One would think that the recent decline in the number of federal disability beneficiaries would be viewed positively. Instead, this improvement has been depicted negatively and incorrectly in recent media account and comments by advocacy organizations. A mistake with dangerous repercussions. It is not the result of an increasingly harsh adjudicative environment at the Social Security Administration (SSA). It is the consequence of an aging population with disability benefits being converted to retirement ones, an improving job market, and reasonable reforms undertaken by the agency in the early 2010s to rein in corrupt and outlier administrative law judges. This accurate conclusion is supported by statistics provided by the SSA, which are often misinterpreted, and by a review of relevant studies.
Since 2000, the number of disabled worker beneficiaries enrolled in the disability insurance (DI) program of Social Security has grown rapidly, increasing from 5 million to 9 million in 2014. By 2021 though, they had declined to 7.9 million. In the last 21 years, the number of applications for disability benefits went from 1.3 million in 2000 to 2.9 million in 2010; they later fell to 2.5 million in 2014, and dropped to 1.8 million in 2021. Awards of benefits as a percentage of applications dropped steadily from 47 percent in 2000 to 32 percent in 2014, before rising to around 36 percent in 2019. Awards per 1,000 workers insured (and therefore potentially eligible for DI benefits)—referred to as the DI incidence rate—increased from 4.4 in 2000 to 6.9 in 2010, decreased to 5.2 in 2014, and then steadily declined to 4.4 in 2019. Similar trends for disability benefits are apparent in the Supplemental Security Income program.
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