Senator Bernie Sanders has a new bill that will fully fund the Social Security Administration, permanently. By giving SSA the funds it needs and removing it from budget battles it should never have been a part of, this bill will end the one million person disability backlog, speed up the time it takes for seniors and persons with disabilities to receive benefits, and prevent the SSA from closing field offices.  

In 2017, SSA was asked to support over 70 million Americans with 1.3 percent in administrative funding; to put this in perspective, private life insurance companies spend 19 percent and private-sector defined benefit plans spend three percent on administrative costs, respectively.

The current funding is not adequate. Not when SSA has had to scale back operations to the public and service has declined in nearly every metric for all 70 million beneficiaries: twice as many calls to the 800 number are not connecting with a representative; almost five million people wait for more than an hour to be served in field offices; more than 3.7 million actions still have yet to be taken to process payments or Medicare paperwork; and the wait for a disability decision is more than two years long. My bill would set SSA’s administrative funding at 1.5 percent, keeping the program efficient while giving it the funds it needs to ensure that we receive the service we have already paid for! Become a Citizen Co-Sponsor today!