Hearing of the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee - Modernizing Social Security's IT Infrastructure

Hearing

The Social Security Administration has an indispensable job -- ensuring that all Americans get their earned Social Security benefits on time and in the correct amount.

No agency serves more Americans with more critical services and activities than SSA. One in four American families receives income from Social Security. Last year, SSA ensured that more than 60 million Americans were paid their earned Social Security benefits, completed more than 8 million new benefit applications, and served more than 40 million in-person visitors and received over 66 million calls to over 1,200 field offices nationwide.

SSA's IT was state-of-the-art when it was developed, and SSA has over its history repeatedly harnessed technology to improve efficiency, productivity and customer service.

SSA had state-of-the-art systems in the 1970s, but today, those legacy systems are increasingly obsolete. They are expensive to maintain, prone to breakdown, and difficult to reprogram.

Modernizing IT infrastructure has been a challenge for SSA, as budgetary constraints have limited SSA's ability to invest beyond maintaining its current systems and implementing small upgrades to its existing infrastructure.

Since 2010, SSA's basic operating budget has been cut by 10 percent after adjusting for inflation. At the same time, the number of beneficiaries has continued to steadily increase, rising by 7 million since 2010. These cuts have squeezed all aspects of SSA's operations, including its capacity to keep its IT up to date.

I am glad that SSA is making a thoughtful assessment of its current IT infrastructure and determining what it will need to do to bring it up to date. But none of this can occur without resources.

Without an additional investment from Congress dedicated to building a modern, agile, and cost-efficient IT infrastructure, SSA's systems will become ever more slow, expensive to maintain, and at risk of catastrophic failure.

I'm glad one of our witnesses, Rick Warsinskey, is here today to tell us the real-world effects of SSA's aging IT systems.

Rick represents the managers of the more than 1,200 Social Security field offices and teleservice centers.

His workers report that they lose about 20 minutes a day to computer problems.

It can take 10 minutes to restart a computer and get back online -- sometimes while a beneficiary is standing there waiting.

But despite these clear problems, just yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that cuts SSA's FY 2017 operating budget below what it received this year by $263 million -- which is $1.2 billion less than what SSA needs to do its work on time.

Today we will learn how and why SSA plans to do this, the resources that will be required, and how to most effectively ensure oversight of this process to ensure taxpayer dollars are wisely spent, and SSA achieves the productivity increases and costs savings we all expect from shifting to a modernized IT structure.

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