A Very Interesting Article About Michael Astrue That I Missed

Here is an article I missed that appeared in the Belmont Citizen-Herald on March 9, 2007, shortly after Michael Astrue became Commissioner of Social Security. Belmont is the Boston suburb where Astrue lived before becoming Commissioner of Social Security. By the way, Mitt Romney also lives in Belmont.

Belmont resident Michael Astrue was in Washington, D.C. this week, but he wasn’t there to check out the museums, see the cherry blossoms in bloom or soak up the nation’s history.

He was there to become a part of it.

Astrue was sworn in as the new commissioner of Social Security on Feb. 12.

This is the second time Astrue has been an employee of the federal government — he was general counsel to the commissioner during the Reagan administration.

“It’s fun and unusual to come back two decades later. My old office is about 20 feet away from my new one,” he said.

Astrue was in Washington until 1992, when he moved back to the house he and his wife bought in 1985 on Benton Road. He started a law firm, then served as CEO of several biotech firms, including Biogen in Cambridge.

His wife, Laura Mali-Astrue, is better known to the children of Belmont as “Madame.” She has been a French teacher at the Belmont Day School for the past 14 years. This will be her last year at the school. She will join her husband in Washington in June.

The two have been “empty-nesters” since last fall, when their daughter departed for her first year of college. Their son James is a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington.

“It will be nice to live close to him without being down his back. He told us we aren’t allowed to live within three blocks of his dorm. The place we really like is about 12 blocks away,” Astrue said.

He said James will be happy because his parents will bring their dog, Maggie, an English springer spaniel named for Margaret Thatcher.

“We got Maggie when the kids were little. They wanted to name her after a famous British woman, and the only ones they knew were Margaret Thatcher and the Spice Girls. I pushed for Margaret Thatcher,” he said.

In his new job, Astrue is responsible for administering the retirement, disability and survivors insurance programs that pay out more than $580 billion annually.

He thinks he landed the job because of an appealing blend of private management and public service experience, he said.

Many, many years ago, he said, he was a law clerk while attending Harvard University. His fellow clerk also eventually settled in Belmont, where he lives to this day. His newest job is state representative, and his name is Will Brownsberger.

The Astrues won’t be leaving Belmont for good. The commissioner’s term is six years, Astrue said, and they don’t plan to become a permanent part of Washington. He said they will probably rent out the house on Benton Road, the same way they did when he was in D.C. over 20 years ago.

“We’ll miss Belmont, but we’ll be back,” he said.

A Bullet Dodged -- For Now

Under a Bush Administration plan, the Social Security Administration was going to send out a huge number of letters to employers about instances in which workers' names and Social Security numbers did not match. Unless these discrepancies were resolved within 90 days, employers were supposed to fire the employees or face serious penalties. This plan has been sidelined by a preliminary injunction issued by a San Francisco federal judge. Whatever good or bad effects this plan might have had upon immigration enforcement, it threatened to have a devastating effect upon the understaffed Social Security Administration. An excerpt from a New York Times article hints at what might have happened -- and what might happen yet if this injunction is lifted:

In a December 2006 report cited in the court documents, the inspector general of the Social Security Administration estimated that 17.8 million of the agency’s 435 million individual records contained discrepancies that could result in a no-match letter being sent to a legally authorized worker. Of those records with errors, 12.7 million belonged to native-born Americans, the report found.

Fraud In Pennsylvania

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

A Brushton woman has been sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay restitution of $15,000 for Social Security fraud, federal prosecutors said.

Angelette Freeze of Susquehanna Street was convicted of concealing her marriage from the Social Security administration so that she could receive Supplemental Security Income between 1998 and 2005.

No-Match Letters Blocked

From Reuters:

A U.S. federal court judge on Wednesday granted a preliminary injunction barring the Bush administration from going ahead with a controversial program to remove illegal immigrants from the U.S. work force. ...

Under the proposed program, employers notified of a "no-match" would have 90 days to confirm that an employee was in the country legally or fire him if not. ...

[Federal District Court Judge] Breyer said in his decision Wednesday that the no-match letters will result in the firing of lawfully employed workers because letters based on Social Security Administration records include numerous errors.

This is important to the Social Security Administration. If those no-match letters ever go out, Social Security offices will be deluged by millions of individuals whose records contain mistakes or are out of date. Social Security's desperate staffing shortages could make this a catastrophic situation. Granting a preliminary injunction probably delays implementation for many months, perhaps even past the end of the Bush Administration.

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