Sounds Like A Plea For A Supplemental Appropriation This Year -- But Why Didn't We Hear This When Trump Was President?

     A letter that the Social Security Administration posted online (emphasis added):

April 21, 2021

The Honorable John B. Larson
Chair, Subcommittee on Social Security, Committee on Ways and Means
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Subcommittee Chair Larson:

I am writing because I want to be clear about the negative impact to Social Security services due to the ongoing pandemic and our funding level in fiscal year (FY) 2021. Our FY 2021 annual appropriation was nearly $900 million less than my original request. It is effectively level with the funding we have received for each of the last four years, despite significant increases in costs that we do not control – such as the Government-wide pay increases.

The pandemic has resulted in unprecedented changes. The safety of the public and our employees has been the paramount driver of how we deliver services during the pandemic. To protect the public and our employees, we have necessarily limited in-person service to critical situations that can only be resolved in-person. While we continue to serve the public over the phone and online, we are still experiencing issues receiving and verifying documents and medical evidence we need to make decisions. Even with fewer applications in FY 2021, pandemic-related challenges and operational constraints present numerous barriers to employees completing workloads timely. In FY 2020, the average time it took us to complete an action in our field offices increased by 20 percent, significantly reducing our productivity. We are working diligently to address these challenges, but the abrupt changes to the way we do our work has caused bottlenecks in certain workloads and service deterioration beyond our control. On February 23, 2021, we shared with your staff the potential implications of our FY 2021 funding level to further harm services.

However, our operational challenges have been aggravated by our inability to fully use our program integrity funding. To use this funding, we must complete cost-saving continuing disability reviews (CDR) and Supplemental Security Income redeterminations. We have had to reduce our planned full medical CDRs by 30 percent due to the pandemic, the lowest level since FY 2013. We deferred these workloads in the early part of the pandemic to protect beneficiaries’ income and healthcare and to reduce the burden on the medical community, which had stopped most elective services.

While we restarted these workloads at the end of FY 2020, we are handling them through the mail and over the phone. During the pandemic, these complex workloads often require multiple contacts with a beneficiary, which slows our ability to complete this work. In addition, over 30 percent of our initial disability claims and CDRs require a consultative exam (CE) with a medical provider so that we can obtain enough medical information to make a decision. Right now, just over 70 percent of our CE providers are scheduling in-person exams. We have focused our limited CE capacity on initial disability claims to ensure that we can provide benefits to people who qualify. Even with that focus, the average processing times for initial disability claims increased about 45 days in the last year. Ultimately, we currently estimate the constraints on our program integrity funding deepens our shortfall by approximately $200 million.

Since becoming Commissioner, I have focused our actions and our resources on efforts to improve the service we provide to the millions of people who turn to us for help. I have been clear in my budget requests about what it takes to improve service and maintain the integrity of our programs: both additional frontline staff to help people now, and information technology (IT) investments to improve our future. IT is fundamental to offering the public more electronic and online options they expect from organizations today, improving the technology to make it easier for our staff to help the public, and ensuring we have a safe, modern platform to support over $1 trillion in benefits payments each year.

I have frozen hiring in non-frontline positions so that we can push all available resources to the offices that directly serve the public. I have increased the staffing in our field offices, national 800 number, processing centers, and State disability determination services (DDS) by nearly 3,000 people since 2019. I have increased IT investments to accelerate our modernization and increase online service options.

We are working with the advocate community to help ensure that the most vulnerable populations can access our services. Our efforts include a robust communications campaign, in combination with a wide range of online resources, to provide information on service options for the beneficiary and individuals or organizations that help them.

I also decided to pay employee awards so they know that we appreciate their hard work and dedication, especially during this difficult time. I have pushed the agency to find creative ways to maintain these efforts despite the significant cut to our budget request this year.

