Does Frank Bisignano Realize What He's Gotten Himself Into?

     I'm surprised that Frank Bisignano wants the job as Social Security Commissioner. He's now the highly paid CEO of a very successful corporation. It's his niche and apparently he's very good at it. Is he aware of the problems he'll face at Social Security?

• If he thinks he'll lead Social Security out of its long term financing problems, he's deluded. Senators of both parties will demand that he promise that he will stay completely away from long term financing issues. He can't be confirmed without making such promises. For that matter, I'm pretty sure that Trump would want him to stay away from such issues. Also, if he actually looks into the political thicket surrounding it, he'll want nothing to do with Social Security "reform." Let Elon Musk take that bullet.
  
• If he thinks he can in any sense "transform" Social Security, he's deluded. There's no simple fix, technical or otherwise, for Social Security's service delivery problems. There's not even a complicated set of fixes that don't take a lot of money and time. It's highly unlikely that he'll get more money.
• If he thinks that he'll have an advantage because he knows nothing about Social Security and won't be held back by old ideas, he's deluded. In any job, it helps to know how things are already set up, what the obstacles to change are, and what ideas have been tried before and how they worked out. The people who came before you weren't fools (except for Jo Anne Barnhart). Social Security isn't a Gordian knot and Bisignano won’t have have a sword.
  
• If he thinks that the real problem at Social Security is that federal employees are stupid and lazy, he's deluded. That sort of arrogance would lead to indifference, if not joy, in losing the experienced, hard-working employees who keep the Social Security Administration afloat. Not every agency employee is a star but they mostly do their jobs ably. There just aren't enough of them.
  
• If he thinks that ending telework will make Social Security significantly more effective, he's deluded. I've been around long enough to know that telework makes little, if any, difference. If telework ends, some percentage of employees will quit. My guess is that it won't be that high a percentage but that's just a guess. Nobody knows. Losing even a few experienced people will hurt an agency that's as bad off as the Social Security Administration. The commonly held view that Social Security is simple is simply wrong. For example, there's not just one type of Social Security disability benefit. Depending upon how you count them, there are as many as seven (remember that blindness is a separate category under both Title II and Title XVI)! And don't get him started on the windfall offset! It'll blow his mind. It takes long training and considerable experience for an employee to become competent.
  
• If he thinks he can transform the Social Security Administration with new IT, he's deluded. When the companies that Gisignano has led have needed to spend money to acquire new IT systems, all he's had to do was to convince a complaisant board of directors to approve the money. The money was available since the companies were profitable. The situation at Social Security is entirely different. Convincing the White House to approve additional funding will be hard enough. Convincing Congress is much more difficult. Martin O'Malley is a born lobbyist. How far did he get? Is Gisignano any kind of lobbyist?
• If he thinks that fighting employee unions will make the Social Security Administration more effective, he's deluded. The unions can be a pain in the neck but they have just about no effect on productivity. Spending energy fighting them isn't worth it. They're not the enemy.
  

Good News

      A tweet from Social Security:

The IT issue that affected personalized services for several hours on Friday has been resolved.  In-person services and full telephone support will resume Monday.

Major IT Failure

     Social Security is in the midst of a major national IT failure. Every time I hear an estimate on when it will be fixed it's later than the last estimate I heard. They're now saying early afternoon Eastern time but who knows whether that will hold?

    Are the field offices able to service walk-ins? Scheduled appointments? Able to do anything? Are the payment centers able to get any work done? What about the teleservice centers? Are hearings being held?

    Update: This is from Social Security's website:

Social Security’s personalized services - online and in-person - are temporarily unavailable while we address an IT hardware issue. We continue to answer general questions by telephone on our 800 number and in our local offices, while offices are temporarily closed to in-person service. We are working to quickly resolve the issue today and apologize for the inconvenience.

    Update: They've made progress. I was able to get in ERE at 3:20 pm EDT.

$81 Million AI Contract

     From a press release:

Accenture Federal Services has won an $81 million artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI / ML) contract from the Social Security Administration (SSA). The company will deliver end-to-end back office intelligent automation services to transform the way 250 million retiree and survivors’ benefits documents are processed every year. The forms are currently being received and managed via email, mail, and fax.

