Is A Replacement For The Grid Regs Coming?

      There are rumors that at least some portion of Social Security's upper level management wants to move ahead with a plan to replace the "grid regulations" that provide a framework for disability adjudication or at least to amend them. We can't know whether the Commissioner wants this or whether the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will be willing to approve it. It would be a big move if it happens.

     In a sense, I'm happy to get some movement. The obsolescence of the Dictionary Of Occupational Titles (DOT) that formed the backbone of the grid regs has made some move inevitable. In a sense it's hard to understand how we've gotten this far without replacing the grid regs. On the other hand, everyone, and I do mean everyone, has been scared of what follows the grid regs. 

    The rumors about what would replace the grid regs -- something basically saying that if you can perform sedentary work you're not disabled regardless of your age, education or work experience or only if you're 55 or older -- fills me with great concern. However, there may be nuances in what's under consideration that we don't know.

    Here are some thoughts that occur to me.

I -- This Won't Happen Overnight 

    Under the Administrative Procedure Act there is a process to go through before new regulations can be adopted. The first step is for the agency to write up the proposed regs and their justification in a document called a Notice of Proposed Rule-Making or NPRM. This will be a major proposal so the NPRM should be a fairly lengthy, well reasoned document. Of course, the Trump Administration is known for slipshod work so who knows? 

    The Commissioner must approve the NPRM. He's a Social Security novice so this complicated proposal will be difficult for him to review. If there's anyone with any sense surrounding him at Social Security he's going to be warned that the NPRM would be important and controversial. The problem is that an environment of intimidation has been created. Can the Commissioner receive good advice in such an environment?

    Once the Commissioner approves the NPRM, it is sent to OMB, specifically to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for approval. OIRA is the most important agency you’ve never heard of. I'd like to think that there are still enough professionals at OIRA to warn that the NPRM will be highly controversial and could have disastrous political results once it comes into effect but they may also be intimidated or ignored.

    If OMB approves the NPRM, it is published in the Federal Register and the public is allowed to comment on the proposal. There will be literally thousands of comments on something as controversial as this. These comments are all supposed to be read and analyzed. Dozens of different issues will be raised.  The agency must respond to each of these issues in the Federal Register if it is to finally adopt the proposed regs. The responses have to be thought out carefully since everything about these regs will be challenged in federal court. You can't publish one justification in the Federal Register and try another one in federal court. At least that would be a bad plan. Social Security's staff has been greatly thinned out, including its staff involved in rule-making. In the past I would have expected it to take over a year to deal with the comments made on such a major NPRM. I have no idea now. This thing could easily take longer than Trump has left in office. It would be amazing if this could be finished before the next Congress begins.

II -- It Isn't Over Once The NPRM Is Adopted

    Major regulations are difficult to implement. Once you start training staff on the new regs, questions come up that you never considered. There may be questions that you just finessed in the Federal Register without ever giving a real answer but you can’t finesse them anymore. The answers to these questions can have a major impact on the impact of the regs. The questions are likely to be technical enough that they will have to be answered by experienced staff rather than political appointees. Experienced staff will probably be a lot less hostile to claimants than the people who thought up the plan.

III — The Courts Get Their Say

    As I've said above, every facet of a replacement for the grid regs will be examined closely by the federal courts. You might think that the federal courts, or at least the Supreme Court, would be highly sympathetic to the Trump Administration but that's not something you can assume. Those who have taken Social Security cases to the federal courts can tell you that you can't predict how Social Security cases will be decided based upon which President nominated the judge or judges hearing the case.

    One huge issue presented by a plan to effectively remove consideration of age, education and work experience is that the statute specifically requires consideration of age, education and work experience. How do you get around that? You could say that "in our adjudicative experience" none of those factors matter. Social Security has long used that phrase "adjudicative experience" as an all purpose explanation for anything they want to do but for which they lack an explanation. I don't see how that will cut it here. There's too much at stake. Is there a strong argument for what is proposed?

    There's also the issue of the reliability of whatever occupational information system (OIS) Social Security puts forward as a basis for what they're doing.  The OIS in question has been developed in secret under the command of the Social Security Administration. There have been serious questions about Social Security's OIS plan for, how long has it been, 20+ years? It sounds exactly like the sort of thing the federal courts would view with deep suspicions.

