Statement by Kilolo Kijakazi, Acting Commissioner of Social Security, on the President’s Fiscal Year 2024 Budget
Reading Time: 3 MinutesLast Updated: March 9, 2023
The Biden-Harris Administration today released the President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The Budget details a blueprint to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out, lower costs for families, protect and strengthen Medicare and Social Security, and reduce the deficit by ensuring the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share—all while ensuring no one making less than $400,000 per year pays more in taxes.
“Our programs affect individuals throughout their lives: from birth, to entering the workforce, to facing a disability or loss, and to retirement. The broad and critical nature of our programs drives our request for the resources necessary to improve our service to the public.”
The President’s FY 2024 Budget request for the Social Security Administration (SSA) proposes $15.5 billion in discretionary budget authority. The Budget will:
Improve Service Delivery: The Budget provides an increase of $1.4 billion, a 10-percent increase over our FY 2023 enacted level to improve customer service at our field offices, State disability determination services, and teleservice centers for retirees, people with disabilities, and their families while maintaining the integrity of our programs. Each year, we process more than 6 million retirement, survivors, and Medicare claims and more than 2 million disability and SSI claims. The Budget supports increased staffing levels from FY 2023, allowing us to process about a half million more disability cases in FY 2024 than we completed in FY 2022 and significantly reduce wait times for those decisions.
Advance Equity and Accessibility: We are one of the most important anti-poverty programs in the country. We remain committed to administering our programs in a way that promotes equity and fairness. We are making it easier for people to access the services they rely on, including individuals experiencing homelessness, children with disabilities, and people with mental and intellectual disabilities. The Budget makes investments in these areas to support SSI outreach work, including collaborating with government agencies and other third-party organizations in local communities to provide convenient access to our services and ensure members of the public are aware of their potential benefit eligibility.
We are also committed to enhancing the diversity and richness of our workforce to strengthen and maintain an inclusive work environment that values individual differences and treats employees with dignity and respect; thereby, enriching our current workforce, which is driven by our public service mission. This Budget continues our efforts to hire and promote the Nation’s best talent and build a diverse and representative workforce and ensure that all employees have equal opportunities to advance in their chosen careers.
Modernize our Information Technology: The Budget continues investment in our information technology (IT) to reduce the burden on the public, modernize our website and online services, and provide an improved customer experience. To accelerate our progress, the Budget includes $50 million in dedicated no-year funding for our Benefits Modernization efforts. Our Benefits Modernization efforts will provide our employees with better technology tools to determine eligibility and process claims in order to better serve the public. The Benefits Modernization project is in addition to the efforts we are taking to sustain our systems.
Provides National, Comprehensive Paid Family and Medical Leave: The vast majority of America’s workers do not have access to paid family leave, including three out of four private sector workers. Among the lowest-paid workers, who are predominantly women and workers of color, 92 percent have no access to paid family leave through their employers. As many as one in five retirees leave the workforce earlier than planned to care for an ill family member, which negatively impacts families as well as the Nation’s labor supply and productivity. The Budget proposes to establish a national, comprehensive paid family and medical leave program administered by SSA. The program would: provide workers with progressive, partial wage replacement to take time off for family and medical reasons; include robust administrative funding; and use an inclusive family definition. The Budget would provide up to 12 weeks of leave to allow eligible workers to take time off to: care for and bond with a new child; care for a seriously ill loved one; heal from their own serious illness; address circumstances arising from a loved one’s military deployment; or find safety from domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking. The Budget would also provide up to three days to grieve the death of a loved one. The Administration looks forward to continuing to work with the Congress to make this critical investment and strengthen America’s economy.
Building on the President’s strong record of fiscal responsibility, the Budget more than fully pays for its investments—reducing deficits by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade by asking the wealthy and big corporations to pay their fair share.
For more information on the President’s FY 2024 Budget, please visit: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/.
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Othman
It’s really great. Thank you for providing a quality article.
Sharon M.