The Social Security Administration has already successfully deployed an enterprise hyperautomation platform that uses advanced deep learning and computer vision techniques to identify data from the agency’s electronic folder, extract text, transcribe data with the highest level of accuracy, and speed processing through downstream business processes. The platform uses internal enterprise data to intelligently and rapidly keep pace with high demand, expedite decision making, and control costs.

Accenture Federal Services will now take this project to the next level providing the licenses necessary to deliver an end-to-end, Infrastructure as a Software (IaaS) roadmap for intelligent automation installation, testing, and training. ...

What Can We Expect On Monday?

       A tweet from the Social Security Administration:

Social Security offices will open for public service on Monday, 7/22. Staff impacted by the widespread Microsoft and CrowdStrike issues are being brought back online. Our phone lines remain operational and many online services at http://ssa.gov remain available. 

     Great, but how capable will they be of doing business? And that’s just the field offices. What about other parts of the Social Security Administration, such as the Teleservice Centers, the Program Service Centers and the Office of Hearings Operations? I know OHO was able to hold hearings yesterday but I don’t know about their work otherwise.

What's At Stake For SSA With Generative AI

     The Acting Commissioner of Social Security recently made the decision that the agency will, for now, have no involvement with Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). While I have a healthy skepticism that AI will ever have much role in taking or adjudicating Social Security claims, there's one area where Generative AI may be of considerable assistance and that's dealing with the COBOL problem. Social Security's most important computer programs are written in the ancient COBOL programming language. Many other agencies and private companies are similarly dependent upon COBOL. Schools are no longer teaching COBOL. Computer programmers don't want to work with it. Few programmers are available to work on COBOL programs and those programmers have long since gone gray.

    IBM, and probably others, have decided that Generative AI may be the cure for COBOL problems. There would be no need to laboriously rewrite all the old programs in newer programming languages. AI would quickly rewrite the old COBOL programs in modern computer programming languages. Programmers would be more widely available for modern computer languages. Corrections and improvements to existing programs would become easier. That would be a godsend to Social Security, if it works.

A Question

     I know that many would like to turn over disability determination to artificial intelligence but there’s no gold standard for disability determination so let’s start out a little simpler. Could artificial intelligence be trained to do windfall offset calculations at Social Security? They're the agency's bane. They eat up tons of employee time. I'm sure that everyone familiar with the problem knows that there ought to be some computer fix. The Social Security Administration has tried two different windfall offset software packages in the past. Both cost in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars and both failed spectacularly. Is AI different?

   

Can't Say Whether Some Automation Projects Have Helped

      From Manual Processes for Resource-intensive Workloads, a report by Social Security's Office of  Inspector General

Our objective was to determine whether the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) automation enhancements (1) reduced manual processing for resource-intensive workloads and (2) were cost-effective. ...

SSA’s automation enhancements reduced the need for manual processing for some workloads from FYs 2019 to 2021. These initiatives aimed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of SSA’s operations; however, they were not always immediately cost-effective. Additionally, SSA could not identify cost or savings estimates for some enhancements; thus, we could not determine whether they were cost-effective.  ......

MFA For SSA

      From Federal News Network:

The Social Security Administration is getting $23.3 million from the Technology Modernization Fund to implement multifactor authentication across its internal systems, part of a trio of recent TMF awards focused on cybersecurity and reliability. … 

“Millions count on Social Security for their benefits, and we are committed to secure systems that protect their personal information and allow our hard-working employees to provide the daily services and assistance American retirees and other beneficiaries depend on,” Sean Brune, SSA’s chief information officer, said as part of the announcement. “This investment will improve security and protections of our programmatic systems while avoiding potential agency costs and potential disruption of services.” 

The funding will help SSA accelerate the implementation of its phishing-resistant, single sign-on MFA solution across all internal systems and services. Using phishing-resistant MFA is a key requirement for agencies under the federal zero trust strategy. … 

The TMF award comes as SSA is also planning to soon release a new IT strategic plan, Federal News Network reported last month.

SSA Information Not So Secure?

