May 24, 2007

The Most Important News This Year On Social Security

We heard what is probably be the most important news about Social Security so far this year -- and I did not immediately recognize its significance. What is this important news? Michael Astrue said at yesterday's Senate Finance Committee hearing that the Social Security Administration could not comply with statutorily mandated time limits on holding Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) hearings without more power to control ALJ behavior.

What is so important about this? Let me share the evolution of my reactions to this.
  • My first reaction was "How typical of Social Security management! They have always hated independent ALJs."
  • My second reaction was "This is silly. More controls on ALJ independence would do almost nothing to get the hearing backlog down."
  • My third reaction was "Astrue will never get Congress to agree that ALJs should be less independent. Social Security management has wanted this for decades, but has never gotten it. When will Social Security management realize that despite whatever problems the ALJs may have with their "outliers", that the ALJs have more credibility with Congress than Social Security management."
  • My fourth thought was that the important thing here was that Astrue was talking about statutorily imposed deadlines on Social Security holding ALJ hearings. Astrue would be talking about deadlines only if he was hearing about deadlines from Congress and only if he thought that there was a good chance that statutory deadlines would pass. That is of much greater importance that Michael Astrue's puny plans for dealing with Social Security's hearing backlogs. What Astrue has in mind is little more than enough to stabilize the situation. His plan will hardly make a dent in the backlog. Statutory deadlines would force the Social Security Administration to propose what is really needed -- ramping up to 2,000 or more ALJs with another 8,000 or so support staff. That is not going to happen without statutory deadlines or the serious threat of them.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find it truly amazing that Astrue is not publicly supporting the Social Security Advisory Board's recommendation to dramatically limit OPM's role in the ALJ appointment process. OPM's mismanagement of the process has contributed significantly to the mess in which SSA finds itself currently.

Anonymous said...

I don't think it is clear that Astrue is hearing about deadlines from Congress. He is looking at the situation as a corporate turn-around guy and it is obvious from that viewpoint that more control over aljs would give SSA better ability to manage the workload. I'll bet he knows very little about the APA. I agree with you that his brief comments about this issue were highly significant, however, because this could cause a firestorm.