Pilot Program Allowing Agency To Set Time And Place For ALJ Hearings Extended

     The Social Security Administration has extended for one year their pilot program that authorizes the agency to set the time and place for hearings conducted by Administrative Law Judges (ALJs). As best I can tell from outside Social Security, the agency has only used this to deal with a few problem ALJs.

Disability Trust Fund Looking Better

     From the written testimony of Stephen Goss, Social Security's Chief Actuary, to the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday:

At the time of enactment [this year of changes designed to shore up the Disability Trust Fund], we estimated that the date of trust fund reserve depletion for DI [Disability Insurance] would be extended 6 years, from 2016 to 2022. In the 2016 Trustees Report, we now project that DI reserves will not deplete until 2023, largely due to the lower than expected recent level of benefit expenditures. Applications for disability benefits have been declining since 2010, and have continued to be below our prior projections.

     In fact, if you look at the full Trustees report, you'll find that there are three projections for each trust fund, the Low-Cost, Intermediate and High-Cost projections. The projection of a 2023 exhaustion date is the Intermediate projection. The High-Cost projection has an exhaustion date of 2020 and the Low-Cost projected exhaustion date is never.

Trust Fund Balance Increases By $23 Billion: GOP Will Claim Sky Is Falling

     The Social Security Trustees Report has been released. Here's a summary from a Social Security press release:

• The asset reserves of the combined OASDI [Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance] Trust Funds increased by $23 billion in 2015 to a total of $2.81 trillion.
• The combined trust fund reserves are still growing and will continue to do so through 2019. Beginning in 2020, the total cost of the program is projected to exceed income.
• The year when the combined trust fund reserves are projected to become depleted, if Congress does not act before then, is 2034 – the same as projected last year. At that time, there will be sufficient income coming in to pay 79 percent of scheduled benefits.

Another Sign That The American Right Has Lost Its Mind

     The Wall Street Journal seems disappointed that Donald Trump doesn't share their zeal for "Social Security reform." Of course, "Social Security reform" to them is code for cutting Social Security. It's hard to believe that any sophisticated person would think that any major party Presidential candidate would campaign on cutting Social Security. This is a sign of just how far the American right has departed from political sanity.

Many Comments On Gun Control Proposal

     There are 3,774 comments already on Social Security's Notice of Proposed Rule-Making that would require that the Social Security Administration refer individuals with a history of serious mental illness to a database used to prevent certain people from buying firearms. Comments will be allowed until July 5.

About Time For Democrats To Start Acting Like Democrats

     Robert Pear at the New York Times reports on how the President and Hillary Clinton came to endorse increasing Social Security benefits. Give Bernie Sanders a lot of credit.

Trustees Report Finally Coming On Wednesday

     The 2016 Social Security Trustees report is scheduled for release on Wednesday, June 22. The House Social Security Subcommittee will hold a hearing that day.

Doing Less With Less -- Part Three

Planning To Rewrite Everything

     From FCW Magazine:

"We have a full-blown plan to basically re-write everything," Social Security Administration CIO Rob Klopp told FCW on June 14.

If the proposed $3.1 billion federal IT modernization fund becomes a system-shocking reality, Klopp said he plans to be among the first requesting a cut.

"We have very detailed plans, we know how we’re going to ask for the money," he said. ...

Klopp pointed to the Disability Case Processing System as a reference point. In 2014, SSA killed and restarted the DCPS project after sinking $300 million and six years into it. The new DCPS push has cost less than $40 million, Klopp told FCW, and should be rolling out this December, thanks to an agile development approach. ...

     OK, a successful rollout of DCPS will impress a lot of people. Automating the windfall offset will impress even more. I think that should be your next goal after DCPS. Of course, how many people are confident that DCPS is going to work?
     I have no idea how likely that $3.1 billion federal IT modernization fund is or what share of it that Social Security might get.

Doing Less With Less -- Part Two

Former HOCALJ Pleads Guilty

     From a Department of Justice press release:

A former social security Chief Administrative Law Judge pleaded guilty in federal court today for conspiring to retaliate against a former employee of the Social Security Administration (SSA) who provided information regarding potential corruption and fraud to federal investigators. ...

Charlie Paul Andrus, 66, of Huntington, West Virginia, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky to a one-count information charging him with conspiracy to retaliate against an informant.  Andrus had been an administrative law judge with the SSA for nearly 28 years, where he was responsible for adjudicating claims for disability benefits on behalf of the SSA.  In 1997, Andrus was promoted to the position of Chief Administrative Law Judge for the hearing office located in Huntington. ...

Andrus admitted that at the time of his demotion, he was aware that an SSA employee from the hearing office was meeting with investigators and relaying information about potential federal offenses.  According to his plea agreement, Andrus met with Conn shortly after the article was published and the two devised and implemented a plan to discredit the informant.  According to court documents, the plan involved filming the informant violating a program that allowed employees to work from home, with the hope that the informant would be terminated as a result.  By pleading guilty today, Andrus admitted that he was aware that the SSA employee reported truthful information to federal investigators and that he wanted to retaliate against the employee by interfering with the employee’s employment and livelihood.

