A Question

From yesterday's press release from Social Security:

The agency also plans to hire about 150 ALJs and some additional hearing office support staff in the spring of 2008 – the only new hiring in FY 2008 as the agency continues to contract through attrition due to many years of congressional budget cuts far below what the President has requested.

Why would budget cuts in prior years require that Social Security cut its workforce this year? I can see how budget cuts in prior years would have required staff cuts in those prior years, but now? It is certainly fair to blame a good part of the current backlogs on inadequate budgets in prior years, but staffing levels in fiscal year (FY) 2008, which just began last week, are determined by the FY 2008 budget, not the budgets in prior years.

Since it seems clear that Social Security will get at least as much as what President Bush and Social Security Commissioner Astrue have requested for Social Security for FY 2008, it seems only fair to me to blame President Bush and Michael Astrue for not asking for enough money to properly staff and run the agency. Blaming prior Congresses for today's staffing level seems dishonest to me.

About the only excuse I can come up with for this is that if prior Congresses had given Social Security more funding in prior years, then in preparing the FY 2008 budget the White House and the Congress would have been working from a higher baseline and might have come to a higher number for this year. It would seem to me that it would be Michael Astrue's job to point out the fallacy of adding some small percentage onto last year's inadequate budget and expecting the backlogs to disappear. If he ever pointed out this fallacy, he did so privately. Publicly, he has said that all he wants is the President's recommended budget, even though the President's recommended budget for Social Security will require a near total hiring freeze in an agency that is already badly understaffed.

New Job For Rita Geier

From a press release:

Rita Sanders Geier has been named associate to UT Knoxville Chancellor Loren Crabtree, and will help lead intercultural efforts and implement goals of the university's diversity plan and Ready for the World initiative....

Geier was a 23-year-old faculty member at Tennessee State University in 1968 when she filed the lawsuit after the University of Tennessee announced plans to expand in Nashville. She feared that UT-Nashville would become a four-year, predominantly white school with top-notch facilities while historically black TSU would be neglected.

The suit resulted in the 2001 Geier Consent Decree, which provided $77 million in state funds over six years to diversify student populations and faculty of all state higher education institutions. Since then, more than 1,300 black students have benefited from Geier-funded scholarships at UT Knoxville. Black enrollment on the Knoxville campus has grown from 6.4 percent in 2001 to 8.2 percent in 2006. About 9 percent of this year's freshmen are black....

Prior to joining UT, Geier worked at the Social Security Administration in Washington, D.C., as executive counselor to the commissioner for special initiatives, serving as principal adviser on Medicare appeals, identity theft and other initiatives.

SSA Press Release On Backlog

The Social Security Administration has issued a press release touting its efforts to reduce its backlog in adjudicating disability claims.

Here is one interesting sentence: "The Social Security Administration also virtually eliminated its backlog of FY 2007 “aged” disability hearings cases." That is wonderful. The backlog has been eliminated! But wait, the next sentence tells us that the term "aged" cases is now defined as cases pending 1,000 days or more. Talk about setting the bar low! As long as it takes Social Security less than 32 months to give you a hearing, your case cannot be considered "aged." The press release also touts the fact that the agency has "slowed the growth" in its pending disabliity hearings case backlog. Of course, "slowed the growth" means that the backlog is continuing to get worse. It is just not getting worse at quite as fast a clip as before.

Read the press release closely and it shows that things are getting worse, but the Social Security Administration is working harder at pretending otherwise.

Note the timing, with Social Security's operating budget possibly coming up for a vote next week in the Senate. Am I being too cynical when I say that this press release looks like a deliberate effort to talk down the agency's need for additional funding?

What is particularly sad about this press release is that many Social Security employees have worked very hard to achieve the "progress" that they have achieved, but the "progress" is trivial and is being used as an excuse to avoid hiring enough people to really get the work done.

Results Of Last Week's Unscientific Poll

Who do you think will win the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination?

