Apr 14, 2021

Why I'm Concerned About How Social Security Spends Increased Appropriations

      In an earlier post I mentioned my fear that Andrew Saul would attempt to spend the increased appropriations likely to come Social Security's way next year on contractors rather than on increasing the federal workforce in order to reduce backlogs. Let me go through two episodes from Social Security history that will explain my concern.

     When Jo Anne Barnhart became Commissioner of Social Security in November 2001 Social Security was suffering from bad backlogs at the hearing level which were a matter of great Congressional concern. The obvious thing to do about the backlogs would have been to hire additional employees. However, Barnhart, a highly skilled snake oil salesperson, put forward two plans to avoid doing anything of the sort. First, she wanted to streamline the process. If you were around for that fiasco, you'll remember that Barnhard delayed and delayed in producing a plan to streamline the process. She only came up with one as her term as Commissioner was coming to an end. Once people saw her plan, just about everyone's response was "Are you kidding me? In what way is this any better?" She made sure that none of her plan was to be implemented until after she left office. Once she was gone, her plan was quickly abandoned as unworkable. Second, Barnhart, knowing that Congress wanted to spend money on solving the backlog, proposed spending huge sums of money making a switch from paper files for disability claims to electronic files. Doing this wasn't a bad thing. However, there has to be some kind of balance. In Barnhart's case, there was no balance. She lavished money on contractors developing an electronic file system while refusing to hire additional employees to actually get the work done in the meantime. The result was that backlogs soared to previously unimaginable levels. It was taking about a year to get a hearing when Barnhart took office, which was already way too long. By the time she left office it was up to insane levels -- about two years on average and worse in some areas of the country! Even after the electronic files came into effect, there was never any proof that they improved productivity, even though I'm sure that Social Security would have loudly trumpeted that proof had it existed.

     At least, Barnhart's spending on electronic files had long term benefit even if done in a way that caused disaster for six or seven years. Michael Astrue was responsible for a plan that spent a lot of money on contractors but which produced little if any long term benefit for Social Security. The Social Security Administration is heavily dependent on computers. By the time Astrue took office, Social Security's National Computer Center building, where the heavy duty computing was done, was antiquated. Social Security also lacked any offsite backup in case of disaster. Astrue proposed and got Congress to fund not one but two hugely expensive computer centers, with the second one near me, somewhere near Durham (the address is apparently a secret, not that I have any interest in visiting it), as a backup. These may seem like necessary expenses but have you heard of cloud computing? By the time Social Security was constructing these big, expensive computer centers (around a billion dollars if I remember correctly), other government agencies were rapidly dumping their computers centers in favor of cloud computing. Don't take my word for it that Social Security's data centers were unnecessary. The guy who was in charge of building the National Computer Center became a whistleblower because he felt the project was oversold and wasteful. Another guy that Social Security hired to develop a computing strategy vision for the agency was fired because he kept saying Social Security was wasting money on the computer centers.

     It's not that I think that Barnhart wanted to create a disaster or that Astrue wanted to waste money. It's that I think they and other Republicans have two simple, unshakeable convictions:

  • Federal employees = Bad
  • Federal contractors = Good

     My opinion is that while federal contractors have their place, federal employees are the ones who actually get the work done. To cope with backlogs, we first need an adequate workforce at Social Security. We should spend money on federal contractors to the extent they help federal employees get the work done. Don't put the cart before the horse by insisting that additional funding has to be spent on contractors rather than on workforce.

     I fear that with additional appropriations coming Andrew Saul will be very receptive to federal contractors trying to sell him on grand, expensive schemes and very unreceptive to any plans coming up through the bureaucracy for increasing Social Security's workforce. 

     You may not have seen the actual appropriations language the Congress uses when it gives money for Social Security's operations but I have. The legislative language typically imposes few limits or restrictions on how Social Security Commissioners spend the agency's operating funds. I don't trust Andrew Saul. There's no reason Democrats in Congress should trust Andrew Saul. The next appropriations bill should force Saul to use additional funding to hire an adequate workforce. Saul should be prevented from making significant new commitments for contractors without specific outside approval.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just a point of balance. At the time when the new data centers were being proposed and planned for, cloud computing was in no way able to handle the security needs of SSA nor of the rest of government. SSA did some cloud computing but the cloud infrastructure for civilian use has only recently been certified as secure enough. And moving processes from mainframes to a cloud environment is pretty damn complex. And While people could disagree and be whistleblowers on parts of that activity, it doesn't mean that their objections were valid at the time even though the industry has now made their objections meaningful. So your inferred slight of that effort isn't really on the mark. And as for contractors, when it comes to IT there is a balance between the growing and feeding of feds with the needed tech skills (and the time it takes) and the need to hire specialized skills and be able to let them go when the job is done. Especially being able to let them go. Heck the good contractors often become feds and SSA gets the skills anyway, after someone else paid for and groomed the employee.

Anonymous said...

The SSA wastes money = the sky is blue.

Anonymous said...

I think we have to give Astrue some credit here. He asked Congress for money to hire, was given it, and expanded hearing operations. The increased staff did in fact shorten the wait time for hearings.

Anonymous said...

I cannot agree with you more. SSA needs more workers, right now everyone is doing 3 things at the same time and they are feeling totally overwhelmed. I speak with them about my cases on a daily basis and I can hear their frustration.

Anonymous said...

Accepting all of that as true, OHO has become a jobs program for lawyers. For the better part of a year make work is being created and assigned in lieu of actual work. And any possible surge of cases to the hearing level has yet to materialize and would seem to be a long way off. Yet there was no early out offered last year or, so far, this year that might help cull the herd the easy way. More staffing for OHO? I hope not.

Anonymous said...

@4:48 pm Apparently there was a lot of hiring of lawyers at OHO prior to the pandemic that was not needed. So, the pandemic just compounded that problem.

Anonymous said...

@6:53 pm In my opinion, the hiring of lawyers several years prior to the pandemic was warranted, as total cases pending at the hearing level remained significant and decisions awaiting writing were at or near record levels. But that stopped being the case even before the pandemic and the overstaffing was clear as the impact of the pandemic began to be seen at the hearing level. Now, a year later, lawyer staffing relative to workload is, frankly, a joke. I think OHO should be trying to make room for its 2018 contract hires, in whom it has invested several years of training and experience, rather than keeping everybody onboard, even those who will be leaving in the short term and are prepared to do so now if not penalized for doing so.




Anonymous said...

I'd note that the agency has a lot more ALJs than it needs at the moment. And paying them to sit around and hold 5-6 hearings per week costs a lot more than it does to pay the AAs performing pre-hearing outreach.

But we all know that this is temporary, and will all be flipped on its head in relatively short order. Also, most of the lawyers hired in the past few years were hired on fairly short NTEs that are expiring soon and can't be renewed/extended due to the freeze. So the sky is not falling here.

Anonymous said...

A bunch of people who have never run anything larger that a strip mall office pondering how best to run a national agency is absolutely hilarious!

Anonymous said...

Sounds about as useful as experience running a chain of women's shoe stores into the ground, which is the sole extent of Saul's relevant experience.