A Message From The Commissioner -- Bad News

An e-mail that went out today:

A Message To All Social Security And DDS Employees

Subject: Budget Situation

As we start the 2008 fiscal year, I am sure that it is no secret to you that we are facing unprecedented workloads. We do so with our lowest staffing level in over 30 years, and these workloads will continue to grow at an increasing rate as the aging baby boomers begin to retire and reach their most disability-prone years. At the same time, Congress has given us new and non-traditional workloads, such as taking Medicare prescription drug subsidy applications.

These factors combined with years of congressional appropriations that have fallen far short of what the President has requested for this agency - almost $1 billion short - means that we must make hard decisions about which facilities and services should be scaled back, consolidated or eliminated.

Let me be candid about our current budget situation. Under any funding scenario currently being considered by Congress, we will have limited resources to maintain our current level of services and drive down the hearings backlog. In fact, under either the House or Senate bills, we will have less discretionary money to spend in FY 2008 than in FY 2007. As you know, our FY 2007 budget appropriation narrowly enabled us to avoid employee furloughs. While we expect to avoid furloughs this fiscal year, field offices and headquarters components will generally be unable to replace employees who leave and in our hearing offices, the only significant hiring will be for up to 150 ALJs and some support staff late in the fiscal year.

To some, this constraint on our ability to hire more staff may seem counterintuitive given the increases the House and Senate have provided for us -- $100 million more than the President’s budget in the House appropriations bill and $125 million more in the Senate bill. Let me explain. Social Security has a large infrastructure, including over 1,400 field and hearing offices. Mandatory cost increases, such as rent, guards, postage, pay raises and employee benefits, means that we require a minimum administrative budget increase each year of over $300 million to fund current operations. These increases, combined with requirements in the FY 2008 budget that we spend $477 million on program integr ity work (CDRs and SSI redeterminations), mean the amount of money available to the agency to invest in additional workload processing is very limited.

Even in the face of our budget shortfall, our demographic challenges and our added responsibilities, what impresses me the most is that you continue to maintain a can-do attitude. I see that can-do attitude every time I visit a field office, a hearing office, a TSC or PSC, our DDSs, the regional offices and the components here in headquarters. I also see it in the new and innovative ideas that employees come up with for dealing with our growing workloads. This is especially evident in our multi-faceted approach to reducing the disability backlog. We can all take pride in the improvement this year in DDS processing times and the virtual elimination of our FY 2007 “aged” hearing cas es (cases pending 1,000 days or more).

Despite this progress, we must continue to look for ways to streamline our business processes. We must also convince the public to take greater advantage of other ways of doing business with us, such as our online and automated telephone services. Doing so is one of the only ways we can survive the coming demographic surge. Doing so will not jeopardize the public’s ability to do business with us face-to-face when they are required to do so or the jobs of our employees.

A May 1, 2007, editorial in the New York Times noted that we are an agency that “gets high marks for productivity and efficiency.” Clearly our situation would be worse without the productivity improvements you have achieved. As an agency, we take great pride in making efficient use of our resources. Your efforts to innovate and automate, coupled with your unwavering dedication to public service, have improved productivity on average by 2.5 percent per year since 2001. In short, we continue to produce more each year with less. The Social Security Administration is a good investment, and it is regrettable that this fact is not as w idely recognized as it should be.

For many Americans, our programs are all that stand between them and poverty. The public expects and deserves the best service we can provide. With your innovation and dedication and with the support of Congress, we will continue to provide the level of service that millions of Americans have relied on for more than 70 years. I know it is often hard, but hang in there!

Michael J. Astrue

Commissioner

So, why has Astrue been telling Congress that he did not want any more money than was in President Bush's proposed budget? Social Security is likely to get $100-$125 million more than was in Bush's budget for this fiscal year, yet Astrue is still talking about closing offices, scaling back services and a near complete hiring freeze for this fiscal year. Why was he not warning Congress and the American people about this earlier!

Congress and prospective ALJs please note what Astrue says -- his agency will not be hiring 150 new ALJs and support staff until late in the fiscal year. That will probably not be enough to even replace the ALJ attrition over the next year and the hiring will not take place until almost a year from now. This is different from what Astrue told Congress just a few months ago. Why was Astrue not frank with Congress at that time about his agency's dire budget situation? There were some sparks when Astrue appeared before the House Social Security Subcommittee at that time. There could be an explosion this time.