     From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

Objective
To determine whether the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) overall information security program and practices were effective and consistent with the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014 (FISMA) requirements, as defined in the Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 core Inspector General (IG) FISMA reporting metrics. ...

We engaged Grant Thornton LLP (Grant Thornton) to conduct this performance audit ...

Based on the FY 2022 core IG FISMA reporting metrics guidance, Grant Thornton concluded SSA’s overall security program was “Not Effective.” 

Although SSA had established an Agency-wide information security program and practices, Grant Thornton identified deficiencies that may limit the Agency’s ability to adequately protect its systems and information. While SSA continued executing its risk-based approach to strengthen controls over its information systems and address weaknesses, Grant Thornton’s audit continued to identify persistent deficiencies in both the design and operation of controls related to the FY 2022 core IG FISMA reporting metrics. ...

The Reports Of COBOL's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

     In recent years many have decried Social Security's reliance on old mainframe computers running programs written in the very old COBOL language. Many have thought this to be a major problem holding back progress at Social Security. As this New York Times article demonstrates, maybe using COBOL isn't bad at all. At the least, COBOL remains in common use:

Caitlin Mooney is 24 years old and infatuated with technology that dates to the age of Sputnik.

Mooney, a recent New Jersey Institute of Technology graduate in computer science, is a fan of technologies that were hot a half-century ago, including computer mainframes and software called COBOL that powers them. That stuff won’t win any cool points in Silicon Valley, but it is essential technology at big banks, insurance companies, government agencies and other large institutions.

During Mooney’s job hunt, potential employers saw her expertise and wanted to talk about more senior positions than she was seeking. “They would get really excited,” Mooney told me. She’s now trying to decide between multiple job offers.

The resilience of decades-old computing technologies and the people who specialize in them shows that new technologies are often built on lots of old tech.

When you deposit money using your bank’s iPhone app, behind the scenes it probably involves computers that are the progeny of those used in the Apollo moon missions. (Also, half-century-old computer code is baked into the iPhone software.)

It’s often seen as a problem or a punchline that so much musty technology is still around. But it’s not necessarily an issue.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” joked Ellora Praharaj, director of reliability engineering at Stack Overflow, an online forum popular with tech workers. “Students out of school these days don’t necessarily want to work in uncool older languages. But the reality of the world is this is what powers many of our existing systems.”

Praharaj said she learned COBOL in college in the mid-2000s and “hated it.” But until about five years ago, she was regularly using a 1950s computer programming technology called Fortran in a former job in the financial services industry. The old stuff is everywhere.

Latin is dead, but old computer programming languages like COBOL live on. ...

Social Security Wants To Learn From A Mediocre NFL Team

     From Federal News Network:

The Baltimore Ravens football team may be better known for its winning ways on the field and its rabid fans in the stands.

But the Social Security Administration turned to the NFL team because of its prowess in using data to drive customer experience decisions. It also didn’t hurt that SSA headquarters is located in Baltimore County, Maryland, and many of the staff are big fans of the team.

Patrick Newbold, the assistant deputy commissioner and deputy chief information officer at SSA, said the Ravens are known for providing a great customer experience for their fans so it just made sense that the agency would reach out.

“One of the questions we asked the Baltimore Ravens was how business intelligence analytics changed their service delivery model?” Newbold said on Ask the CIO. “The Ravens shared an excellent use case with us on how data was able to challenge one of their assumptions on fan demographics. Early on, when they started to aggregate that data, that data disproved assumptions they had about their season ticket holders. Their fans were a lot younger than the marketing assumed. ...

The Ravens brought their chief data officer or equivalent position to the table to meet with executives from SSA’s CIO, CDO and mission offices. ...

 “We want to use data to monitor and improve the way we do business and services, and deliver our services to our citizens,” Newbold said. “We also shared several challenges. One was the importance of data collection. The Baltimore Ravens leverage NFL-wide data as well as their Baltimore Ravens-specific data. They use that data to inform decisions. We, at SSA, want to create a primary source of SSA-wide data that is beyond assumptions and that supports that ad hoc, cross-cutting capability to do some data analytics. While we are completely different organizations, we have the same goals and mission desire when it comes to how we can use data to really inform the way we want to move forward.” ...