IV. The Administration Should Be Wary Of Political Consequences 

    Anything that dramatically reduces the percentage of disability claimants approved for benefits would be extremely controversial. I'm one of the few people still around who can tell you that the most controversial thing the Reagan Administration did was to make it much more difficult to get on disability benefits and to stay on them once they were approved. If this Administration wants to proceed with an anti-claimant plan, it is poking a hornets nest, especially if it is dealing with a House of Representatives or Senate controlled by Democrats.

    There are reasons this didn't happen in the prior Trump Administration. 

V -- The Administration Should Be Wary Of Unintended Consequences 

    I was working for Social Security in a position then called staff attorney, writing decisions for an ALJ, when the grid regs came into effect in 1979. There was concern leading up to the effective date that the grid regs would greatly reduce the number of disability claims approved. I wondered what the effect would be. As I recall, I pulled the last 100 decisions I had drafted and looked to see what effect the grid regulations would have had on them. I found that it would have changed five decisions from a denial to an allowance with none going in the opposite direction. I didn't put much effort into spreading what I had found but I think word did get about and allayed some fears. As it turned out, my unscientific study was right on the money. The allowance rate did go up by about 5%.

    Trump Administration officials may want to be evil but do they know enough about Social Security to accomplish the evil they have in mind? Back in 1979 I'm pretty sure that higher Social Security officials expected lower allowance rates under the grid regs but that's not what they got. The devil is in the details and the details are the specialty of people like me, not the Commissioner and his inexperienced aides.

Probably Not Good News For The Commissioner

      From Government Executive:

When a member of the public has an issue accessing a federal benefit or service, they often contact their member of Congress for help. That assistance is called constituent casework. 

If an agency receives a lot of requests from lawmakers on behalf of their constituents about a specific issue, or if there are multiple constituent cases coming from the same area, that could be a signal to officials that there’s a problem. 

 But actually using this data to pinpoint systemic problems with agency operations is difficult because there’s no database to collect such information from across Capitol Hill offices. The House of Representatives, however, could soon change that. 

 House Digital Services, a tech team within the chamber’s support office, has been working since 2024 on Case Compass, which is a dashboard that will display anonymous constituent casework data from across participating Capitol Hill offices. On Sept. 9, the House unveiled a framework to aggregate such information. …

     The Commissioner probably isn’t interested in seeing a database tracking increases in complaints about his agency 

The DOGE Chaos

      From the New York Times (emphasis added):

At the height of its power, the Department of Government Efficiency was operating out of headquarters that had become a haphazard scene of armed guards, makeshift bedrooms, children’s toys and windows obscured with garbage bags, according to a new report from Senate Democrats that accuses President Trump’s federal cost-cutting operation of putting Americans’ data security at risk. 

Staff members for Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, reported that young DOGE aides living and working on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration building sat at workstations eight or 10 laptops deep, where they were able to operate on Starlink networks that could have allowed them to work without being tracked. … 

In one instance, the report cites whistle-blower disclosures alleging that Jon Koval, a former DOGE employee at the Social Security Administration, asked about the possibility of uploading data to the cloud so that it could be retrieved by the Department of Homeland Security, but was rebuffed. One whistle-blower also said that data from Social Security’s numerical identification system, called Numident, did show up at the Homeland Security Department in a strange format, suggesting that it was not shared via a normal interagency process. …

    And from the report itself:

... An internal SSA risk assessment determined that the likelihood of a data breach with “catastrophic adverse effect” is between 35 and 65 percent. ...

During agency site visits, staff observed each DOGE workspace cordoned off with armed guards, providing an unusual layer of protection to their activities. Staff were not provided clear reasons why this was needed. Beyond security, DOGE workspaces were either completely or largely empty as their staff were able to work remotely at their discretion (despite strict in-office requirements for regular federal employees, in many cases without adequate office space).  ...

Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act Passes In Senate

     From a press release:

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed Sens. John Kennedy (R-La.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.)’s Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act, which would save hard-earned taxpayer money by curbing erroneous payments to individuals who have passed away.  ...

The Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act would permanently amend the Social Security Act to allow the Social Security Administration to share the Death Master File—a record of deceased individuals—with the Treasury Department’s Do Not Pay system. This change would rein in the government’s ability to make improper payments to deceased people in the future. ...

    Are there some safeguards here? Doesn't this make it easier to cut off benefits to anyone the Trump Administration wishes? There are standards for the Death Master File. Are there any legal standards for the Treasury system? Maybe everyone voted for this because they halfway believed Elon Musk's lies about payments to deceased people. Who is actually going to be cut off benefits? Dead people or people the Trump Administration wants to punish without affording them due process?

