Social Security Administration FY 2024 Budget Outlook

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its fiscal year (FY) 2024 budget request last month, including spending plans and details for the Social Security Administration (SSA). OMB also posted details of SSA’s IT portfolio investments to the IT Dashboard.

FY 2024 Discretionary Budget

The Social Security Administration has requested $15.5B in total discretionary budget authority for 2024, a $1.4B (+10%) increase from the FY 2023 enacted level, including allocation adjustment funding. This total includes $10.5B in base discretionary funding, $900M above the FY 2023 enacted level.

Funding highlights include:

• Includes $8.7B for payroll costs, approximately $700M above the FY 2023 enacted level, to fund the employees in frontline operations, hearings operations and support. Increases include, +$250M for field offices, +$60M for teleservice centers to reduce wait times, +$75M for Processing Centers and +$100M for hearings offices, respectively, to address backlogs.
• Allots $1.9B in program integrity funding for dedicated PI work to provide effective stewardship of taxpayer dollars, $86M above the FY 2023 enacted level.
• Requests $120.4M for the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), an increase of $5.7M over the FY 2023 enacted level. The funding covers core mission activities and operations, while also building data analytics capacity, increasing data-driven decision-making, investing in IT and automation tools and building and strengthening the workforce. 
• Requests $91M for research activities, $5M more than the FY 2023 enacted level, to fund continued data development and dissemination, modeling efforts, administrative research and retirement and disability policy research.

Information Technology – Total IT and New Development Budgets

The SSA is requesting just over $2.5B for IT spending for FY 2024, more than $339M (+15.7%) above the FY 2023 enacted level and $293M (+13%) above the final FY 2022 budget. SSA’s budget overview notes they are assigning over $1.7B of these top-line IT funds for IT services, an increase of over $250M from the FY 2023 enacted level, to maintain and modernize IT infrastructure and increase digital and automated services.

Within the total $2.5B top-line IT request, the new SSA IT budget provides new development spending, known as Development, Modernization and Enhancement (DME), of more than $1B. This DME accounts for roughly 41% of their total FY 2024 IT budget – two percentage points higher than in FY 2023 and FY 2022. The FY 2024 DME level is $180M (+21%) above FY 2022 and more than $195M (23%) above FY 2023. (See table below.)

Deducting the DME funding from the total IT budget reveals nearly $1.5B in Operations and Maintenance (O&M) funding for FY 2024, which is an increase of $112M from the FY 2022 O&M level and $144M above the FY 2023 O&M level. O&M funding accounts for just over 59% of the SSA IT budget in FY 2024, which is about two percentage points lower in proportion than was for the previous two fiscal years.

Noteworthy IT Programs

To meet its mission objectives and support larger agency priorities, SSA continues to pursue IT modernization efforts. Below are the six largest IT budget lines that each garner $120M or more within SSA’s FY 2024 request.

• Data Center and Cloud Standard Investment – The Data Center and Cloud standard investment provides the IT Infrastructure for SSA's data center facilities. This investment receives a $57M increase above the FY 2023 enacted level to reach $671M for FY 2024. This initiative contains 23% ($154M) in Development, Modernization and Enhancement (DME) funding.
• Network Standard Investment – The Network standard investment provides data, voice, video teleconferencing, electronic services, equipment, access arrangements, cable and wiring to manage network and telecommunications activities. At $419M for FY 2024, Network has $55M in growth over the FY 2023 level and 36% ($149M) is for DME efforts.
• End User Standard Investment – The End User standard investment provides IT resources such as productivity software and desktop, laptop and other computing equipment which SSA requires to meet its workload demands. The $264M requested for FY 2024 is $59M above the FY 2023 enacted level. DME accounts for 20% of the FY 2024 funding request.
• IT Security & Compliance – This investment captures the costs associated with IT Security resources setting policy, establishing process and means, and measuring compliance and responding to security breaches. The $242M requested for FY 2024 is almost $12M above the FY 2023 enacted level and is 68% DME funding.
• IT Management – This budget line covers IT Management, Strategic Planning, Enterprise Architecture, Capital Planning, Project Management Offices, IT Budget/Finance, IT Vendor Management, 508 Compliance, General IT policy/reporting, and IT Governance. At $139M for FY 2024 IT Management sees an increase of $7.8M (+6%) from FY 2023. This investment line is 96% O&M funding with only 4% slated for DME.
• Application Standard Investment – This investment builds enterprise-wide software to support SSA’s IT operations, including the analysis, design, development, code, test and release services associated with application development projects. It receives $120M for FY 2024, a marginal $29K increase from FY 2023, and consist of 92% DME funding.

IT Modernization Activities

When looking beyond the above handful of large enterprise-level IT initiatives, one will find that the majority of SSA IT investments focus on specific systems or capabilities and receive program budgets in the $100M range and below. These smaller initiatives by comparison focus on maintaining or modernizing SSA mission-specific applications that support supplemental security income (SSI), benefits, disability claims processing and enterprise financial management. Some initiatives are building greater capabilities in business intelligence, data analytics, electronic citizen services and others.

In previous years’ IT portfolios, SSA has listed a collection of six programs with “IT Modernization” beginning their program names, followed by the specific areas the program addresses: Benefits, Cross Cutting, Cybersecurity, Disability, Earnings and Enumeration, and Service Delivery. The FY 2024 SSA IT portfolio reveals that each budget line was “zeroed out” for FY 2023 going forward, suggesting progress in reaching modernization goals in these areas. Together, these six programs accounted for nearly $100M in FY 2022.

Remaining programs that have “modernization” in their initiative names account for more than $311M for FY 2024. These initiatives are Service Delivery Modernization, Benefits Modernization, Disability Modernization, Earnings and Enumeration Modernization, and Data Modernization. Each initiative is categorized as DME funding at between 98-100%.