Since his first job as a 14-year-old washing dishes in the back of a restaurant, Robert Moore has always found purpose and pride in work.
“You feel alive,” said Moore, now 61, who lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts. “Then the day comes and you're done, kid.”
That day came in 2018 when Moore was working as a health care aide at a brain injury rehabilitation home.
Moore said he was moving a heavy chair with another person who suddenly lost his grip.
“I hurt my shoulder and it was over,” Moore said. “The sad reality is, I still can't lift.”
The injury to his right shoulder left him unable to keep his physically demanding job. With limited mobility, even driving became a challenge.
Like most Americans who have a job, a portion of Moore’s paycheck had always automatically gone into the Social Security Disability Insurance Trust Fund. The money is supposed to be there for people who get hurt or fall ill and can’t work for at least a year.
Getting approved to access these funds turned into a slog for Moore as he waited months for an answer.
“I honestly thought, well, I got the X-rays, I got the MRIs, I got the doctors letters, how can they take that long? But they did,” Moore said.
WTVR-TV Scripps News Richmond first reported on applicants descending into financial ruin while waiting for the Social Security Administration to process their disability claims.
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Two people, a former Home Depot employee and an ex-truck driver, both said they began considering suicide as they ran out of money.
A national Scripps News investigation found delays have been impacting disability claims filed by more than a million Americans all over the country.
Data from the Social Security Administration reviewed by Scripps News shows there is a bottleneck at the state field offices that initially check whether a person’s medical condition qualifies them for disability aid.
Six years ago it used to take about three months for these offices to make a determination.
Now the average wait time has almost doubled to about six months.
In some states, the wait is even longer. Applicants in Florida and Texas wait about nine months, while in Massachusetts where Moore lives, the wait is almost eight months.
"The whole country is experiencing this,” said Christopher Doherty, an attorney based in the Boston area who helps clients nationwide get their disability applications approved.
“People are going along living fat dumb and happy in their life and something happens,” Doherty said. “They have to apply for these benefits and then they run into these delays.”
Unlike in previous years when applications were getting stuck further along in the process, now it often takes months just to get an initial review, Doherty said.
“We have clients in our databases that have been waiting at the initial claim level since 2022, so over two years,” he said. “It's not too hard to envision how people can become homeless. They lose access to their health insurance. They have no money coming in.”
For some of the applicants, the consequences are not just financial.
A 2020 report by the Government Accountability Office found “a long wait time may have increased the potential risk of declining health or death” as money runs dry for health care and other basic needs.
An estimated 30,000 people died in 2023 with pending disability applications, Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley said during an interview with Scripps News.
“It is absolutely a crisis,” O’Malley said. "When 30,000 people die waiting in line, it's a crisis.”
He said the problem primarily is too few staffers to handle a growing number of cases.
“Social Security staffing has been reduced by Congress to a 50-year low even as us baby boomers have swelled the ranks of active customers to an all-time high,” O’Malley said.
He has been pressing Congress to approve President Biden’s request to increase funding by more than $1 billion.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have not shown a willingness to boost the Social Security Administration’s budget, saying the agency should instead try to speed things up with existing staff and resources.
O'Malley said the agency has taken steps to simplify the review process and improve a customer service hotline but can only do so much without an injection of more dollars.
“The number of calls that you can imagine that we get: ‘When, when, when, when, please, I'm about to lose my home,’” O’Malley said. “That weighs heavily on all of us, and I hope is starting to weigh heavier as Congress becomes aware that they are really the key.”
As Moore waited for his claim to be reviewed, he turned to his friends for loans and scraped by on $300 a month in welfare from the state.
Finally, after a year and a half and with the help of Doherty, Moore received word from the Social Security Administration that he qualified for aid.
“Finally got approved,” Moore said. “I have learned to live on it and I'm doing good, and my sons help out.”
For more than a million other people unable to work and in need of money from a program their paychecks supported, the wait goes on.
“God bless those people,” Moore said. “They're going to go through hell. They're probably sitting there depressed and wondering how they're going to live, the same as I did. How could they not?”
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