"A Lot Of Us Are Medicated"

     The New York Times has a long piece on service delivery problems at the Social Security Administration. Below are some excerpts. Note that I haven't included excerpts talking about the experiences of actual people although those are quite interesting.

... Frontline workers, whose morale had already been low for years, say they are asked on a daily basis to do more with less.

“In my 24 years, I have never seen it so bad to the point that a lot of us are medicated,” said one Social Security technical expert who works in a field office in the Midwest and takes an anti-anxiety medication daily. She asked not to be identified because she didn’t want to jeopardize her position and scheduled early retirement. “We openly talk about it,” she said. “We joke about it, because what else can you do?”

The agency’s recent effort to reduce wait times for callers to the national 800 number has worsened their plight. ...

 “There is a tipping point, where you can’t do more unless you are going to cut corners and not do the work properly,” said Heather Hughes, a local union president in Raleigh, N.C. “We don’t want to do that. We know these are people and these are people’s lives and livelihoods.” ...

“The process to get a digital S.S.N. into the phone is one of my No. 1 priorities,” Andy Sriubas, who was recently appointed to lead the agency’s vast field operations, said on an internal call with agency staffers also reviewed by The Times. Mr. Sriubas was most recently an executive at Outfront Media, a billboard company, but said he worked with Mr. Bisignano at JPMorgan during the financial crisis. ...

Preliminary findings from a study by a group of academic researchers to be released in October said that access to services — while never easy — had worsened since early 2025, especially for that population.

“Respondents overwhelmingly reported that compounding administrative breakdowns — loss of staff with specialized knowledge, rapidly changing policies, significantly worse processing delays, more frequent errors with emails and faxes routinely lost — have made even basic tasks impossible,” said Katie Savin, the lead author and assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento. The results are “devastating consequences to claimants who’ve experienced hunger, eviction, and loss of health care as a result.” ...

Commissioner Bisignano has said the average wait time on the national 800 number had already been reduced to single digits during his first 100 days, down from 30 minutes last year.

But the metric being cited is actually the “average speed of answer,” which doesn’t include the time customers wait for a callback, an option the vast majority of callers use and that took roughly an hour, on average, in August. That statistic is no longer on the website, but it reflected improvements in July and August, just as more field workers were asked to work the phones.

Call wait times have been removed from the agency website, but internal agency logs reviewed by The Times show many callers are still lingering.

On Sept. 3, for example, the only time callers had a single-digit wait time was at 8 a.m. Later, by 5 p.m., the average wait had stretched to an hour and 18 minutes, and the longest a caller waited that day was more than three hours, according to internal agency data. ...

OK, Mr. Bisignano, You Want To Reduce Payment Errors, What Are You Going To Do About This?

      From Follow-up on Dually Entitled Beneficiaries and Family Maximum Provisions, a report by Social Security’s Inspector General:

 … This is a follow up to our 2014 audit of the Adjustment of Monthly Benefits Under the Family Maximum Provisions. For our current audit, we identified 23,603 Social Security records with dually entitled beneficiaries and at least 2 other beneficiaries who had a date of entitlement of May 2013 or later and were in current pay status as of May 2023. We selected a random sample of 225 records for review.  …

We estimate SSA correctly adjusted benefits in accordance with the family maximum provisions for 15,211 of the 23,603 wage earners’ records in our population (64 percent); however, SSA improperly paid approximately $114 million to spouses and children on 8,392 wage earners’ records (36 percent). …

Percentage Of Population On Social Security

From Visual Capitalist

Chief of Disability Adjudication Position Advertised

    Here are the job duties for the position of Chief of Disability Adjudication currently being advertised by Social Security:

The Chief of Disability Adjudication (DA) oversees an organization responsible for providing the basic framework and mechanisms through which individuals and organizations file for disability under Titles II, VIII, and XVI of the Social Security Act as amended, which includes initial applications and reconsideration requests whose decisions are rendered by the State Disability Determination Services (DDS). DA also provides the basic framework and mechanisms through which individuals and organizations who are dissatisfied with determinations affecting their rights to and amounts of benefits, or their participation in benefit Programs administered by the Agency under the Social Security Act, including initial disability determinations made by State agencies when requested by the claimant, may administratively appeal such determinations in accordance with the requirements of the Administrative Procedure and Social Security Acts.