So, in other words, they will hire more staff, update their computer systems, and add paid family leave for workers to the cost of Social Security/Medicare. If Social Security/Medicare are going broke as it is, where is the money going to come from for paid family leave for workers? Social Security COLAs have not kept up with inflation for the last 20 years, but no one is addressing that. Medicare doesn’t pay for eye exams, glasses, hearing exams, or hearing aids, health care needs that millions of elderly Medicare recipients desperately need. How about adding coverage for those things? No, just give away more money that we don’t have, and continue to provide seniors with inadequate COLAs and inadequate health care. And don’t forget to keep reminding us constantly what a drain we are on society and that Social Security/Medicare will be broke in 10 years and threaten us every few months with the possibility of benefit cuts. Gosh, thanks a lot!!!
Patricia M.
You must be forgetting when Congress raided the Social Security Account for billions of dollars and currently owes the Social Security fund $2.9 trillion dollars!!! They haven’t paid 1¢of what they owe the fund and that’s been in the last 38 years! So everything, as much as you’d like to believe, is BIDEN’S doing or Fault!!
Patricia M.
Error Everything is NOT BIDEN’s fault or doing!
Pete Z.
So SS takes the words & belief of what Joe Biden repeated again today. This may be the reason SS is having such a problem economically. This President is doing nothing for the security & longevity of this program. Remember less than 50% of citizens pay any income tax, and the top 10% pay 90+% of all taxes! So let’s punish them!! SS, please wake-up and stop being so ideologic.
Sharon M.
That top 10% pays $0 in Social Security/Medicare taxes on income above $160,200. Everyone else pays Social Security/Medicare taxes on 100% of their income. Hardly fair!!
Patricia M.
Not if it’s over $160, 200! There are a fair number of people in this country earning $3 or$400,000 a year and none of them pay for SS or Medicaid either! And they’re not in the top 10%! So what are yo annoyed it stops at $160,200? At least it’s fair. I’m sure you pay a lot less than that!
Patricia M.
You’re forgetting all these multi-million dollar companies and corporations who are a major part of Biden’s plan when THEY start paying their fair share of taxes too! And those rich people you’re speaking of have been paying MUCH, MUCH less than they SHOULD have been paying right along for years, due to tax loopholes and hiding assets- it’s way past time for them to pay what they SHOULD have been paying for years! Those poor, rich souls. Oh please
Bob L.
I would like to know how much the “Fair Share” amounts to. I continually hear “fair share” but no one ever has an actual amount. Eliminate tax write-offs for everybody and go to a flat tax. Then everyone has more skin in the game. And a small national sales tax would cover a lot of under the table money floating around.
Bob A.
Unfortunately when the two words “discretionary” and “spending” are combined by the government with Social Security funds, the money doesn’t always go where it was intended. We need an overhaul of those who oversee those funds so that the word “discretionary” has more accountability attached to it….
MARK C.
I TRULY THINK ITS IMPERATIVE WE START A GROUP TO OVERSEE THE BOOKS , AND ACCOUNT FOR EVERY PENNY. AND TRULY LOOK INTO EVERY POLITICIAN’S ACCOUNTS!
Ed
Right on
Since congress owes SS 2.1 trillion,arrangments should be made to pay that back with interest ASAP.
Everyone of the folks having any authority within the SS should be investigated. Now and the past.
Patricia M.
Correction: left out a sentence -On earnings over $160,200 either
Leah G.
Ssa still hasn’t done what it should to raise the amount a person on ssi can have without being penalized. We can’t save money, invest money, or plan for our futures with the way its still being done.
Ssa needs to actually do waivers or forgive overpayment that occured during the REAL PANDEMIC PERIOD. SSA set its end of the pandemic date for August 2020. SSA also claimed its employees snd offices were back sbd fully accessible from that date forward. This was untrue. Basing pandemic waivers and overpayment on that date and informations is tantamount to commiting fraud and abuse.
Please correct these issues immediately.
MajJOhn
The pandemic did not cause overpayments in SSI, the reasons never changed. Since SSI is a welfare program based upon need it was not designed to help people save and invest money. Office hours did not prevent one from calling 800-772-1213 toll free.
Tia S.
$1.4 billion to improve customer service! What about hearing aid reimbursement for seniors that supported SS their entire working lives. I just paid $4k for hearing aids. Over the counter would do nothing for my type of loss.
