Aug 5, 2008

Astrue Interview

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has published a transcript of an interview with Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Q: How stressful is your job?

A: If you are doing this job right, you can't help internalizing some of this stuff. I am taking more hypertension medication than I was a year ago. ...

Q: There have been reports that even with all your efforts the backlog continues to grow?

A: We are nine months into this fiscal year, and we are at an increase of about 18,000 cases for the year. I am not happy about that. But the rate keeps going down. If you look historically, it went up at about 75,000 cases a year for many years in this decade.

So how come Commissioner Astrue is putting out a report talking about his plan to eliminate the backlog and prevent its recurrence when he has not yet been able to even stop the backlog from growing?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You, sir, are an idiot.

The first step in eliminating the growth is to reverse the trend. That means slowing the growth, which, given the numbers are accurate, it appears he has done.

How are you a successful lawyer? Don't you have to have some sort of competency in logic?

Anonymous said...

"despite all your efforts"!!--from the field office perspective, there have been no efforts--SSA is in the dumpster now. It is too late for many people to be paid the amounts due them, and some none at all, because of lack of staff to correctly complete processing. consider--we have been slowing the rate of growth of the federal deficit, off-and-on, for decades--how is that working out?