The Chief is responsible for the following:

• Managing reviews and disability decisions on applications for disability under title II and title XVI on initial applications and reconsideration requests.
• Managing and administering the nationwide hearings process of SSA.
• Managing the Appeals Council (the final level of administrative review under the Administrative Procedure Act for claims filed under titles II, VIII, and XVI of the Social Security Act).
• Developing and implementing comprehensive workload management strategies for initial and reconsideration claims, hearings, and appeals filed under the Social Security Act.
• Managing employee services, performance management, and labor management and employee relations activities for DA nationwide.

Bad News Coming?

      From the Urban Institute:

SSA’s forthcoming regulation includes three major components:

• Replacing outdated occupational data: SSA plans to adopt the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Requirements Survey (ORS) to replace the obsolete Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), a move with bipartisan support.
• Implementing data from ORS: SSA must make many decisions on how best to implement and interpret ORS data, such as determining whether sufficient jobs exist at various skill and exertional levels that will directly affect eligibility outcomes.
• Age as a Factor: SSA is considering changes to how age, education, and past work experience influence disability determinations. These changes would disproportionately affect older workers.

Estimated Impact:

• The anticipated regulation could reduce eligibility for new applicants to the SSDI program by as much as 20 percent overall, and up to 30 percent among older workers. The potential impact on the SSI program is unclear.
• A 10% reduction in SSDI eligibility could result in 500,000 people losing access over 10 years including 80,000 widows and children. An additional 250,000 beneficiaries could lose eligibility for part of the period. 

• A 10% reduction would reduce benefits by $82 billion, with ripple effects on Medicare and Medicaid eligibility. 

• Many denied older workers may claim early retirement benefits, reducing their lifetime income by up to 30%. …

OHO Operating Stats

 

From Social Security -- Click on image to view full size

 

Where The Cuts Have Come

      From a paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

A Response

     The Social Security Administration has responded to a letter from the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee concerning the whistleblower complaint of Charles Borges concerning DOGE usage of sensitive Social Security databases. Here are a couple of key quotes and my response:

… The location referred to in the whistleblower allegation is actually a secured server in the agency’s cloud infrastructure which historically has housed this data and is continuously monitored and overseen—SSA’s standard practice. … What would have been the point of making a copy of Social Security’s databases elsewhere within Social Security’s own cloud if you weren’t doing something sneaky? Who had access to this copy of the databases? Why were multiple Social Security employees, not just Borges, going to DEFCON 1 over this if it was innocuous?

All employees are required to go through a vetting process prior to being granted access to SSA information systems. Based on their job functions, employees are granted the appropriately permissions to perform their work. Access to resources within the AWS environment is governed by the agency’s established Systems Access Management protocols. … Sure, that’s what’s supposed to happen but we know that DOGE employees were given access to sensitive Social Security databases long before they could have completed training.

     You can get by with half truths and fibs as long as the Committee Chairman doesn’t really care to delve into the matter and you’re only looking to survive the day. This isn’t a great long term plan but long term planning isn’t something the Trump Administration even tries to do. 

I Sorta See Your Point But I Don’t Think It’s Much Of A Problem And I Don’t See How This Helps

      From a summary of a bill reported out of the House Ways and Means Committee:

Studies show that people are confused by the current SSA terms and are generally uninformed about how their claiming decisions affect their monthly benefits.

• As a result, many of today’s seniors are missing out on substantial retirement income because of suboptimal claiming decisions.

The Claiming Age Clarity Act:

Directs the Social Security Commissioner to change the terminology SSA uses when describing benefit claiming ages to better reflect the implications of claiming decisions:

FRA [Full Retirement Age] would be referred to as the “standard monthly benefit age.” 

“Early eligibility age” would be referred to as the “minimum monthly benefit age” 

 Any reference to age 70 as the maximum age up to which delayed retirement credits can be accrued would be referred to as the “maximum monthly benefit age.”

Scope Of The Unauthorized Direct Deposit Change Problem

      From Direct Deposit Changes by Social Security Administration 800-number Staff, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General:

... The Social Security Administration (SSA) has a national 800-number that handles calls from the public. Before April 14, 2025, staff could change an individual’s direct deposit over the telephone by asking the caller to confirm certain personally identifiable information. We identified 3,109 beneficiaries who had direct deposit changes by 800-number staff from October through December 2023, followed by a non-receipt of benefits, followed by another direct deposit change. We randomly selected 200 beneficiaries and quantified the amount of benefits misdirected because of unauthorized direct deposit changes. We also identified 74,916 beneficiaries who had direct deposit changes initiated by 800-number staff from October 1 to 30, 2024. We randomly selected 225 beneficiaries and listened to recorded calls to determine whether SSA employees appropriately verified caller identities before changing beneficiaries’ direct deposit information.

