When
the Social Security Administration’s inspector general investigated
allegations earlier this year that one of the agency’s senior leaders was routinely impaired on the job, six witnesses painted an alarming picture.
Theresa Gruber, a deputy commissioner overseeing around 9,000 employees and a $1.2 billion budget in the hearings and appeals operation, displayed “significant
anomalies” at work over the course of at least a year, including
slurred speech in which she “appeared intoxicated,” leaving meetings
without notice, slouching in her chair and aggressive behavior,
witnesses told investigators.
But five months after acting Social Security commissioner Kilolo
Kijakazi was presented with the internal report, which The Washington
Post obtained, Gruber remains on the job. The allegations by witnesses
were corroborated to The Post by three members of Gruber’s senior staff,
who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
In recent months, Inspector General Gail Ennis’s office has received more formal complaints
about Gruber’s conduct, according to people with knowledge of the
communications. She has continued to act erratically, three agency
employees said, and in recent weeks has missed several meetings of her
leadership team. ...
Staff members told investigators that while they did not directly
witness Gruber consuming alcohol on the job, her comportment led them to
wonder if she had been drinking. Gruber, 53, is also diabetic,
the report notes, a condition that, when poorly treated, can cause
irritability, disorientation or slurred speech. She told a close
circle of colleagues that she was dealing with medical issues stemming
from the condition, according to the report. ...
One high-ranking official interviewed by The Post described a “rudderless” department under Gruber, who sometimes does
not communicate with her staff for days at a time, the official said.
“She is MIA, and they’re not holding anyone accountable,” said this
person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to discuss matters publicly. Another official described
“delays to decision-making” and important meetings and difficulty
getting Gruber’s attention — factors they say threaten the department’s
mission to conduct impartial hearings and issue decisions on appeals
involving retirement and survivor and disability benefits for poor and
elderly Americans. ...
48 comments:
Is DA/A material?
I doubt it is material as to whether she can perform her past work.
Perhaps she should apply for disability based on her diabetes.
The first comment wins the thread, I don't care whatever else happens.
Perhaps she needs to file for SSDI. She can then fill out 100+ pages of forms that no one reads, then wait 2 years to get her hearing and hope that she does not draw Judge 17% approval.
SSA is a rudderless ship, period. And no one seems to care which is odd considering it is an agency that impacts millions of lives.
The lack of compassion among the early commenters is surprising, considering the blog's presumed audience of people who work for an Agency that is supposed to help people with medical problems or representatives who are supposed to assist people with medical problems.
Either she is struggling with the controlling her diabetes or she has a substance abuse problem likely cause by burnout/depression from trying to manage the dumpster fire that she's in charge of. Either is understandable. Neither is helpful for steering OHO, but considering how almost every manager in the private sector in the U.S. is feeling right now, understandable. The question is what to do about it. Give her an extended vacation? Ask for a resignation so someone else who can't do the job either can step in? I think it is more noteworthy that even those who are at the top of the agency are stumbling under the load of getting things done in the agency.
The lack of compassion is warranted. This women is responsible for a major section of operations at a federal agency that processes claims for hundreds of thousands disabled Americans. And at time where SSA is in a general state of disrepair, there is no room for blind "compassion" towards ineffective leaders that cannot show up for the job and help fix a broken agency. If she cannot execute her duties, she should step down or transition to a less demanding role within the agency.
Moreover, it is not compassionate to ignore performance issues that are obvious to all around her. If many SSA workers are filing complaints and the source of her impairment is unknown, it is clear she is not been sufficiently transparent about what is going on. She is not entilted to an absolute right of privacy for medical conditions that have a material impact on her job performance--especially if her symptoms can be confused with drug abuse and rumors start spreading that a non-functional alcoholic is running things. What kind of effect do you think this has on employee morale?
If I witheld for many months a major disability from my employer which had a significant impact on my ability to represent my disabled clients, I would not be met with compassion, and would also be risking my legal license. Leaders of agencies should be held to at least the same standard.
@ 1:41PM I don't review the comments as a lack of compassion but simply reflecting the mirror that the Agency uses in evaluating claims back onto the Agency. No one was disparaging Deputy Commissioner Gruber.
I certainly hope that whatever is impacting her performance can be addressed. The most disheartening part of the story is that people have apparently been seeing this unfold for months.
If you’re surprised that people who work for OHO might not have compassion for upper management, then you’re clearly not familiar with how the agency is run.
🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌
Is that supposed to be cute? First you have to have an established impairment. I have seen nothing that establishes an impairment of alcoholism.
I couldn’t agree more.