Patricia M.
It depends upon what state you live in. I just got a brand new set of hearing aids for 0 dollars, as Vermont State Medicaid pays for a new set every three years. Social Security left Hearing AIDS up to each State Medicaid program. It stinks whatever State your in does not pay for them.
Liza B.
Yes Medicaid pays … Medicare does not.
I’m disabled. My disability benefit is the pits. It is extremely difficult to pay the necessities needed each month. Food stamps have just been decreased. I receive $24.00 per month now. The pandemic truly made a huge mess of practically everything. I am in need of dental work, huh!! no way I can afford to think about having anything done.
I difficult to see seniors working when they should be able to take advantage of retirement. Not working because they cannot make ends meet. Really sickens me!!!
Social Security needs a complete overhaul!!! We are stuck. We cannot change what the Administration and SSA say we have to abide by.
Caryl
Please….look at the comments. Are we getting anywhere?
There has been lack of proper planning…SSA knew baby boomers were coming. There are dark forces that want SS to fail so it will be privatized. SSA’s procedures should have been revamped many times by now. Stuck on customer service? Call it —repeat what you just said. That’s it.
Don’t service…resolve. 2.5 year backlog …there’s no such thing. Pay 5K interim, settle up later.people are living in cars,
Bob L.
I’m not so sure the Dark Forces want SS privatized. It would remove a lot of power out of their hands. Privatization may prove to be beneficial though: you would most assuredly earn a higher Return on Investment MUCH HIGHER), programs would be run much more efficiently (less fraud as well), more nimble than the Federal Gov. What does the Fed. Gov. run well? (Rhetorical question.) Ultimately, we need a congress that will start working on the issue instead of kicking it down the road. Term limits might help clean out the riff-raff.
Patricia M.
Social Security has been in trouble for the past 38 years! Perhaps if Congress would get their grubby paws out of the SS Fund, there wouldn’t be so many issues. The Federal Government has “borrowed” and “borrowed” (stolen at this point) so much money from the Social Security account, they now OWE the fund $2.7 trillion yes TRILLION dollars! I’m thinking the very well could be the major reason the program is now having financial problems!
Bob L.
Ask your congress to put the money back into SS that they took out of it over the past several decades. If they had never touched it, SS would be solid as a rock. And yes, let’s go to a small flat tax with a small Federal sales tax, so that everyone has skin in the game. The top couple of percent of earners pay half the taxes. Thank you top earners. They only take advantage of the current tax laws. Get rid of tax writeoffs for everyone. That flat tax business would also allow the reduction of IRS staff and a reduction of needed computers and computer power, reducing the size of that agency.
Gail M.
I like the way you think! To bad the politicians will not think that way. It makes way way way too much sense for them to even consider it.
Cab
Amen, you are spot on! Too bad it will never happen until we get rid of the ones stealing our money and raising everyone’s taxes!
Edward J.
ABSOLUTELY !!!!
Theodore
POSITIVELY!!!! a good platform to vote for…
MajJohn
Nothing was taken from the trust funds, IOU’s were left. The big issue is when the government goes bust and it will, so will SSA and every other program.
A flat tax has some merit but the peasants would riot in the streets, they have become accustomed to the way it is.
Linda T.
Sharon, who posted earlier, wrote: “That top 10% pays $0 in Social Security/Medicare taxes on income above $160,200. Everyone else pays Social Security/Medicare taxes on 100% of their income. Hardly fair!!”
She is correct and I agree with her that it’s not fair. It would not hurt the top 10% to lose their tax break of not paying SS/Medicare taxes on their income above $160,200. If they did that, there would be no need to “save” the programs. They would be in the black and remain in the black as long as politicians keep their greedy hands off our monies.
Michael S.
Glad to hear your plan and Thank You all who cover and protect Soc Security and Medicare!
Edward J.
HERE, HERE !!!
Linda T.
I agree! Thank you, President Biden, for protecting our SS & Medicare. Those are our funds, not for politicians to utilize elsewhere. They don’t contribute to the deficit. They are OUR funds.
William Z.
I love Social Security! Keep up the good work, we need you. This is the greatest program the government has for our citizens.