.

President Kelley noted that while the agency has announced a net increase of 81 senior attorneys, to 450, “additional changes are required if SSA is to get control of the backlog within an acceptable time frame.”

She called for increasing the number of senior attorney positions to 700—and permitting these key employees to spend 50 percent of their time, rather than the current limit of 25 percent, in reviewing every case appealed to ODAR and adjudicating the cases that do not require ALJ participation.

If that were done, she told the House committee, “SSA can immediately reduce its pending caseload by well over 100,000 cases a year in spite of the increased case receipts expected.”

Moreover, she recommended that SSA make the most out of expanding the Attorney Adjudicator Program by hiring an additional 200 attorneys “to maintain sufficient decision-drafting capacity” and 100 additional technical staff to process the increased number of decisions.

“Even considering the cost of the promotions of current employees consistent with their new duties,” she said, “the total expense is far less than that involved with hiring the massive number of ALJs and the staff that otherwise would be necessary to support them.”

The NTEU leader underscored the union’s continuing willingness to work with the committee “to do all we can to address the crisis in the disability determination backlog.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.