Let’s Circle Back To This

      I want to circle back to something that was in the Washington Post article about Social Security’s decision to scrap their plan to reduce or eliminate the consideration of age in making disability determinations. There was this interesting sentence:

… Among the Trump administration’s concerns with using the new [occupational] data is that younger disabled people with cognitive and mental impairments would probably qualify for fewer jobs, potentially leading more of them to be awarded benefits, the former Social Security executive said. …

     OK, so it sounds like they collected data showing that more people with cognitive and mental impairments should be awarded disability benefits but they’re not going to act on that data or even release it to the public. Does that sound like the right thing to do? If the data is subpoenaed for an ALJ hearing shouldn’t it be produced?

     I recall a non-disability case where I asked the ALJ to obtain some information about the case from a field office. The field office sent back a memo literally asking “Don’t you understand that the attorney is only trying to get his client approved?” Would that be the agency’s response to a request for the occupational data that they spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars obtaining?

     You might think that an attorney raising a fuss over this might be endangering their older clients since the plan to reduce or eliminate consideration of age might come back. That sounds too speculative to me to take into consideration but if an attorney has clients with conflicting interests, you don’t solve the conflict by deciding which clients to not represent zealously. You solve it by withdrawing from cases. That’s non-negotiable.