We have explored all possibilities to eliminate our budget shortfall but we are unable to overcome it. I have no other option but to delay our planned hiring to operate within our appropriated resources. Further, we will not be able to compensate for fewer employees with additional overtime. We are operating with the lowest level of overtime in the last decade. These decisions have a lasting negative impact on the service we can provide to the American public. It will increase waits for service from our field offices and on our 800 number as we begin to emerge from the pandemic. The number of pending actions in our processing centers will grow from about 3.7 million actions pending at the end of FY 2020 to more than 4.2 million actions pending by the end of FY 2021. It will delay our plan to eliminate the backlog of cases in the DDS, which currently has about 20 percent more pending cases than prior to the pandemic, as we anticipate an increase in disability receipts into FY 2022.

The pandemic has changed the way we do work at SSA in unprecedented ways. At the start of the pandemic, we transitioned to remote work, focused on critical service workloads through online and telephone options, and suspended some adverse actions to protect the public during an especially critical time. The pandemic required necessary operating adjustments to safely serve the public, reducing our ability to complete our workloads and contributing to increased backlogs and wait times in some priority service areas. These novel factors prevented us from achieving some of our goals in FY 2020 and put our goals for FY 2021 and future years at risk. FY 2021 is a critical year to shape the agency for post-pandemic success, but our resource constraints will delay our recovery.

I appreciate President Biden’s support of our needs with his FY 2022 budget request of nearly $14.2 billion for us, which is $1.3 billion more than what we received this year to operate our agency. No one anticipated the duration of the pandemic and the ongoing challenges it presents. I hope you will consider these challenges and support his request to help us improve service.

Sincerely,

Andrew Saul
Commissioner

Remembering Field Reps

      Tom Margenau remembers the old days when Social Security had field representatives who, like actually, went outside their offices, to the field, to help people file claims and otherwise deal with the agency.

     The lousy service we have come to expect from Social Security isn’t inevitable. It’s based upon decisions made over many years by people who are indifferent to the level of service the agency provides, if not hostile to good service.  We deserve better.

A Poll

picture polls

Field Offices Are Essential

      A few people who ought to know better think that there’s no need to ever reopen Social Security’s field offices to the public. The AARP gives you some of the reasons why those people are wrong.

Question For The Day

      Once field offices reopen, should vaccination for Covid-19 be required of Social Security employees who have extensive dealings with the public?

     On the one hand, we generally respect personal autonomy when it comes to healthcare decisions. On the other hand, while even vaccinated employees pose some risk of spreading Covid-19 to the public and ever though the evidence isn't yet definitive, it seems clear  that un-vaccinated field office employees will pose a much greater risk to the public.

     I've got zero sympathy for vaccine skeptics. Even though I've got relatives, friends and neighbors in this camp, I regard them as dangerously deluded fools. I have no problem with putting pressure on them. That's what it's going to take for us to fully get past this pandemic.

NIOSH Visits A Field Office

      Social Security management has invited representatives of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to tour four Social Security field offices and to give recommendations for safety for those already working at the field offices. A representative of the labor union that represents most agency employees has written up a summary of the inspection of the Hamilton, OH field office. 

     The union rep asked management officials present on the day of inspection whether there was any plan to provide vaccination to Social Security employees prior to their return to work and received "no acceptable response" as he put it. 

     If, as promised, vaccines are freely available by sometime in May, I doubt it will be necessary for the Social Security Administration to provide vaccinations. I'd be more interested in the answer to a question that wasn't asked: Will Social Security require that its employees who deal with the public be vaccinated? I don't know whether there is legal authority for such a requirement. You'd hope that front line employees would have enough common sense to be vaccinated but there are a lot of vaccine skeptics in the country.

Bad Times At Field Offices

      An anonymous e-mail I received:

Hi Charles - I have been reading your blog for years.

Im a field office manager and felt compelled to share what management has sustained for nearly twelve months.

First off - kudos to SSA for putting somewhat of pan together by sending everyone home after cancelling telework...of course. Since that time things have gotten just awful and unsustainable.