Wow, people complaining about a lack of compassion. We see a lack of compassion every day for claimants who are disabled and desperate. We see those in charge of this system do absolutely nothing to improve it. We see no concern that some ALJs approve 17 percent of claims and that too often, even for those clearly disabled, the chance of success depends on the luck of the draw as to which ALJ they get. Spend your days talking to people who clearly cannot work and telling them that you do not have an answer for how they can keep from being evicted and becoming homeless while waiting on some alleged doctor who is probably not competent to practice medicine and who might or might not spend 10 minutes on his file to arbitrarily deny his claim. No, I don't have compassion for anyone in charge of such a system. I have compasstion for those who are suffering because the system is such a mess. I have compassion for thos who are suffering because bureaucrats are more concerned with wielding power and continuing the status quo than they are in trying to make the agency serve those who desparately need the benefits that they paid for when they were working. Compassion is something that is too often hard to find within this badly broken, heartless bureaucracy. When these people start making some effort to fix this system, or buiild a new one, then I'll pay attention to you complaining about compasssion.
This micromanager tried to dismantle the ALJ union and has no regards for claimant’s due process rights. She successfully got her way to change regulations so that AC AAJs can hear disability cases and she can micromanage their workload.
Shocking that she is allowed to disappear for days, leave meetings whenever she wants to and treat her subordinates like garbage and she is still on the job. Come on COSS do your job.
@2:58 pm Compassion for anyone who has health problems is appropriate. However, even before this recent turn of events, Gruber and others in upper management at SSA have failed to do much of anything that helps to serve the public better and have done nothing to improve how employees at SSA are treated. She should have been fired long before this recent turn of events.
@9:27
2:58 here. I agree with that compassion for anyone with health problems is appropriate. But context/mens rea matters. If she is deliberately hiding her health impairments from the agency, and knows said impairments are having a marked impact on her work performance, she is not deserving of same level of compassion. Because at that point she is knowingly/recklessly causing harm to the agency and the Americans that agency is supposed to serve. Donald Trump is the most extreme example of this. He clearly suffers from some kind of mental disorder, but his actions harm millions of people and destabilizes our constitutional system. He is not deserving of the same level of compassion as my veteran client with a similar narcissistic personality disorder (and who has caused far less harm and is at least trying to improve their anti-social behavior).
Let her case go to an AAJ instead so the AAJ can propose an allowance only for their manager to overturn it and issue a denial.
TG's apparent erratic behavior and ineffectual leadership isn't the only major, troubling info this commissioner (and TG herself, and other high level OHO management) has seen and done absolutely nothing about. Wait for another OHO bombshell (that they were aware of and have as of yet still done nothing about) to drop this summer.
This just goes to show that SSA's "See something? Say Something" logo is worthless.
This is no surprise to me that someone will accuse her of such. After 30 yrs working with SSA, I've seen many employees being accused of something of this type. Usually because they want someone else in the position. SSA management are the worst, they will blackball you in a minute.
I know Theresa Gruber and have always liked her although she directly lied to me in a meeting two years ago when I asked her if the plan at SSA was to continue with video and telephone hearings after COVID was over. She said they had no such plans. Yeah, right.
Operations failure as SSI starting with the phone system collapsed in February reflect a management that is concerned with issues of equity over issues of basic competence and basic functioning of the program.
If half of what is reported is true, then Gruber needs to be replaced, should have been replaced well before now. I can have compassion for her personally but the job needs to be done and if she is not doing it, then someone needs to take her place. And the same goes for Grace Kim, Deputy Commissioner for Operations, and the ACOSS who seems to have no ability to actually manage the Agency.
What she told you about video hearings probably wasn't a lie, but an admission that we have no strategy. If you think anyone in the agency has a plan for what happens two years, let alone two months, out, then you're delusional.
I see this situation with TG as "you reap what you sow" considering she has been instrumental in blackballing others and destroying other people's reputations. I would not be surprised if none of this was true, and it is now her turn to be blackballed. If there is one thing that SSA is good at, it is making up falsehoods and perpetuating lies to ruin people. I know TG has had health issues for years, so it would also not surprise me if her health was really deteriorating due to the stress and trauma caused by the narcissistic behavior and gas-lighting that is prevalent throughout agency leadership (this is not speculation, this is fact that can be confirmed by anyone who has been employed there). Regardless of the scenario, I feel bad that she is sick, I would not wish that on anyone, but I do not feel sympathy for her situation because of all the wrong she has inflicted on others - things I have witnessed first-hand. And if she is being pushed out, it is because Nancy Berryhill is itching to replace her with Sylviane Haldiman.
Say It Again Louder For The People In The Back.
This article seems to be a hit piece sourced by disgruntled underlings or jealous peers. The troubles at OHO started long before Ms. Gruber's time and remain hard to solve...Commitment and resources must come from higher up.
I shake my head whenever I read sweeping comments about changing management as a solution to years of budget cuts, lack of effective legislative policy changes and increasing difficulty in recruitment and retention of line employees. Don’t blame SSA for all of that as it effects all federal agencies. Ms. Gruber should have due process and let’s face it, the WAPO article with the innuendo and lack of evidence wasn’t even thinly veiled as a hit piece. Not sure who you are but this is a similar theme to other posts I has ever seen that seem uninformed, personal and agenda driven. Grace Kim is an effective leader. It is easy to snipe without specifics from the comfort of an anonymous blog post.
