The project will likely require moving some members of the computer center staff who work at the existing facility. There, computers house the earnings records of hundreds of millions of individuals, plus data on 56 million Americans who are receiving some form of Social Security benefit payment. Those files will grow as about 80 million members of the baby boom generation retire over the next quarter-century.
Social Security's databank also contains what the agency says is the world's largest collection of electronic medical records.
The medical information is used in processing disability claims under the Social Security and Supplemental Security Income programs. A total of about 12 million people are receiving federal disability payments through those programs, according to Mark Lassiter, an agency spokesman.
The backlog in processing disability claims exceeds 570,000 cases, Lassiter said. Some who become disabled are forced to wait an average of about a year and a half before their appeals are resolved, he said.
Until the agency began whittling down that backlog, it was taking as long as 900 days to resolve appeals. Astrue has set of goal of reducing the wait to an average of 270 days over the next five years, in part by computerizing more of the records used in the process.
To help do that work, the agency has been interviewing prospective new hires. As many as 5,000 to 6,000 new positions could be filled, using $500 million provided by Congress in the stimulus package, Astrue said. The vast majority of those new employees would work in hundreds of field offices around the country, he said.
Social Security employs about 11,000 workers in the Baltimore area, mainly at or near the Woodlawn headquarters, just inside the western rim of the Baltimore Beltway. But according to Astrue, the Woodlawn campus doesn't have enough room to accommodate a new data center.
The new facility will need "a fair amount of space" for "national security purposes," including an "appropriate perimeter" and land for future expansion, he said.
"Basically, there's no way to do it [at Woodlawn] without using up all or most of the employee parking or taking adjacent land, and neither of those look like practical options."
He declined to say where the agency hopes to build the new center or how much acreage it wants.