We don’t have centralized print so management is asked to go in and pack every letter daily. Many ma agents don’t have updated mail machines so we must weigh envelopes individually and seal them by hand. The process takes hours. After outgoing is done all day - we handle incoming. Hundreds of documents from the public daily in some cases. Items go missing regularly. We open every piece and scan them into a program so employees can work. This process is even longer than outgoing mail. When it concludes - the day is likely over. As this work from home progresses we were slowly told things would return to normal but from home. Problem is we don’t the technology - everything at home takes longer. Managers were drowning in mail and still are- the calls exploded - an office like mine went from 600 calls to roughly 2000. We could not keep up - Area directors insisted on 90% answer rates. Workload immediately fell off. Instead of adjusting they increased our PSI goals in one area in particular- ssi redetermination. We had some of the highest targets ever yet we were receiving no help. Through all this management was told they could not work OT because it would look bad. We were told that management doing production was also frowned upon.

Months have passed and the agency did little to aid mgmt. in fact they made it worse. They made exceptions to allow individuals in office and mgmt was asked to pull away from mail to risk ourselves with claimants. It’s ok - they bought flimsy sneeze guard to protect us. When we asked for hazard pay or ability to carryover we were told no.

We have been wildly mistreated by the DCo front office. This year is worse still

For your audience our initials claims have gone from 125 as a goal for an initial decison to 170 days and recons from 118 to 152 days . In short it’s now average 11 months before you make it to a hearing In many cases - replacement cards take a month before processing . Record request from attys - I haven’t been able to get to them in months. You want certified record - that’s 6 months minimum. We are a disaster and holding it all together on the back of managers that are breaking. We are told we can’t let calls go but due to a nearly 500 million budget shortfall we won’t have any OT , are still expected to clear 20% more redeterminations and answer 90% of goals. Oh and all mail most be processed in 60 days.

I could go on forever - I only share to say how truly dire SSA situation is. I also share to show this who represent people that we are in a giant spiral with zero plan.

How out of touch you say - well dco touted a great Mobil check in program that they didn’t realize can’t handle foreign ss5 because a lack of having a number. They actually developed , designed, shared , gloated and didn’t realize its flaws until a manager pointed out the obvious.

Sorry for the rant and misspelling -perhaps you can take some blurbs to share with readers that we aren’t bad - we work hard - we just are given no chance for success and it’s getting worse. Thanks Charles

Even The Simple Things Are Difficult Now

      Even the seemingly simple things have become so difficult at Social Security. God help you if you need to get the agency to recognize a name change during the pandemic. 

     There will be so much to unwind once field offices reopen.

Devastating Effects From Field Office Closures

      From an op ed by Jonathan Stein and David Weaver in the New York Times:

At a time when the pandemic has hit the disabled and elderly the hardest, they also face the erosion of a critical income lifeline, Supplemental Security Income (S.S.I.). The program has collapsed during the pandemic: From July to November 2020, the Social Security Administration awarded benefits to about 100,000 fewer individuals compared with the same period last year. In July 2020 the agency distributed just 38,318 new awards — the fewest in 20 years of available data.

At this rate, more than 230,000 low-income disabled and elderly Americans will miss out on vital cash benefits and access to health care (via Medicaid, which S.S.I. recipients generally qualify for) in one year. ...

The immediate cause of this ongoing crisis is the closure of Social Security’s network of 1,200 field offices during the Covid-19 pandemic. Generally, the agency does not take online applications for S.S.I. benefits, leaving these disabled and elderly people with one primary service option: calling its overburdened general phone line. Further, the field offices were a source of information and assistance for millions of Americans, many challenged by cognitive, learning, language and poverty-related issues. ...

Even before this crisis, two-thirds of those who completed the initial 23-page application for the program failed to qualify under the current burdensome disability and means tests. ...

Social Security executives are aware of the existing and pandemic-era challenges and are making good-faith efforts to address them, including a rare and laudatory engagement with claimants’ advocates. But these important steps by the agency are undermined by an effort to close the doors to hundreds of thousands of claimants during a time of economic collapse and labor market contraction. ...

The S.S.I. elderly and disabled await Jan. 20, and a Biden White House that understands their plight.

How Does Social Security Reopen?