Thanks GOP

     The Senate Appropriations Committee has reported out the Labor-HHS Appropriations bill for Fiscal Year (FY) 2017, which begins on October 1, 2016. I don't have a link but my understanding is that Social Security's administrative funding in the bill is $12.464 billion.  This is up from $12.162 billion in FY 2016 but the entire amount of the modest increase would be appropriated only for program integrity. This means that the money that the agency gets to pay its employees, answer its telephones, keep its offices open, process people onto benefits, hold hearings, etc. has been frozen even though the cost of all of these has been increased by inflation. If this budget is enacted, every problem that the Social Security Administration has is going to get worse. It will be even harder to get through to the agency on the telephone. There will be ever longer lines outside Social Security field offices. It will take even longer to get a hearing. 

     I don't know what it's going to take before the public starts raising holy hell. I'm sure that when that does finally happens, Republicans will blame the Social Security bureaucracy which, in a sense, will be deserved since the agency's leaders have been so timid about blaming their service delivery problems on the Republican led Congress.

Doing Less With Less -- Part One

The Hell Of Applying For Government Benefits

     The Atlantic has a piece written by Laura Kwerel on The Hell of Applying for Government Benefits. Here's an excerpt:

It’s 11:30 a.m., and after three hours of waiting, I have finally gotten to the front of the line at the Social Security Administration on M Street in Washington, D.C. I have come to see if they received a fax—the agency rarely uses email to communicate with the public.

The harried worker in front of me click-click-clicks something into her computer terminal, then looks up at me disapprovingly. “You have an appointment,” she says. Um ... what? This was the first I had heard of an appointment. After weeks of calling their 800 number without success, I decided to just show up in person. “It’s at 3 o’clock,” she went on. “Didn’t you receive the notice?”

I would later find out that their office had indeed sent me a letter, but because a “2” was incorrectly entered as a “4,” it had gone to the wrong address. The fact that I appeared on the day of my “appointment” was a fluke. And they had not received the fax.

Employment Rate Of Older Americans Soars

You Don't Get What You Don't Pay For

     Joe Davidson writes for the Washington Post on the serious service delivery problems that the Social Security Administration has and on the cause of these problems -- grossly inadequate administrative appropriations.

NPRM On Excluded Medical Evidence

     From a Notice of Proposed Rule-Making (NPRM) that Social Security had published in the Federal Register today (footnotes omitted):

In accordance with section 812 of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 (BBA section 812), we propose to revise our rules to explain how we would address evidence furnished by medical sources that meet one of BBA section 812’s exclusionary categories (statutorily excluded medical sources). Under this proposed rule, we would not consider evidence furnished by a statutorily excluded medical source unless we find good cause to do so. We propose several circumstances in which we would find good cause, and we also propose to require statutorily excluded medical sources to notify us of their excluded status when they furnish evidence to us. ...

Specifically, we may not consider evidence from the following medical sources:

• A medical source convicted of a felony under sections 208 or 1632 of the Act,

• a medical source excluded from participating in any Federal health care program under section 1128 of the Act, or

• a medical source imposed with a civil monetary penalty (CMP).

Shots Fired Outside Social Security Office

     From the Sun Herald of Gulfport, MS:

Moss Point Police Chief Art McClung said shots were fired Wednesday in the parking lot of the U.S. Social Security Administration office at 6000 Mississippi 63.

McClung said a man was conducting business in the office when he became angered and left the building, saying something to the security guard as he exited the building.

“He went outside and went to his car and got a gun and discharged it three or four times in the air and then got in his vehicle and left,” McClung said. “The shots were fired into the air and no one was injured, nor was any property destroyed.”

McClung said police have a good idea who fired the shots and are pursuing him.

Read more here: http://www.sunherald.com/news/local/crime/article82508227.html#storylink=cpy

Blahous And Reischauer Nominations Barely Clear Finance Committee

     The re-nominations of Charles Blahous and Robert Reischauer to Social Security's Board of Trustees were narrowly reported out of the Senate Finance Committee yesterday by a vote of 14-12 for each. 

     Blahous's nomination has been criticized because he has been a consistent advocate for Social Security "reform" that would cut benefits. I think it would be fair to say that he is philosophically opposed to the concept of social insurance and wishes to undermine it in any way possible. Reischauer has been opposed to the sorts of cuts that Blahous advocates but he hasn't been an advocate for increasing Social Security benefits.

     In any case, Social Security's Board of Trustees has no power. The Trustees have no role other than to sign off on a yearly report that is really the product of Social Security's actuaries. It's little more than a ceremonial position.

New Respiratory Listings

     The Social Security Administration has posted new Listings for respiratory system disorders. These are final rules, effective October 7, 2016.