- There is no such thing as "Temporary SSDI", it's always basically permanent.
I'm going to quibble with that. At least, while it may not be called that, there are two types of periods of disability: open and closed. A closed period ends at some point. Whether or not it's open or closed is generally only found after the fact. For instance, if you have a disability that lasts over 12 months but your claim has been denied, you could be awarded a closed period finding that while you are not currently disabled, you were in the past and are entitled to back benefits.
However, there are also two classifications of types of disability when you do receive an award based on current disability.
Things like temporarily disabling injuries, or other conditions expect to improve with treatment, usually have something in the decision like this from Phil's:
"Medical improvement is expected with appropriate treatment. Consequently, a continuing disability review is recommended in 24 months."
People like Chris, by comparison, are not expected to improve. They only have a continuing disability review every seven years.
From the SSA:
"Social Security conducts a disability review of your case approximately every three years depending on the nature and severity of your medical condition and whether it’s expected to improve. If we don’t expect improvement, we’ll review your case every seven years."
I'll note that in Phil's case, the period was only two years and improvement was expected.
So while it's true they don't call it "temporary" or "permanent" as such, when they award disability, they either issue the award with the expectation that it will end at some time, or the expectation that it will continue indefinitely. The main impact of this is that reviews occur more frequently when improvement is expected; in both cases, the burden of proof that improvement has actually occurred is on the SSA; and in both cases, disability continues if the SSA does not meet its burden of proof.
Also, and this is entirely a personal opinion based on seeing lots of these cases play out, while the legal standard is supposedly the same for CDR for both kinds of disability award, my opinion is that the ALJ seems more aggressive in trying to find improvement in the "expected to improve" cases and they are more often terminated.