Sam Brownback (3)	4%
Rudolph Giuliani (34)	45%
Mike Huckabee (5)	7%
Duncan Hunter (2)	3%
Alan Keyes (3)	4%
John McCain (2)	3%
Ron Paul (5)	7%
Mitt Romney (11)	15%
Tom Tancredo (2)	3%
Fred Thompson (8)	11%

Total Votes: 75

Independent Commissioner Of Social Security?

Take a look at some correspondence between Jim McCrery, the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee and Michael Astrue, the Commissioner of Social Security, on the effect of the children's insurance provisions recently passed by Congress and vetoed by the President. Astrue confirms that Social Security cannot tell for certain who is and who is not a citizen, which should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Note the last line in Astrue's letter: "The Office of Management and Budget advises me that there is no objection to the transmittal of this letter from the standpoint of the President's program." Why did an independent Commissioner of Social Security need the approval of the Office of Management and Budget to respond to a letter from a Congressman? Why is the "President's program" a matter of concern to an independent Commissioner of Social Security? Would Michael Astrue worry about the "President's program" if the President were Clinton or Obama or Edwards? What do we have ahead of us if Michael Astrue remains as Commissioner of Social Security through four years of a Democratic Presidency? That is how long his term of office lasts.

Note also that Astrue's stationery does not include a street address or any telephone number. That is the way it is with all virtually all Social Security stationery. It seems like they want to hide.

Ex Parte Communications And ALJs

I hesitate to link to a completely anonymous thread on an online message board, but I think that attorneys who represent Social Security claimants will find this thread on the ALJ Improvement Board amazing and disturbing.

Where The Money Is Going

From a Program Operations Manual Series (POMS) release:

Unlike prior Fiscal Years (FY), the number of workyears allocated for processing redeterminations (RZs) and Limited Issues (LIs) in FY 2008 is larger than in FY 2007. Because of the increase in workyears, the number of High Error Profile (HEP) Redeterminations (RZs) and Limited Issues (LIs) selected will be greater than were selected in FY 2007. Also the A, B and UC profiles will again be selected.

To translate this for you, it is more important to address SSI redeterminations to prevent erroneous payments of benefits than it is to answer the telephones at Social Security's field offices or to address the backlogs in processing of disability claims. In fact, it looks as if there will be a near complete hiring freeze during this fiscal year so these other problems will just get worse over the next year.

It would not be fair to blame the Commissioner of Social Security for this, since Congress has made it clear that it wants this. Of course Social Security ought to have sufficient funds to address the redeterminations, answer the telephones, work off the disability claims backlogs and more, but it does not. No one should be surprised that Scial Security service does not get better. That is not where our nation's priorities lie.

Fee Payment Stats

The Social Security Administration has posted the September figures for payments of fees to attorneys and others qualified to receive direct payment for representing Social Security claimants. After peaking at more than $100 million in August, fee payments declined to about $76 million in September. The fluctuations in fee payments have far more to do with increases and decreases in payment backlogs than with anything the attorneys did. These fluctuations are an indirect indicator of fluctuations in new benefit payments to disabled individuals, since the attorney is paid at about the same time as the claimant. There are huge fluctuations in how rapidly or slowly these benefits are paid.

Fee Payments
Month/Year	Volume	Amount
Jan-07	15,331	$55,149,991.81
Feb-07	19,301	$69,731,683.72
Mar-07	26,505	$94,396,916.02
Apr-07	26,889	$96,650,134.82
May-07	24,429	$86,625,391.60
June-07	27,716	$99,357,038.71
July-07	21,807	$78,273,082.88
Aug-07	28,607	$101,523,346.40
Sept-07	21,409	$75,663,579.78
Fee payments also include payments made to eligible non-attorneys participating in the demonstration project authorized by section 303 of the Social Security Protection Act of 2004 (Pub. L. 108-203).