      The Covid-19 timeline is starting to come into focus. Before the end of the month Covid-19 vaccinations will have begun. Probably only medical personnel and first responders will be vaccinated at the beginning. However, by early next year it will probably be possible to start vaccinating older people and those with chronic illnesses. It will take until around May or June to make vaccination available to anyone who wants it. Sadly, a significant percentage of the population will refuse vaccination.

     I've got a lot of questions about how Social Security reopens:

• Does Social Security wait to reopen its offices until all its employees can be vaccinated or does it allow or require employees to return to their offices as they complete their vaccinations?
• Can field offices be reopened to the public in some partial manner before all employees can return to the office?
• Does Social Security have the legal authority -- and the will -- to demand that its employees be vaccinated or else lose their jobs? Unvaccinated employees in the office are a threat to other unvaccinated employees and customers. To some extent, they're a threat even to vaccinated employees since the vaccines are less than 100% effective.
  
• Can Social Security refuse to allow members of the public to enter its field offices if they cannot present proof of vaccination? Unvaccinated customers in waiting rooms are a threat to other customers and to employees.
  
• Once field offices reopen there's going to be a crush of people wanting to be seen in person. Other than urging people to make appointments, how does Social Security deal with this? Appointment calendars may quickly fill up for months into the future. There's also the problem that there's a specific statutory requirement that Social Security deal with many walk-in customers. 42 U.S.C. §405(t).
  

What Happens When The Pandemic Finally Wanes?

      This is the line outside a Social Security field office a year ago. Can you imagine the lines once Social Security field offices reopen to the public sometime next year? 

Andrew Saul Claims A "Basically Seamless" Transition To Service Delivery With Field Offices Closed

      Next Avenue has decided to give Andrew Saul, who may be Social Security's Commissioner, its 2020 Influencers in Aging Award. (I'm not joking. There is a legitimate controversy about Saul's position.) According to Wikipedia,"Next Avenue is a digital platform launched by PBS that offers original and aggregated journalism aimed at baby boomers."

     Here's some excerpts from an interview that Saul gave to Next Avenue:

...  "To be honest, a year ago, I never thought we would be this far along now," Saul told me. "It did take us time to get up and running, but now we're going to reap the rewards of a year's planning." ...

... How has customer service improved since you've been on the job would you say?

Well, first we have to talk about, unfortunately, COVID-19, because there's no question you cannot.

When I took over here, we had a tremendous amount of plans to digitalize and modernize the way we deliver services. But obviously when March hit and we were faced with this situation, we had to keep the lights on. We had to protect our employees and our beneficiaries, and therefore we had to revert to operating from home.

And we were forced to close our offices, both our field offices and our disability hearing offices, and become a virtual operation. We had no choice.

So, the service that we were delivering was interrupted, but considering what happened, this team did an amazing job. And I think if you talk to people that use our services on an active basis, they'll say we really made a transformation here which was basically seamless.

Look, I'm not saying everything was perfect. It still isn't perfect. The last six months have really pressed the team to the limits. But having said that, I think we've done a great job in keeping the lights on and keeping the old boiler running.

Now what this [COVID-19] has taught us and what we've been doing is changing the way we do business. And I think it's going to be changed forever. ...

And the field offices?

When we hopefully go back and roll out our field office operations again, we're going to be using many more personal appointments rather than having people just come into the office. I believe the offices are going to be much better organized, with express service for certain things that people come in for on a much more regular basis.

What about the Social Security Administration's website?

We're going to have a new website, completely redesigned, which is something that is important because it's our most important face to our customer.

How far along did you get before you had to pivot in March with the pandemic?

We had most of this underway. And you know, the amazing thing about systems work is you can do it offsite.

I'm not going to tell you this [COVID-19] didn't slow us down, because we had to be able to go from an in-office to a virtual operation. Did it slow us down? Yes, it did slow us down, but now we're running well.

Before the offices were shut down for the pandemic, a lot of people would come into the offices to ask questions and sign up for retirement benefits. How much has closing the field offices slowed down the number of applications that have come in?

You know, it is somewhat slower. What's happened is we have many more eight-hundred number calls. We also have many more calls to the individual offices.

