Social Security Chief Nominee Warns of 'Customer Service Crisis'

Social Security “faces a customer service crisis,” former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who was nominated in late July to serve as the next commissioner for the Social Security Administration, told senators Thursday.

During his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, O’Malley said that for all its historic strengths, “we must acknowledge that Social Security faces a customer service crisis. The truth is, today, the Social Security Administration is serving a 50% increase in beneficiary customers with the same levels of staffing they had in 1995.”

As it stands now, a ”senior citizen who calls the 800 number of the Social Security Administration will face an average hold time of 37 long minutes,” O’Malley testified. An American in need of disability benefits, he said, “will wait 220 days for an initial decision, and perhaps as long as two years for an appeal. This is not the greatness of America. This is not acceptable.”

Someone who wants a face-to-face meeting with a Social Security employee to claim benefits “should be able to get one,” O’Malley told the senators.

“If you are a person already living with a severe disability, you shouldn’t have to be dragged through two years of ‘due process’ to receive the benefits for which you have already spent a lifetime working,” O’Malley said.