The tens of millions of Americans that rely on Social Security will continue to receive their payments while the government is shut down, though they may experience other service disruptions.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) is funded through mandatory spending, meaning that funding for the agency does not require annual congressional approval and it does not have to pause its essential services after lawmakers failed to reach a deal to fund the government by Wednesday’s deadline. So while the shutdown is set to disrupt a wide range of federal programs, the SSA will continue holding appointments for benefit applications, considering appeals requests, and issuing original and replacement Social Security cards, among other services.
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“We will continue activities critical to our direct-service operations and those needed to ensure accurate and timely payment of benefits,” a document outlining the SSA’s plan during a shutdown reads.
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More than 45,000 staffers, or nearly 90% of the SSA’s workforce, will remain on the job during the shutdown, allowing the agency to continue much of its work. But the planned furlough of approximately 6,200 employees could cause delays in its responses to requests for assistance. And the agency has said it will discontinue some services during the shutdown, including benefit verifications, earnings record corrections and updates, overpayments processing, and the issuance of replacement Medicare cards.
The Social Security Administration’s annual COLA, or cost-of-living adjustment, announcement, may also be delayed. The measure, typically announced each October, adjusts the benefits Social Security recipients earn to counteract the effects of inflation.
This marks the first government shutdown in almost seven years. It comes as lawmakers appear to remain deadlocked in a showdown over government spending after Democrats rejected a Republican measure to temporarily extend funding and Republicans have refused to meet Democrats’ demand that Affordable Care Act subsidies be permanently extended as part of a deal. It is unclear how long this shutdown will go on; the last time one occurred, during the first Trump Administration, it lasted a lengthy 34 days.
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If a partial shutdown lasts longer than five days, the Social Security Administration has said that it would reassess the number of employees that are exempted from work. “We would reevaluate the number of excepted employees performing such functions and possibly increase the number of excepted employees as we did during the 2013 shutdown,” the document says.