The National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives has posted biographies of many high Social Security officials. The information was almost certainly provided by the Social Security Administration. The biography of Lisa de Soto, who heads Social Security's Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR), is quite unusual. Take a look.
Lisa de Soto is [was] SSA's General Counsel. [She is now head of ODAR.] She is an experienced attorney who has held a number of senior management positions in the private and federal sector. She specialized in procurement, bilateral and multilateral negotiations, conflict resolution and organizational change. Most recently, Lisa was the Country Director for the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Transition Initiatives in Nigeria. Before that, she served as the General Counsel of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and as Deputy Assistant General Counsel for Contract and Commodity Management for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C. Lisa received her law degree from the University of California at Los Angeles, where she was executive editor of the UCLA-Alaska Law Review.What a bizarre background for someone in her position! How did she end up where she is?
Those who have worked under her are not really fans of Ms. Desoto. She just about ran OGC into the ground and will do the same with ODAR. She made numerous comments to long time OGC employees about the need for those employees to get out of OGC and move on, yet when she gets her chance, she takes a career SES position as head of ODAR. Ms. DeSoto did her best to rid OGC of union involvment (at least at the attorney level) but will now have to directly deal with the morass of union involvment in all of the aspects of ODAR(clerical, ALJ and the atty adviser association). Let the fun begin. The DeSoto debacle is only beginning.....
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