940,000 people are stuck in the SSDI application backlog, waiting 7+ months while 10,000 die per year

As of mid-2025, approximately 940,000 people are waiting for an initial determination on their SSDI claim, down from an all-time high of 1.26 million in May 2024 but still higher than at any point during the Great Recession or COVID pandemic. The average wait for a first decision is 231 days. If denied — and 64% of initial applications are denied — the applicant enters the appeals process, where a reconsideration takes another 7 months, and an Administrative Law Judge hearing takes 335 days on average. End to end, a denied-then-approved applicant can wait over two years. During those two years, the applicant has no income from SSDI, often cannot work (that is why they applied), and may have lost their job, their health insurance, and their housing. GAO data shows that approximately 10,000 disability applicants die each year while awaiting a decision, and 8,000 file for bankruptcy. These are not abstractions — these are people with degenerative conditions, terminal diagnoses, and severe mental illness who were told 'apply for disability' by their doctors and then entered a bureaucratic queue that outlasted their bodies. The approval rate has also been falling: from 38.7% in FY2024 to 36.0% in FY2025, meaning more people are being denied at the same time that wait times remain extreme. The backlog persists because SSA has been chronically underfunded for over a decade. Between FY2010 and FY2024, SSA's operating budget grew far slower than inflation while the number of beneficiaries and applications increased. The agency has lost over 10,000 staff positions through attrition. ALJ hiring has not kept pace with retirements. And the disability determination process itself is inherently slow: it requires obtaining medical records from multiple providers (who have no obligation to respond quickly), scheduling consultative exams, and making individualized legal determinations. There is no technological shortcut because the adjudication is fundamentally a human judgment about whether someone meets a complex legal standard.