Another GAO Report

From Social Security Disability: Additional Performance Measures and Better Cost Estimates Could Help Improve SSA's Efforts to Eliminate Its Hearing Backlog, a report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO):

SSA’s Plan should help the agency reduce its hearings-level backlog, but the likelihood that SSA will eliminate the backlog within its projected time-frame depends on the extent to which SSA’s assumptions for improved administrative law judge (ALJ) hiring, availability, and productivity are achieved in practice. Both SSA and GAO believe that the agency has about a 78 percent chance of eliminating the backlog, that is, reducing the number of hearings-level pending claims below 466,000 claims, by the end of fiscal year 2013—SSA’s target date—if those assumptions are fully realized. However, SSA’s assumptions project higher levels of performance achieved than recent experience—from fiscal year 2008 to April 2009. ALJ productivity improvements are especially important to SSA’s reaching its goal. The likelihood that SSA will eliminate the backlog by its target date changes under different scenarios for achieving its ALJ hiring, availability, and productivity goals. If SSA achieves its average ALJ productivity, but not its ALJ hiring and availability goals, GAO estimated that SSA’s chances are reduced from about 78 percent to about 53 percent. Conversely, if SSA achieves its goals for ALJ hiring and availability, but not for average productivity, its chances are about 34 percent. If SSA is unable to achieve any of its ALJ workforce and performance goals, the likelihood of the agency eliminating the hearings-level backlog by its target date drops to about 14 percent.

GAO is foolish enough to think that the chances of reducing the backlogs can be reduced to percentages and that Social Security's projections of productivity gains have a relationship to reality. It has seemed clear to me for many years that Social Security figures out how much budget it can expect to get and how many people it can hire and then works backwards to figure out how much productivity it needs to project to meet some abstract backlog goal.