5,000 to 6,000 New Jobs

A broadcast e-mail to all Social Security employees:

From: ^Commissioner Broadcast
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 5:51 PM
Subject: COMMISSIONER'S BROADCAST -- 02/17/09

A Message To All SSA And DDS Employees

Subject: Economic Stimulus Bill

President Obama has just signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly referred to as the stimulus bill. I’d like to take a few minutes of your time to explain what I think this legislation means for SSA in both the short run and long run.

In the short run, our most immediate task is to issue the $250 stimulus payments to our beneficiaries and recipients as soon as possible. The legislation is complex and requires extensive coordination with other agencies to avoid duplicate payments, but I am optimistic that we will issue payments to the public by late May—about three weeks earlier than the statute requires. We are working on a communication plan and guidance for field offices so that we can handle the inevitable questions that will arise.

The legislation provides $90 million for the administrative cost of the stimulus payments and an additional $500 million to process the additional work that we are receiving as a result of the economic downturn. However, we are still under a continuing resolution, so we must continue to operate cautiously. We believe that when Congress passes the FY 2009 appropriation in March or April, we will have an opportunity to hire between 5,000 and 6,000 new employees before the end of the year. If you have hiring responsibilities, please do not let the legislative situation translate into inaction. Post the jobs, interview the candidates, plan for training, and hope Congress provides the money to pull the hiring trigger in the next 30 – 45 days.

As part of the legislation, Congress is investing about $20 billion in health information technology across the Federal government which has important strategic implications for us. Our pilot testing at Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital in Boston demonstrates that we can become significantly more timely, efficient, and accurate if our field and DDS staff can access complete electronic medical records early in the process. We are running additional pilots in Virginia and expect to expand into many other locations in the next three years.

Congress has also provided a critical $500 million for replacement of the National Computer Center (NCC). When I first started as Commissioner, I was disturbed to learn that the NCC was physically fraying and was increasingly at risk of failure from electrical interruption or other facility issues and that we had no plan in place to address the problem. Replacement of the NCC will allow us to provide 24/7 service and avoid outages and slowdowns that disrupt service delivery. Building the new NCC with today’s technology will, in three to five years, make your lives easier and greatly improve our service to the public.

The kind of progress we have made in the past few months doesn’t happen by accident. We started planning early and extensively for the possibility of additional funding, and we have had excellent support from President Obama’s transition team and the new officials at the Office of Management and Budget. This teamwork allowed us to make an effective case to Congress in a difficult time.

We should all be grateful to the people who worked with us and for us on this bill.

Michael J. Astrue

Commissioner