Yesterday's Hearing

Videos of yesterday's House Social Security Subcommittee hearing are now available for your viewing pleasure in bite size pieces:

• Chairman of Social Security Subcommittee, Congressman Earl Pomeroy
• Government Accountability Office, Barbara Bovbjerg
• President of National Council of Social Security Management Associations (NCSSMA), Joe Dirago
• Secretary of NCSSMA, Billie Armenta
• American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Witold Skwierczynski
• AFGE, Daniel Woosley
• Office of Inspector General, Social Security Administration (SSA), Patrick O'Carroll
• The Commissioner of SSA (Michael Astrue)

Here are a couple of excerpts from a Washington Post article on yesterday's hearing:

If you work in an agency where the number of employees has increased a little bit while the amount of work has jumped a lot, there are going to be some unhappy campers among the staff and the customers.

That's the situation at the Social Security Administration, according to several witnesses at a House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing Thursday.

But one witness had a different opinion, demonstrating the old maxim that where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit. If you sit in the boss's office, as does SSA Commissioner Michael J. Astrue, you can paint a considerably more optimistic view of the agency's operations than employees and independent evaluators. ...

That kind of work environment produces great stress, representative of the American Federation of Government Employees told the panel. Daniel Woosley is a social insurance specialist in the Louisville office and serves as a SWAT team reserve police officer in his county's sheriff's department.

"Working in the Louisville West [SSA] office is incredibly stressful," said Woosley, who also is executive vice president of AFGE Local 3984. "I've made statements in the past that I feel less stress while working with the SWAT team -- and having weapons pointed at me by perpetrators -- than I do going into the Social Security office every day."