Ranking Member DeLauro Statement at the Social Security Administration Hearing

WASHINGTON — Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee and the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee delivered the following remarks at the Subcommittee's hearing on the Social Security Administration:

Thank you, Chairman Aderholt, for holding this hearing on the Social Security Administration.

My deep thanks also go to today’s witness, Commissioner Martin O’Malley, for appearing today, and I thank you for your leadership of this agency which serves millions of seniors and Americans with disabilities, and for your forthright approach to sharing information with Congress. We really appreciate all you have done in your relatively short time at the Social Security Administration, and we welcome you to the Labor-HHS Subcommittee.

I must say, while I am glad you are here and I look forward to today’s conversation on the funding needs for the Social Security Administration, I am disturbed that this committee appears disinterested in completing our work on time. 

We are one month from the expiration of the continuing resolution we passed in September, without so much as a topline agreement, let alone a final Labor-Health and Human Services-Education bill that can become law. 

This Committee — and this Congress — should be laser-focused on finishing appropriations bills that can become law before the end of the year. Some of my colleagues want to delay our work until well into next year by passing yet another continuing resolution.

America is demanding change. They want border security, public safety, and help with extreme weather, and natural disasters. Those are addressed by government funding bills, and continuing resolutions delay government getting to work. 

Forcing agencies to operate from continuing resolution to continuing resolution without consistent, predictable resources hurts the American people and worsens the issues we examine with each hearing. Democrats are ready and willing to negotiate. It is time for our Republican colleagues to come to the table. 

For this subcommittee, it is our responsibility to finish full-year appropriations for health, education, and labor programs — including the administrative expenses of the Social Security Administration, such as staff salaries and expenses, information technology, and buildings and facilities, which include over 1,200 field offices that serve communities across this country. 

And indeed, when I was Chair, we increased investments in the Social Security Administration an average of $339 million per year, with an increase of $785 million in fiscal year 2023 alone when we had Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate. 

Our investments enabled SSA to hire field office staff, and allowed the States to hire desperately needed disability determination staff. But SSA needs much more to be able to adequately serve Americans who are duly entitled to receive Social Security. 

The partisan and extreme Labor-HHS bill the majority proposed for 2025 – which was, by the way, never voted on by the full House of Representatives – included deep and harmful cuts to the Social Security Administration that would mean closings and shorter operating hours at Social Security field offices, and delayed benefits to seniors and to those with disabilities. 

A cut to the administrative budget of your agency is a de facto cut to Social Security, because fewer Americans will be able to access their earned benefits.

House Republicans may claim that they are not touching Social Security – but they are indeed undermining the Social Security Administration, and they are ultimately destroying the resources needed to carry out its mission, hurting seniors and disabled Americans. 

This is their favorite play out of Grover Norquist’s playbook: they want to shrink government until they can drown it in a bathtub. If you defund an agency to the point of dysfunction, then it becomes easier to mislead the public into believing that agency is not working.

In other words, Republicans want Americans to believe their government is broken, and they are willing to break the government to prove it. Republicans are trying to break Social Security, while SSA is trying to serve more Americans than ever before, with less resources. Republicans are, in effect, cutting Social Security.

Staffing shortages and historic beneficiary growth driven by the retirement of the Baby Boom generation have created a customer service crisis at the Social Security Administration, with significant backlogs, excessive employee workloads and delays in issuing disability decisions that this committee must help the agency to address. 

In Georgia, the average wait for an initial decision on disability benefits is more than 14 months, and people are waiting for over a year in Texas and Maryland. Over one million people are waiting for disability determinations around the country, with over 100,000 waiting in both California and Florida, over 80,000 in Georgia, over 40,000 in Louisiana, and over 30,000 in Alabama. 

A field office in Cleveland, Ohio, was forced to shut down for over a month due to staff losses, and in rural areas, such as Cody, Wyoming, the local office is only open one day per week. SSA simply cannot adequately serve the American people – especially in harder-to-reach rural communities – with current staff and resource levels.

Commissioner O’Malley, in your testimony, you note that nearly 30,000 Americans died in 2023 while waiting for their disability decisions from the Social Security Administration. 30,000 Americans. That is an outrage. We cannot accept this or allow this to continue.

The Social Security Administration is tasked with serving more Americans than ever before and with fewer staff than they had 50 years ago. Imagine how we could serve seniors and disabled Americans if Republicans committed to investing in Social Security as opposed to gutting it. 

I would like to hear more from you, Commissioner O’Malley, about the downstream ramifications of this staffing shortage on the SSA’s ability to serve the American people, and to provide the American people with the benefits that they have earned and are entitled to. 

Social Security turns 90 years old next year. Before the program was created in 1935, half of America’s seniors were impoverished. Today, Social Security serves as the primary income source for a majority of seniors. 

We must ensure this agency’s legacy of pulling millions out of poverty continues unabated, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to provide the funding that is needed for the Social Security Administration to accomplish its mission. 

Thank you, and I yield back.

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