“We also met with a couple of thought leaders since June, the former General Motors CIO Ralph Szygenda and the former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti,” he said. “We take these conversations and we’ve highlighted about three important lessons learned from these conversations, and we are baking those into our strategy. They are around governance, data and culture.” ...

    Learning from the experiences of others is a good idea but this still sounds weird.

Slow Progress In Obtaining And Analyzing Medical Records Via IT

      From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

Despite spending more than 10 years trying to increase the number of medical records received through health IT, SSA still receives most records in paper or ERE format. In the Fiscal Year (FY) that ended on September 30, 2020, SSA received only 11 percent of medical records through health IT. 

SSA experienced a decreasing trend in adding new health IT partners from 56 in FY 2018 to 12 in FY 2021 (as of August). During this time, SSA reduced the number of staff and contractors involved in health IT outreach and did not fully fund projects to increase electronic medical evidence. Also, expanding the number of health IT records by adding new partners is not a unilateral decision made by SSA, as prospective partners must be willing and able to meet SSA’s technical requirements, and COVID-19 was a factor. In October 2021, SSA informed us it was (a) working on Memorandums of Understanding with 3 entities to exchange health IT records with over 30 large health IT organizations and (b) adding more staff to develop and implement strategies to expand health IT.

Challenges in expanding the number of health IT records include some partners’ inability to send sensitive medical records, acceptance of SSA’s authorization form to release records to the Agency (Form SSA-827), and medical industry-wide differences in patient-identifying data fields. 

Additionally, SSA has had limited success analyzing medical records because MEGAHIT is limited to analyzing only structured data. MEGAHIT generated data extracts on only 7.3 percent of the 1.6 million health IT records SSA received in FY 2020. The extracts assist SSA disability examiners in making accurate disability determinations. Since 2018, SSA has been developing and testing the Intelligent Medical-Language Analysis GENeration application with new capabilities for reviewing medical records. As of August 2021, SSA was still testing and rolling out this application to its offices. ...

IMAGEN How Skeptical I Am

      The National Association of Disability Examiners (NADE), a voluntary organization of the personnel who make initial and reconsideration determinations on disability claims for the Social Security Administration, has released its Winter 2021 Newsletter. Among other things it discusses a video conference held in September, particularly a presentation on IMAGEN, which is:

... a tool for reviewing evidence. It has a search engine for specific types of data like pathology reports, diagnoses and listing level labs. It recognizes synonyms, acronyms and abbreviations. It can suggest listings for analysis. In a case with thousands of pages, it can scan for whatever you ask it to. It’s been rolled out in 17 states so far. ...

When claimant medical and related evidence is received, IMAGEN transforms the evidence in real-time, into machine-readable text that enables enhanced search capabilities and intelligent analysis of medical record content. The medical evidence is analyzed to identify key clinical findings using a robust clinical vocabulary specialized for SSA's disability adjudication needs. This enables the identification of severe medical impairments (step 2 of sequential evaluation) which are then mapped directly to SSA's established diagnosis codes and SSA's Disability Listings (step 3 of sequential evaluation). Specific dated encounters and reports are also identified in the evidence, allowing the user to organize the evidence by section types (inpatient, out-patient), report types (MRI, Pathology, Post-operative, etc.), and chronologically. In upcoming releases, IMAGEN will be able to identify content in the medical record that relates directly to the claim-ant's physical function and mobility, as used in steps 4 and 5 of the disability sequential evaluation. IMAGEN currently supports Initial and Reconsideration level disability claims. ...

IMAGEN has a cadre of representatives from multiple components, including ODP, ODD, DDS, OHO, and OQR that provide feedback, which allows the IMAGEN team to continue to refine and improve IMAGEN's user interface, predictive analytics and other features. ...

A Mobile Accessible Platform To Handle All Of Social Security's Transactions?

      From Federal News Network:

The Biden administration is working on an executive order focused on improving customer experience within government and building on its ongoing work to improve the equity of public-facing services. ...

The draft executive order directs agencies to link customer experience metrics to their strategic plans and priority goals. It also ties that progress into performance review requirements for members of the Senior Executive Service and senior management. ...

