May 9, 2007

More Social Security ALJs: Is That Gross Or Net?

At the House Social Security Subcommittee hearing, Commissioner Astrue talked of hiring 150 new Administrative Law Judges (ALJs). By the time Astrue got to Ohio for a meeting a couple of days ago, he was talking about hiring 160-170 new ALJs.

At the Social Security Subcommittee hearing, Astrue made casual mention of a factoid that I had not heard before. The average time that an ALJ stays on the job with Social Security is about 20 years. If my math is correct, this means that Social Security loses about 5% of its ALJs each year due to retirement, death and other reasons. Since Social Security currently has about 1,100 ALJs, this means that Social Security can expect to lose about 55 ALJs a year, or about 80 between now and the end of the next federal fiscal year, September 30, 2008.

If Astrue is talking about hiring only 150 new ALJs total in the next fiscal year, the net gain would only be about 70 new ALJs, an increase of only 7%. If he is talking about a net gain of 170 ALJs, Social Security would need to hire about 250 new ALJs, which would yield a 16% increase in the number of ALJs. My opinion is that Social Security should aim for more than a 16% increase in its ALJ corps in the next fiscal year, but first we need to find out exactly what Astrue is talking about. Is he talking about hiring 150-170 new ALJs period or a net increase in the number of ALJs of 150-170? The difference is significant. What Astrue has said so far has been ambiguous and no one has publicly pinned him down.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would expect multiple hirings in the next few years off the newly formed register.

Anonymous said...

All this talk and worry about hiring more ALJs. Even assuming they hire 500 more and they speed up hearing times, the backlogs in the payment center will just increase and the wait times will just be transferred there.

In the end, they have to look at all the problems, not just the ones that are more evident.