How Important Are Social Security's ALJs?

Judges in ordinary civil and criminal courts obviously hold positions of considerable importance to the public. They send criminals to prison, and occasionally to execution. They make decisions in civil litigation that affect millions of dollars. Their actions are frequently reported in the press. How important is the work done by Social Security's Administrative Law Judges in comparison? They do not send people to prison and they are only rarely in the news. It is easy to think that their jobs do not matter that much, but once one takes a look at the dollar value of the cases they hear, it becomes obvious that they hold jobs of great importance.

Let me try to put a rough value on an average Social Security DIB claim. The total DIB benefits paid in 2003, the most recent year for which this figure is given in SSA's Annual Statistical Supplement, was $70.9 billion. Of course, this figure includes benefits for people approved over many years. The number of people shown in the Statistical Supplement as being approved for DIB in 2003 was 777,461. Those individuals will be paid benefits over many years. However, if you divide the total benefits paid in 2003 by the total number of people newly approved for DIB in 2003, you get a rough idea of the cash value of a DIB claim over the life of a beneficiary. That average figure was $91,236.73. This underestimates the value because of the inflation adjustment and because more people are going on benefits now than in prior years, meaning that the amounts paid out in the future to Social Security disability recipients will be much greater than they were in 2003, but it is still as good a rough estimate of the cash value of a DIB claim as we are likely to get.

The cash value of DIB is only part of the equation. There is also Medicare. The Medicare costs for 2003 for recipients of DIB were $19.6 billion for Part A and $16.7 billion for Part B, for a total of $36.3 billion according to CMS figures. This works out to a Medicare value per claim approved of $46,690.44.

The total for both cash benefits and Medicare would be $137,927.17. An ALJ who decided 50 cases per month would be making decisions involving about $6.9 million per month or or about $83 million per year. How many judges hearing civil cases adjudicate cases involving anything like that amount of money? How many judges in other circumstances have anything approaching the discretion of a Social Security ALJ?