The other thing is: We are getting tremendous amount of hits on our website. I think it's up fifty, sixty percent. We've been getting almost a million hits a day. Wow.

And we are doing about fifty-three percent of our transactions online through those that have the my Social Security account. ...

What else would you like to do to improve customer service?

We're going to have to see what happens when we start reopening the offices to the public.

I don't know how much you knew about the offices before, but it was terrible. I used to go visit these offices and some of the busy ones were really a disaster, in my opinion — just people sitting around waiting. I don't want that anymore. We can't have that.

It doesn't mean that we're not going to have field offices. It doesn't mean that we're not going to have an eight-hundred [toll-free] number. But we are going as quickly as we can so that our major form of communication to our customer is digital and video. ...

In Office Appointments Now Available In Limited Circumstances

     From Social Security's Covid-19 webpage:

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, you can only enter our offices if you have an appointment. For more information regarding appointment availability for your situation, please select the statement that applies to you:

• I need help with benefits.
• I need help with my Social Security Number (SSN).

I need help with benefits

Generally, we will schedule an in-person appointment in dire need situations. Dire need exists when you:

• Are without food or shelter, including utilities or are without medical care or coverage and need to apply for or reinstate benefits.
• Currently receive benefits and have an urgent need for payment to meet expenses for food, shelter, or medical treatment, and you cannot receive the payment electronically.

If you believe you qualify for an in-person appointment, call your local office. You can look up the phone number for your local office by accessing our office locator. Please note that appointments may not be immediately available, depending on local health and safety conditions and staffing.

I need help with my Social Security Number (SSN)

We are prioritizing requests for in-person SSN services for:

• Individuals age 12 or older applying for their first SSN card.
• Individuals who need to update or correct their SSN information (such as your name, date of birth, or citizenship) to obtain income, resources, or medical care or coverage, or other services or benefits (for example filing a tax return, applying for housing, or seeking an Economic Impact Payment).

If you believe you qualify for an in-person appointment, call your local office. You can look up the phone number for your local office by accessing our office locator. Please note that appointments may not be immediately available, depending on local health and safety conditions and staffing.

Almost A Caricature Of Republican Priorities

      A press release:

The Inspector General for the Social Security Administration, Gail S. Ennis, announces the addition of four new investigative units to the Cooperative Disability Investigations (CDI) program. CDI is a nationwide joint effort between the Social Security Administration and its Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to fight disability fraud and save money for taxpayers. The four investigative units recently opened offices in Omaha, Nebraska; Las Vegas, Nevada; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Cheyenne, Wyoming. ...

     Just how much fraud are you expecting to find in New Hampshire and Wyoming? Do they really need their own dedicated offices? And why are you saying this is directed at "disability fraud"? I think that most fraud cases detected at Social Security involve retirement benefits.

     Social Security is closing down field offices which provide service to the public while opening new offices to hunt for fraud even in low population areas. What does that tell us about the priorities contained in Social Security's operating budget?

More Social Security Employees To Work In Office

      From Federal News Network:

The Social Security Administration is planning to ask more employees, first on a volunteer basis, to return to the agency’s field offices.

Managers have been coming into the field offices since the beginning days of the pandemic to handle the mail and process “dire-need cases.” Some SSA employees have joined them at the request of their managers, but the American Federation of Government Employees union, which represents workers at the agency’s field offices, didn’t consider those recalls to be large-scale.

Now, the agency will solicit more volunteers to return to their field offices, Sherry Jackson, a vice president with AFGE Council 220, told Federal News Network.

Offices that don’t have enough volunteers will begin recalling employees to work in person on a rotational basis. Employees who have been chosen to return will receive a recall letter from their area managers and two weeks notice before they’re expected in the office, Jackson said. ...

Sounds Bad But I’d Like To Hear The Other Side Of This

      From Government Executive:

Less than 24 hours before Hurricane Laura made along along the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm, officials at the Social Security Administration told employees at its Lake Charles, La., field office that they would not be eligible for weather and safety leave.

