Federal Register Alert

An item due to run in the Federal Register on Friday:

SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

NOTICES

Modifications to the Disability Determination Procedures:

Reinstatement of "Prototype" and "Single Decisionmaker" Tests in States in the Boston Region, E8-04531

41 Senators Join In Letter On Social Security Budget

Here is the text of a letter that went out yesterday:

The Honorable Kent Conrad
The Honorable Judd Gregg
Chairman
Ranking Member
Senate Committee on the Budget Senate Committee on the Budget
United States Senate United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510 Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senators Conrad and Gregg:

We respectfully request that the FY 2009 Budget Resolution recommend $350 million above the President’s Budget request of $10.327 billion for the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) administrative expenses. Last year, the Senate approved as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 as much as $363 million additional dollars that will allow Social Security to begin to reduce the enormous waiting times for many disability benefit applicants to have their benefits approved, and to reverse cuts in services to the public in SSA field offices.

Currently, many applicants to the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program and the disability portion of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program face significant delays before receiving benefits. Indeed, waiting times can exceed three years in some cases. Such delays create serious or desperate financial situations for the applicants and their families. According to the SSA, about half of these waiting times result from the Agency’s huge backlogs of initial claims and hearings before Administrative Law Judges.

As you know, these waiting times are a major concern for many of our constituents and are a constant source of casework in Senate offices. As of January 2008 nearly 751,000 cases are awaiting a hearing on an appealed claim, compared to 312,000 cases at the beginning of FY 2000. Nearly 300,000 of these appeals are over one-year old. Approximately 91,000 veterans have their hearings pending. The average processing time for a hearing is currently over 500 days, up about 200 days from earlier this decade.

In recent years, Congress has increased the SSA’s responsibilities. Today, the SSA is required to evaluate Medicare beneficiaries’ incomes in order to determine whether they need to pay increased Part B premiums. The SSA is also responsible for implementing a low-income subsidy program to help individuals with limited incomes and assets obtain Medicare Part D coverage. Furthermore, the implementation of the Intelligence Reform legislation has increased SSA’s workload.

The President’s recommendation for SSA’s funding for FY 2009 and the additional funds received for 2008 will begin the process of reducing the backlogs, but are not enough funding to make the progress that is needed. Under SSA’s long-term plans, it would still take five years to eliminate the backlogs altogether. Moreover, the President’s Budget proposes to defer work on other important workloads, such as initiating repayments of amounts that beneficiaries have been overpaid. For these other workloads, the Budget falls $140 million short of what is needed even to operate at the same deficient processing rates as last year. Furthermore, the President’s Budget does nothing to improve other inadequate levels of service to the public in SSA’s field offices, such as the inability to get through to the office on the telephone and the long waiting times for walk-in customers.

We also suggest that the funding level for SSA’s administrative costs assumed in the Budget Resolution include funding for program integrity views to assure that only qualified individuals receive Social Security and Supplemental Security Income program benefits. Ultimately, conducting a greater number of these Continuing Disability Reviews (CDRs) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) redeterminations will reduce benefit payments to ineligible individuals and save substantially more money than they cost. CDRs detect payments in SSA’s disability programs to beneficiaries who are no longer disabled, and these reviews save $10 for each dollar spent. SSI redeterminations review the eligibility of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries each year. Seven dollars is saved for every one dollar spent on these redeterminations.

Providing SSA with the amount of funding requested by the President -- plus an additional $350 million -- accomplishes two objectives. First, more funds can be used to reduce backlogs of disability cases and shorten waiting times for disability benefit applicants. Second, because CDRs and SSI redeterminations save more than they cost, the adoption of both of these proposals in the Budget Resolution will result in lower Federal deficits, not higher ones. We believe this is a win-win proposition for everyone.

Thank you in advance for your consideration of this important issue.

Sincerely,


John Kerry
Olympia Snowe
Max Baucus
Edward Kennedy
Daniel Akaka
Evan Bayh
Jeff Bingaman
Joseph Biden
Barbara Boxer
Sherrod Brown
Maria Cantwell
Robert Casey
Hillary Clinton
Norm Coleman
Susan Collins
Christopher Dodd
Elizabeth Dole
Byron Dorgan
Russ Feingold
Dianne Feinstein
Daniel Inouye
Tim Johnson
Herbert Kohl
Frank Lautenberg
Patrick Leahy
Carl Levin
Joseph Lieberman
Blanche Lincoln
Claire McCaskill
Robert Menendez
Barbara Mikulski
Ben Nelson
Barack Obama
Mark Pryor
John Rockefeller
Ken Salazar
Charles Schumer
Gordon Smith
Jon Tester
George Voinovich
Ron Wyden
Richard Durbin

Possible "Mass Loss" In Minnesota

From the Associated Press:

The Social Security Administration may have to declare a "mass loss" to speed disability checks to residents of southeastern Minnesota.

Dozens of people in Austin, Rochester and other parts of southeastern Minnesota are still waiting for their disability checks -- days after they were supposed to arrived.

The checks were sent from the U.S. Treasury's office but never made it to the post office.

If the checks don't arrive today in people's mailboxes, the Social Security Administration will declare it a mass loss and expand its investigation.

