The Judge Lottery

      From  The Judge Lottery: Within-Office Disparities in Social Security Disability Adjudication, Fiscal Year 2025 by Drew Patterson:

Description

A claimant who appeals a denied Social Security disability claim is assigned, essentially at random, to an administrative law judge (ALJ) within a hearing office. Using the Social Security Administration's public ALJ disposition files for fiscal year 2025, this paper measures how much that assignment matters. Among 1,023 judges who issued at least 100 decisions in a single office (317,462 decisions in total), allowance rates ranged from 8.8 percent to 92.8 percent. The disparity is not primarily geographic: 73 percent of the variance in judge allowance rates lies within hearing offices rather than between them, and in the median office the gap between the most and least generous judge is 32.6 percentage points. A simulation in which every judge in an office decides identical case pools shows that sampling noise can account for only about 5 percent of the observed within-office variance. Judge allowance rates are also highly stable across years (r = 0.93 between FY2025 and FY2026 year-to-date), which rules out one-off docket composition as an explanation. Office-level workload measures explain little of either the level or the spread of allowance rates, and a state-month panel of initial-level determinations from 2015 to 2026 shows only a small association between backlog pressure and allowance rates. The judge draw remains one of the largest observable determinants of whether a disability appeal succeeds, a decade after the agency's quality-review reforms. Includes full analysis code and the exact SSA public data snapshots used. …

I’m Back

      I’m sorry that I was unable to approve comments on this blog for the last day. Blogger is quite reliable until it isn’t. For about 24 hours it professed not to know me. I’ll have something substantive to post tomorrow.

New Compassionate Allowance List

      A message from Social Security:

Social Security Adds 14 Compassionate Allowance Conditions

Date: Tuesday, August 11, 2026 

 Dear Colleague, 

 Today, Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano announced the addition of 14 conditions to Social Security’s Compassionate Allowances list. The Compassionate Allowances initiative is designed to cut through red tape and allows us to quickly identify claims where the applicant’s medical condition or disease clearly meets our definition of disability. Given the severity of these conditions, claims are often approved based on medical confirmation of the diagnosis alone, helping individuals experiencing life-changing diagnoses receive the support they need as fast as possible. 

 The newly added Compassionate Allowances conditions are: 

• Adenylosuccinate Lyase Deficiency – Neonatal Form and Type 1 
• Aicardi Syndrome 
• Baraitser-Winter Syndrome 
• Beare-Stevenson Cutis Gyrata Syndrome 
• Bohring-Opitz Syndrome 
• CASK-Related Gene Disorders
• Hepatosplenic T-Cell Lymphoma 
• Lafora Disease 
• Malignant Migrating Partial Seizures of Infancy (MMPSI) 
• OPHN1 Syndrome 
• Primary Cardiac Sarcoma 
• Primary Intracranial Malignant Melanoma 
• Uveal Melanoma – with Metastases 
• Warburg Micro Syndrome 

I encourage you to share this important update with your members, colleagues, affiliates, and other interested parties. Sincerely, Nick Perrine Chief Communications Officer

     Think most readers of this blog realize that the Compassionate Allowance list is nearly meaningless. The list is comprised of very rare disorders so it affects few. Virtually all of them would have been approved quickly even without the Compassionate Allowance list. The list does allow for various Administrations to claim they’re doing something for disabled people even though they aren’t.

Larson Loses Primary

      John Larson, the ranking member of the House Social Security Subcommittee, lost his Connecticut primary race to hang on to his seat in the House of Representatives.

A New Position For Dudek

       Leland Dudek, who served briefly as Acting Commissioner of Social Security, is now Advisory Council Chair for Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled (ACRD), a group founded not too long ago. ACRD is a rival to the much older National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR). 

     I am quite surprised to see Dudek linked in such a way to any Social Security organization that wishes to help claimants. I expect that Dudek sees himself as a friend to claimants and a supporter of Social Security but his tenure as Acting Commissioner was notable for his cooperation with DOGE and that permanently tarnished his reputation in the minds of most people who support the mission of the Social Security Administration.

Winning!

      A recent message from a colleague:

Does anybody answer the phone at the **** OHO anymore? 

We could not reach a person this afternoon, and apparently no one received the message I left. 

Some gentleman called this morning saying he had a telephone hearing today, but he was late and when he tried to call the OHO no one answered or returned his call.

What’s Going On With CDRs?

      The ranking (Democratic) members of the House Ways and Means Committee subcommittees having jurisdiction over Social Security and SSI have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the agency’s decision to assume the role of continuing disability reviews (CDRs).

     I’m not sure that I see anything sinister in what Social Security is doing but I don’t see how it makes sense either. It’s not like there have been problems with CDRs that I’ve been aware of, so why are they doing it..

Agency Performance Stats

      The Social Security Administration has released a highly massaged set of statistics on agency performance. There are many aspects of agency performance not included. I wish things were getting better. They’re not.