Disappointing News From Social Security Subcommittee Hearing

I found yesterday's Social Security Subcommittee hearing a bit disappointing for the following reasons:

• Commissioner Astrue wants to hire only 150 new Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) with support staff to go with them in the next fiscal year. When Subcommittee members pressed him on whether this would be enough, he said that this was the most that Social Security could absorb in one year. He did not say anything like, "Under the budget I expect to get, that is the best I think we can do" or "If you can get me another $100 million, I can hire another 200 ALJs and staff to go with them." There is some uncertainty about exactly what Social Security's budget will be for the next fiscal year, but Astrue seemed certain that regardless of the budget, 150 new ALJs and staff to go with them was all he intended to hire.

Hiring 150 new ALJs is not enough to make much of a dent in Social Security's hearing backlog. It is little more than enough to keep the backlog from getting worse. If there is no more hiring than this, the wait for an ALJ hearing on election date 2008 will be only slightly less than it is now.

I do not discount the difficulty in hiring, training and housing 150 new ALJs and the staff to go with them in the next fiscal year. That will be a challenge. Hiring a good many more would be very difficult. Finding enough office space to house more would be a huge challenge. However, the Subcommittee seems to share my view that this is a crisis. In a crisis, one must do extraordinary things. I suggest that the appropriations bill for Social Security should earmark $250 million for more ALJs and the staff to go with them. This would force Social Security to treat the hearing backlog as a crisis and undertake a crash program to deal with it. I can only make a wild guess on this, but I would guess that this sort of earmark would triple the number of ALJs and support staff hired. That would make a huge difference.

• Astrue made only a vague mention of ideas that he has for reducing the hearing backlog other than hiring more personnel. He said that he had something pending at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and that he could not say anything until he heard back from them.

At the conference of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives two weeks ago, other Social Security officials mentioned using senior attorneys to review requests for hearing and allow strong claims, restarting re-recon, allowing use of short form allowances and encouraging bench decisions. To the best of my knowledge, the only one of these that would require new regulations which would require OMB approval would be the senior attorney program -- and, if Astrue really wanted to get that going quickly, he could just call the senior attorney decisions reconsideration decisions and do it without OMB approval. Why did Astrue not mention these other ideas? Why is he waiting on OMB approval for restarting senior attorneys instead of simply calling these senior attorney decisions reconsideration decisions? There is no guarantee that OMB will approve senior attorney decisions. OMB officials do not have to testify at Congressional hearings. OMB is part of the White House. Traditionally, OMB has been leery of anything that accelerates the process of getting disabled people on Social Security disability benefits. We will have to see what Commissioner Astrue has to say when he testifies before the Senate Finance Committee. That hearing has not been scheduled yet, but should come up before the end of the month.

• Commissioner Astrue said that he wants to centralize a good part of the ALJ corps.

Why centralize? Falls Church, VA, which is where the central offices for the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review is located, has high real estate costs and terrible traffic for commuting. Would ALJs want to work at a large ALJ farm with dozens of other ALJs? It is going to be hard to hire ALJs to work in Falls Church. Falls Church is in the Eastern time zone, which would be inconvenient for holding video hearings for claimants on the West coast. There is no need for centralizing ALJs to deal with workload imbalances. An ALJ at an ODAR hearing office in Miami can hold a video hearing for a claimant in Detroit just as easily as an ALJ in ODAR's central office in Falls Church. On the whole, centralizing a large group of ALJs in Falls Church seems both unnecessary and unworkable.

So why would Commissioner Astrue be thinking of centralizing ALJs? I can think of only one reason. He likes the Medicare model. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has centralized ALJs. The reason appears to be a strong desire to control the ALJs. The feeling is that if ALJs are centralized that they can be closely managed and controlled by central office brass. This reflects a strong distrust for ALJs. This is a bad sign.