Individual agency actions under consideration include the State Department providing a new online passport renewal experience, the Social Security Administration creating a mobile-accessible online platform that can handle all transactions and the Transportation Security Administration implementing new tools at airport security checkpoints to reduce passenger wait times. ...

    People who think that a single mobile accessible platform will handle all of Social Security's transactions with the public greatly underestimate the complexity of the work that the Social Security Administration does. That's one of Social Security's biggest problems -- the public perception that what the agency does is simple -- just processing people onto retirement benefits. Most of what the agency does is far more complicated than that. Many of the agency's forms should be simplified but they would still be far too long to be completed on a cell phone.

Budget Projections

       Some excerpts from Social Security's budget projections (bolded) with my comments:

     "The Budget would increase staffing for frontline operations including State DDSs by over 6 percent." -- You say that as if frontline staffing is your real priority but if the agency gets what's proposed, its funding goes up by almost 10% but staffing only increases by 6%.

      "Over $2.7 billion for current staff, additional hiring, and other expenses for the State DDSs to make our disability determinations. This amount includes funding for 1,300 additional employees we are hiring in FY2021, an increase of about 10 percent." -- OK, so DDS staffing goes up 10%, which corresponds with the 10% increase in the budget. However, "frontline staffing" which includes DDS only goes up 6%. If I'm doing the math correctly, this means that "frontline staffing" apart from DDS goes up by a lot less than 6%. 

     "More than $2.1 billion for IT services funding to help us maintain and continue modernizing our large IT infrastructure, as well as increase our digital and automated services." -- The FY 2021 IT number was $1.9 billion so the projection is for an 11% increase which is a bit above the approximately 10% overall budgetary increase. However, contrast this with the 6% increase in frontline staffing and you get an idea of management priorities.

     Overtime:

• FY 2020 (actual) 1801 FTEs 
• FY 2021 (projected) 1,155 FTEs 
• FY 2022 (projected) 1,800 FTEs

 -- They expect to get a nearly 10% increase in funding but overtime will be slightly less in FY 2022 than in FY 2020. How do they expect to work off the backlogs at their field offices and payment centers? As we'll see below, the answer, at least for the payment centers, is that they don't expect to work off the backlogs.

      Disability claims receipts:

• FY 2020 (actual) 2,213
• FY 2021 (projected) 2,491
• FY 2022 (projected) 3,111

-- I don't understand the FY 2021 number. There have been far fewer disability claims filed in the current fiscal year than the last so why are they saying it's up? Anyway, they're projecting a 25% increase in disability claims in the next fiscal year. That's as good a guess as any but nobody knows. It could easily be a good deal more or less than that.

     National 800 number: Average speed of answer projected to go down from 15 minutes to 12 minutes. -- That still sucks

     Office of Hearings Operations Production per Workyear: 

• FY 2020 (actual) 93
• FY 2021 (projected) 80
• FY 2022 (projected) 103

-- I don't know what these numbers mean but if the are meaningful, they're saying that productivity at the hearing offices has taken a major hit during the pandemic but will soar in the next fiscal year. If these numbers mean anything, OHO employees should knock off the talk about how they've been just as productive working from home. Also, it would be nice if we had productivity numbers for other agency components.

     "We plan to hire ALJs by the end of FY 2022 to ensure we have adequate resources in our hearings operations." -- I think you may need them sooner but I'm glad you're planning for this. I hope you haven't forgotten that you need additional staff to go with those ALJs. Also, remember it takes time to hire and train people.

     "In FY 2022, we plan to reduce the PC backlog from 4.2 million actions to 4.14 million actions." -- That's almost no improvement in the backlog. Sounds like the payment centers aren't your priority.

     In FY 2022 the agency expects to " Begin nationwide rollout of the modern HACPS that increases the accuracy and efficiency of disability case processing for our hearings offices and Appeals Council." -- What is HACP? How does it increase accuracy and efficiency?

More On Budget

     From CNBC:

President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget could give the Social Security Administration a $1.3 billion — or 9.7% — boost in funding. ...