OMB Action Completed

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is part of the White House, must approve all new federal regulations. OMB has just completed action on this item sent to them by the Social Security Administration:

AGENCY: SSA	RIN: 0960-AF33
TITLE: Revised Medical Criteria for Evaluating Immune System Disorders (804F)
STAGE: Final Rule	ECONOMICALLY SIGNIFICANT: No
RECEIVED DATE: 01/17/2008	LEGAL DEADLINE: None
** COMPLETED: 03/05/2008	COMPLETED ACTION: Consistent with Change

Poor Budget Means Poor Performance

Some excerpts from the testimony of Richard Warsinskey, on behalf of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations and the Social Security Advocacy Group at last week's House Appropriations Committee hearing, with my comments bolded in brackets:

SSA is planning on replacing these losses of positions during the actual period of this Fiscal Year:

7 of 10 losses in Field Offices
1.2 to 1 losses in Teleservice Centers
2 for 5 losses in Payment Centers
1 of 2 losses in the Disability Determinations Services (DDSs) ...

For many years SSA has stated that it wants to improve the 800 Number services. The FY 2009 budget states that SSA plans to have a 10% busy rate for FY 2009 and an average of a 330-second answering time for a call [five and a half minutes to answer the phone on average on top of a 10% busy rate!] . ...

In FY 2006, the agency’s SSI accuracy rate with respect to overpayments was 92.1 percent with an error rate of 7.9 percent, which represented improper payments of $3.2 billion. This is a statistically significant difference from the FY 2005 error rate with respect to overpayments of 6.4%, which represented $2.5 billion in improper payments. SSA directly attributes this increase in the error rate to the reduction in the number of redeterminations conducted in FY 2006. [Lack of staff is leading to hundreds of millions of dollars of overpayments to claimants.]

Senate Budget Committee To Vote On Resolution Thursday

The Associated Press is reporting that the Senate Budget Committee will take up its version of the Concurrent Budget Resolution on Thursday. The "mark" or committee chairman's version of the resolution is scheduled for release on Wednesday.

Despondence And Anxiety Grow, But Social Security Central Offices Do Not Seem To Care

Some excerpts from the minutes of a January 17, 2008 conference call of the Executive Committee of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations (NCSSMA), an organization of Social Security management personnel:

The state of field offices was a hot topic of discussion. Conference call participants weighed in with comments about the impact our resource shortage is having on the Field Offices and the Teleservice Centers [TSC]. Field/TSC employee morale is at an all time low and the number of employees retiring is growing. Employees do not feel supported by the agency, and so are more prone to retire as soon as they can. Many have over 30 years of service but are at the end of their ropes because there is no hope in sight. ... Some of the regions expressed the concern that new hires seem to be targeted for urban offices with little done for suburban or rural offices. New managers are overwhelmed with the decreased staff and increased workloads. Managers are increasingly involved in processing direct service workloads and tabling traditional management activities as they have no other way to provide the public service. Rising expectations from area, regional and national components to clear work are unrelenting, with new reports, listings and additional workloads being piled on field office employees. The pain needs to be felt by other components including ADO [Area Director's Offices] and regional employees. There is a sense of doom – Field Offices are being left to wither without any assistance. ... With the usual dedication, employees have been very creative in their approaches to handling staffing losses with all pitching in across the board and doing the best they can. Maybe it is time that we quit trying to prove that we can do the same amount of work, or even more, with fewer resources. The despondency and anxiety in the field and TSCs continue to grow, but our staffing losses do not seem to concern Central Office.

Time Crunch?

On January 29 Michael Astrue sent a letter to Congress indicating that he was suspending regulatory proceedings on the proposal for major procedural changes at Social Security. Those changes would have required all evidence to be submitted at least five days before a hearing, would have eliminated reopening of Administrative Law Judge decisions on account of new and material evidence and would have made all remands for closed periods only. Astrue said in the letter that he would have a new notice placed in the Federal Register asking public comment on some questions related to the proposal and that his agency would then publish a new proposal in the Federal Register.

If Michael Astrue wants to get some new procedural regulations, his agency is going to have to work fast. He cannot publish much of anything in the Federal Register without approval of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) which is part of the White House. That takes time. I think this request for comments would require OMB approval, although I am not certain of that. He has not submitted the request for comments to OMB. Probably, he will have to allow 60 days for comments once he does. After that, his agency has to draft new proposed regulations and submit them to OMB for approval. Those proposed regulations must be published in the Federal Register with sixty days for comments. The comments must be reviewed and the agency must finalize the regulations and get OMB approval before publishing final regulations. All of this takes time.

The question is whether this can be accomplished before time runs out. When will time run out? It will certainly run out on inauguration day if a Democrat is elected President this November. It may run out even if John McCain is elected President. It may run out as soon as election day, since most agencies prefer not to adopt new regulations of any consequence in the interregnum between a new President being elected and taking office. In fact, time may run out as early as Labor Day, since after that the Presidential campaign is in full swing, agencies typically do not want to do anything controversial. Even if Astrue wants to push this through, he will have to deal with the fact that OMB will start running down by early this fall, as political appointees leave their jobs and everyone become distracted by the upcoming transition.

Is it already too late for Astrue to do something with this before it gets swamped by the election and its aftermath? Probably not, but he would have to move fast and there is no sign of rapid movement.