Nancy Berryhill may be itching to replace TG with Haldiman... while Sylviane is a nice person, she is totally clueless about how OHO operates...
This article is a copy and paste job of an agency report. The only person interview said she was "innovative, decisive and empowering leader who won praise for overseeing efforts to reduce a well-publicized backlog of disability hearings and more recently for transitioning her employees to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic." Erratic behavior and short temper could be due to diabetes. What passes for journalism is trash. Smells of a hit job leaked to an agency mouthpiece at the post.
Someone mentioned that this lady should get "due process." Let's give her due process in the same manner claimants get it with biased judges who are permitted to make decisions using whatever criteria they want, as the numbers prove. Let's give her due process like reliance on 40 year old job data that even the BLS says is unreliable. Let's give her due process like unqualified incompetent doctors denying claims with scant, if any review of the records. Let's give her due process like an agency bias that believes every treating physician, thousands across the country, are lying on a regular basis to help their patients get disability. I could go on and on but I don't have the time. Really, SSA and due process? Perhaps it is only for employees of the agency.
Opinions like that aren’t helpful
Hmmm, fascinating. So basically, Berryhill is the powerbroker who's still in-essence calling the shots at SSA? Honey, Kijakazi better watch her back.
Pat Nagle should be commended for the backlog reduction - he was the key leader in accomplishing reducing the backlog... TG would still be treading water or drowning in a growing backlog were it not for Nagle taking charge of that task...
No fan of OHO higher-ups, but I'm still waiting to hear from someone who experienced this erratic behavior. Also, although I generally trust WAPO's reporting, I've yet to see an article from them about SSA that wasn't one-sided.
Ok, will try to be more helpful. Let's give her due process like field office employees constantly lying about not receiving paperwork when we have proof they did. Let's give her due process like field office employees failing and refusing to process paperwork after multiple requests and lying to a congressman's office about it. Let's give her due process like ALJs who are not medically trained thinking they know more than the treating physicians. Let's give her due process like the way in which a claimant's chance of success depends on which ALJ the draw -get the 17 percenter, too bad, just have to get used to being sick and homeless, perhaps you'll die by the time your next app gets to a hearing. Let's give her due process like the thousands who do die while waiting years to get benefits. Let's give her due process like the thousands who become homeless waiting years to get benefits. How about we find the ALJ with the lowest approval numbers int eh country, have her examined by the DDS doctor whose license was revoked twice due to substance abuse and who currently only holds a license that allows her to work for SSA and works for DDS in two states to give us her opinion on Ms. Gruber's health. Would she put her future in the same hands claimants are forced to trust? Okay, got to get back to work. Hope this is helpful enough for you.
@3:15 AM, July 14, 2022 - people at SSA speak anonymously because, let's face it, we all know what happens to those who voice their opinions openly. And yes, that is the biggest problem with SSA leadership: they always want to blame their ineffectiveness on budget cuts, policy, and attrition. Well, I got news for you - this is the environment we live in now and it is not going to change! I remember discussions about projections and budget cuts happening decades ago. True leaders would have been creating a plan to deal with the issues back then. COMPETENT LEADERSHIP in any business or organization means evolving, seeing the future landscape and developing new, innovative ways to get the work done, not sitting back and waiting for SSA to somehow regain the resources it once had.
@12:38 Many have experienced the behavior, just afraid of facing this exact situation: nothing done to address a problem, but a high risk of retaliation against those who do speak up. The article was accurate and, if anything, erred on the side of caution.
100 percent
Agree - show her the same compassion she showed those “beneath” her on the SSA food chain = less than zero
Lol - Nagle may be next. Does anyone believe he has nothing to do with this Gruber hit job?
It is interesting to read these comments and easy to tell who has real experience with management at Ssa from those who did not. If you have not walked in these shoes you have no room to comment. Try obtaining an executive position at SSA and experience the challenges yourself.
@11:43 -"If you have not walked in these shoes you have no room to comment. Try obtaining an executive position at SSA and experience the challenges yourself."
Perhaps those in SSA management need to walk a mile in a claimant's shoes. By your logic, they have no room to comment on what claimant's face.
In fact some do. I worked in SSA management for 10 years, in a Field Office for 7 years and in a Disability Determination Services for 28 years. As a result of this experience I am now a claimant advocate
Doubt Nagle has anything to do with the “hit job” - ever heard the saying that the devil you know is better than the one you don’t….
And Gruber has managed to show up for some meetings since the article came out so I imagine she is as secure in her position as she has always been…ACOSS seems to have a let’s all play nice and not hold anyone accountable so it is doubtful anything will change.
Terri Gruber has a degree in Literature not Law. She’s out of her element. Meanwhile, we have attorney’s at the DC levels working in budget and facilities management.
She died.
Despite how those felt about personally Gruber good or bad, she was dedicated to her job and delivered outstanding business results. She cared about employees those in her position now do not, the goodie boy crew is back in full force.
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