The money would allow the Social Security Administration to pursue a host of improvement efforts, Social Security Administration Commissioner Andrew Saul said in the agency’s budget overview. ...

The money could help reduce the hearings backlog, bringing the annual average processing time for a decision down to 270 days in fiscal year 2022 from 386 days in fiscal year 2020 , according to the Social Security Administration’s estimates.

It could also help increase the number of initial disability claims completed by 720,000 – to 2,757,000 in fiscal year 2022 from 2,037,000 in fiscal year 2020.

The 800 number wait times could also drop to 12 minutes in 2022 from 16 minutes in 2020. ...

More than $5 billion of the proposed $14.2 billion budget would go to payroll costs for frontline employees who work at the administration’s field offices, 800 phone number and processing centers, according to the Social Security Administration.

Additionally, more than $2.7 billion would be earmarked for disability determinations, including existing staff, new hires and other expenses at state disability determination centers. The administration plans to maintain the 10% increase in staff — or 1,300 additional employees — that it took on in the 2021 fiscal year.

More than $2.1 billion would fund the modernization of the administration’s IT infrastructure.

Another $1.7 billion would pay for the expansion of the anti-fraud disability investigations program, as well as the completion of program integrity reviews.

More than $1.1 billion is slated for payroll costs for employees in the hearings division.

 In addition, $96 million would be dedicated to additional outreach for Supplemental Security Income, or SSI benefits. The goal would be to contact vulnerable people who are eligible for benefits, such as adults and children with disabilities, and the homeless.

FTEs -- This Year And Next

      The Biden Administration has released its entire Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Budget proposal. We already knew that it would call for a big hike in the agency's administrative budget, from $13.7 billion to $14.8 billion, an 8% increase but the entire proposal goes into much greater detail. The part that interests me is the projected number of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) employees (page 1,241).  The proposal shows the FTE number for FY 2020 as 59,574 (actual), for FY 2021 (estimated) as 59,355 and for FY 2022 (projected) as 60,586. 

     A couple of things stick out. First, overtime only went down by 0.4% between FY 2020 and FY 2021. If there's been a decline in performance at Social Security, in general, it's not because of a lack of overtime. In fact, with the amount of overtime almost stable, one would expect an improvement in performance since there are fewer time-consuming disability claims being filed. However, I've seen the opposite from the field offices and the payment centers with backlogs going up substantially. Hearing office performance hasn't been negatively affected but their workloads have been way down.  Second, there's an increase of 1,231 FTEs or 2% from FY 2021 to FY 2022 projected if Social Security gets the entire appropriation recommended. I don't understand. The budget goes up by 8% but the number of FTEs only goes up by 2%? Where's the rest of the money going? Will we once again see an increased operating budget drained away by IT? Of course, IT is needed but you have to have some balance with current operations. These projections tell me that Social Security management is largely unconcerned with public service.

     Update: There was a comment posted saying that federal FTE numbers do not include employee overtime. It doesn't make sense to me to compute FTEs that way, especially for Social Security which usually uses a lot of overtime, but that's the way they do it.

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

How Can You Go Wrong With More Agile Scrum Masters?

      From Federal News Network:

The Social Security Administration used the project to modernize its Disability Case Processing System as a proof of concept.

The question then became could SSA replicate the success of DCPS with other legacy, traditional waterfall programs.

Sean Brune, the CIO of SSA, said the answer is a resounding “yes.” The agency is taking the success of the DCPS2 and expanding it through its new IT modernization strategy as a way to guide SSA’s transformation. ...

SSA revamped DCPS2 starting in 2015, and over a 14-month period using DevSecOps to move from a COBOL based, green-screen system that had been in use for more than 25 years. SSA and states use DCPS to determine if claimants are qualified from a medical perspective for a benefit. State and territories process the claims on behalf of SSA using DCPS as a case management and disability determination system.

Brune said the DCPS2 success helped SSA expand their focus on overall IT modernization by further identifying core mission functions, building expertise in modern application development around those core mission functions. ...

“We trained more agile Scrum Masters. ...

     Is DCPS such a big success that it's time to take a victory lap? I don't know because I don't use it. I know that DCPS has been controversial, at least in the past.