Lack Of Planning

From an editorial entitled "Lack of Planning" in the Las Vegas Sun:

Federal auditors say the Social Security Administration lacks a sufficient plan to address its backlog of hundreds of thousands of disability claims. ...

The report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, says 1.5 million claims remained unresolved at the end of 2006 and 576,000 of those were backlogged meaning they had exceeded the amount of time generally needed for resolution of claims. ...

Social Security Administration officials have said that in order to hire enough staff to adequately process the backlog, the agency needs $100 million beyond the $275 million increase that Congress approved in December. Both amounts are more than President Bush has proposed in his 2008 budget, which calls for funding at the existing level.

The GAO, however, said that regardless of whether funding is increased, the agency needs to improve the poor communication that exists among the agency’s state offices, where initial claims are handled. ...

Social Security Administration officials also must improve the monitoring of claims as they enter the appeals process, the GAO says, and must adequately plan and execute programs to address the backlog something the agency has failed to do.

It is sad to think that Americans who are unable to work because of injury or illness are helplessly watching bills pile up and mortgages go into arrears while waiting years for the federal government to decide whether assistance will be granted. Congress must see to it that the GAO’s recommendations are carried out.

Note here that the GAO report has succeeded in convincing a newspaper editorial writer that most of the backlog problem at Social Security is due to poor leadership at the Social Security Administration. In a sense this is true. Social Security's leaders have been unwilling to exhibit leadership by speaking up and telling the world that they lack adequate funding. Their inability to speak the truth has been coupled with a willingness to come up with increasingly desperate "Hail Mary passes" such as re-engineering, Hearing Process Improvement (HPI) and Disability Service Improvement (DSI) to create the illusion that there is a plan to address the backlogs. We are to the point now that the current Commissioner can only come up with pathetic, meaningless phrases such as "compassionate allowances" that, even on their face, offer no solution to the backlog problem.

While Congress was considering Social Security's operating budget for the current fiscal year, Astrue was willing only to hint that his agency needed more operating funds than provided for in the President's budget, even though he knew well that Bush's budget might not even be enough to keep the backlogs from growing. This is poor leadership indeed.