Instead, employees forced to evacuate ahead of the hurricane were expected to work remotely from their hotel rooms on unsecured public Wi-Fi connections or take annual or sick leave, just three hours after the storm had left the area.  

Joel Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3184, which represents Social Security workers in Louisiana, said management informed employees they would not be able to take weather and safety leave in a teleconference meeting Wednesday morning. .Although there is no written record of the leave denial, an IT employee sent all employees in the office instructions on how to connect to the agency’s virtual private network over public wireless Internet connections. ...

Major Downturn In SSI Awards

      From David Weaver, writing for The Hill:

... In May, June, and July of this year, SSA awarded 5,038, 4,572, and 5,122 elderly individuals SSI benefits, respectively. The June award figure is the smallest number of monthly awards for the elderly in the last 20 years. The May and July figures are the second and third smallest in the last 20 years. Further, the total number of awards in these three months is 42 percent lower than the number of awards to the elderly for the comparable 3-month period in 2019.

Problems have now materialized for the disabled groups as well. In July of this year, SSA awarded SSI benefits to 25,200 disabled adults ages 18 to 64. That is the lowest monthly award figure in the last 20 years for this group. It is also 40 percent lower than the figure for this group for July of 2019. ...

     Weaver is blaming the downturn on lack of outreach. Maybe, but I'm pretty sure that having the field offices closed to walk-in traffic is a bigger factor. You certainly can't blame this downturn on disability determination since this includes a major downturn in people qualifying on account of age alone. Those claims don't go through disability determination.

No, Internet Services Aren't Causing The Field Offices To Fade Away

     One of the proactive disclosures recently posted by Social Security is data on in-person visits to Social Security field offices in Fiscal Year 2019. There were 43,467,832 of them. They have it broken down by field office.

Kiosks Coming To Field Offices

     From a Request For Information recently posted by the Social Security Administration:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is improving its field office kiosk technology for visitors to check-in and perform simple self-help services.  We seek a solution easily usable by all members of the public that visit our field offices and accessible to people with a disability.  The kiosks will be:

• Standalone, enclosed units
• Ruggedized for use in semi-supervised locations 
• Zero client based systems
• USB attached peripheral devices installed inside the kiosk cabinet 
• Meet agency accessibility and usability requirements

The agency will design and host the software on its own infrastructure.  This includes software accessibility features that rely on hardware components.  For instance, the software is designed to start a screen reader when a user inserts a headphone jack into the kiosk and this will require headphone jack sockets that include a tip switch that detects the insertion and removal of a headphone jack.

The government provided software for the check-in kiosk is nearly complete. We have an immediate need to install several hundred to a couple thousand check-in kiosks within 12-18 months. 

Because the check-in kiosk solution needs to be deployed in the near future, we are interested in cabinet designs that are already “on the shelf” and will require little modification.  If costs and timelines are not impacted, we may consider a custom cabinet design.

Why Are Simple Things So Hard?

     What's it like dealing with Social Security these days? Here's a sample. Client gets approved. The field office needs a copy of his birth certificate. Client's father was in the military and assigned overseas when the client was born, overseas. His birth was registered with the U.S. embassy of the country where he was born. That's the way these things are done. The client reports back to me that the field office told him that the Department of State birth registration form isn't good enough. I wonder if someone at the field office doesn't know that this sort of document meets the agency's requirements or if there's some other problem. It takes two weeks and several phone calls before someone at the field office calls back to say the State Department form is fine. It's just that the client faxed it to them and they need to see the original. They never told the client this was the problem. They must have given the client their fax number. We didn't. The field office suggests that the client come around to the back door of the office and knock.  Someone should be there to inspect the original and give it back to the client. We were told they were doing this sort of thing regularly. We hadn't heard they were doing this. Certainly, the client hadn't been told they were doing that. Remember, the field office gave the client their fax number and only later decided that the faxed copy wasn't good enough but then failed to tell the client what he needed to do.

     Who knows whether other field offices are doing this back door business?

     Dealing with Social Security has always been harder than it should be. It's much harder now.