A Message to All SSA and DDS Employees
Subject: SSA Brings Continuing Disability Review Workloads In-House
Today, we announced the agency will bring in-house the processing of medical continuing disability reviews (CDRs) from State Disability Determination Services (DDS) to our federal processing site called Disability Case Review (DCR). CDRs are conducted as part of SSA’s ongoing program integrity workload to determine whether a person receiving disability benefits should continue receiving them.
Centralizing medical CDRs is another important step to reduce improper payments and improve customer service. This shift allows the DDSs to focus on efficiently processing disability claim decisions and benefits for eligible individuals. Reduced wait times for state level disability decisions means eligible individuals can begin receiving their critical benefits more quickly.
DDS initial claim backlogs spiked to over 1.2 million in June of 2024. They have done great work driving down the backlog to 831,000 claimants waiting for a decision as of February 2026. This next step will maximize the DDS’s state level resources to further reduce processing time and continue to drive down the pending claims.
DCR, with its experience processing initial disability claims, reconsideration cases, and medical CDRs, will now handle medical CDRs for the entire country—allowing DDS sites to focus on reducing wait times on initial claims and reconsideration cases for citizens in their state. Non-medical CDRs, which do not require the same expertise as medical CDRs to process, will continue to be handled by the agency’s field offices and processing centers.
4 comments:
Is this a joke? DCR doesn't exist.
Is DCR the former HQ folks who accepted transfers to "front-line" "mission-critical" work and got very little training before starting to decide on reconsiderations? I can't imagine most of them will stick around once they stop getting paid at the GS 12-15 most of them are continuing to earn. Are they getting any training on the MIRS (and situations like meeting 12.05 where less development is needed)? Do they have support staff to help them gather evidence? Will they be able to schedule people for CEs? Will they also do DHO hearings when people get denied? I am not completely opposed to this if it actually works--it could help bring down DDS processing times for initial decisions--but I fear it won't be well-executed and we'll wind up with a bunch of CDR cessations (including for "failure to cooperate") that either become new claims or ALJ hearings.
I see the dark clouds of a disastrous storm. If they take the time to do it right, it may just sprinkle a bit of rain. If not, it could be a full on brutal storm against the disabled.
What could possibly go wrong?
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