Results
Social Security beneficiaries did not always authorize direct deposit changes initiated by 800-number staff. We estimated $2.2 million for approximately 1,197 beneficiaries had been misdirected because of unauthorized direct deposit changes from October through December 2023. As of April 2025, we estimated SSA had not recovered approximately $2 million of the $2.2 million. ...

It's A Vicious World Out There

     There's an interesting video floating about the interwebs saying that Social Security's Commissioner is wearing shirts monogrammed with the initials FJB which they say stands for F*** Joe Biden. He does wear shirts with that monogram but the video is completely misleading since FJB happens to be the Commissioner's own initials. 

     While we’re talking about the Commissioner’s apparel, I’ve seen pictures of him wearing kiltee loafers. I don’t think I’ve seen those on many other men in a long time. I wouldn’t have thought they still made them.

IT Acquisition Issues

      From Fedscoop:

 Social Security Administration is facing issues tied to IT acquisition, having fallen behind on training to get contracting officers up to speed on some areas of tech procurement, a new Government Accountability Office report found.

According to the congressional watchdog, the SSA’s senior-level contracting officers have “deficiencies” when it comes to acquisition practices involving IT, and an existing agency training plan to address those shortcomings hasn’t been updated since 2019.

The lackluster workforce expertise in this area is especially problematic for the agency, given that it obligated at least $1.4 billion annually on IT acquisitions from fiscal years 2020 through 2024, according to the GAO. …

Officials in SSA’s IT office said the agency has “halted” its hiring efforts to comply with the Trump administration’s EOs and guidance, and “it plans to use reduction-in-force actions to achieve its targeted workforce number.” Because of RIF plans and cost-reduction measures, SSA officials acknowledged to GAO that such “reorganization efforts could affect the IT acquisition workforce.”  …

Major Frustration

 

    An email from a legal assistant at my law firm to others in the firm:

Is anyone else feeling the major frustration of attempting to get tasks done and not getting very far because the DO’s new phone system?

After waiting on hold for anywhere between 50-90 mins on a regular basis, I often get hung up on or the “this isn’t our jurisdiction” response and cannot get any assistance.

Also experiencing some frustration with the cases that are filed online as now Baltimore is “helping” but really just dropping the ball on these as well.

Is there anything that can be done other than getting in touch with our useless congressperson?

    No one had a response other than to say basically, "Yeah, I'm facing the same situation." 

A Poll

 

online polls

Still Standing After All These Years

     From Tom Margenau, a retired Social Security employee with a syndicated column:

… I remember way back in 1973 when I was sent out as a relatively new Social Security Administration spokesperson to deliver my first speech on the topic. And hardly before I had a chance to introduce myself, some guy in the audience who appeared to be around 40 years old jumped up and said, “I don’t know why we should listen to anything you have to say. We all know Social Security will go belly up long before we ever have a chance to collect a dime out of the system!” …

Well, of course, if that guy is still alive, he’d be pushing 90 now and would have been collecting many millions of dimes in the form of Social Security checks, month in and month out, for about 30 years now.  …

That story always reminds me of something I learned from one of my mentors when I started working for the Social Security Administration. He was a fairly high-placed official within the agency who started working for the SSA shortly after it was created in 1936. And he told me that way back then, many members of the public were telling him that the Social Security program was doomed to failure. …

More Oversight For Security Guards

     From Government Executive:

The House on Monday passed legislation that responds to issues flagged by watchdogs about oversight of contract security guards at federal buildings. 

The Personnel Oversight and Shift Tracking Act of 2025 (H.R. 3425), approved 402-0, would require the Federal Protective Service, which is responsible for guarding more than 8,500 facilities [including Social Security offices], to “establish processes to strengthen oversight, performance and accountability of contract security personnel.” 

Specifically, it would task FPS with developing a standardized process for collecting and analyzing the results of covert security tests when the employees don’t know that they’re being evaluated and mandating contract security companies to provide corrective training to any personnel who fail such tests. 

 The Government Accountability Office in March reported that contract guards who screen individuals entering federal buildings failed to detect prohibited items (e.g. baton, pepper spray) in about half of covert tests that its investigators conducted. GAO also analysed nearly 500 such evaluations performed by FPS between 2020 and 2023 and found that roughly half of the time the contract security did not notice the prohibited item. ...

    Let's be safe but let's not get carried away. I've met guards who did everything but a cavity search.