Transition Meeting On Social Security Coming Up

From the December 8 Capitol Insider put out by the Disability Policy Collaboration (DPC):

DPC staff will meet this week with members of the Obama Transition teams to discuss high priority disability agenda issues and the Social Security Administration. The purpose of these meetings is to educate and inform the transition team about major disability policy issues. In addition, some meetings are targeted to specific federal agencies as the transition team conducts its reviews.

New Federal Judges

"What I do want is a judge who is sympathetic enough to those who are on the outside, those who are vulnerable, those who are powerless, those who can't have access to political power and as a consequence can't protect themselves from being . . . dealt with sometimes unfairly"

-- Barack Obama in May 2008.

The federal courts have had relatively little impact on Social Security in recent years. This may change as the composition of the courts changes over the next four or eight years as a result of Barack Obama's appointments. A Washington Post article reports that 56% of the judges on the Courts of Appeals are now Republicans. Congress seems likely to approve a bill to add 14 judges to the Courts of Appeals and 52 District Court judges.

The most dramatic change will occur at the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Republicans have a 6-5 majority on the court, but there are four vacancies on the Court.

My advice in recent years on appealing to the 4th Circuit has been to not appeal, no matter how strong the case or how egregious the mistakes below may have been. It has literally been impossible to win at a Court this has become astonishingly right wing. The impression given was that the judges of the 4th Circuit did not bother to read the briefs before entering two paragraph per curiam opinions.

There will also be a change in control of the 2d and 3d Circuits as well.

Christmas At Social Security 1959

Christmas party in Equitable Building in 1959. Left to right: Victor Christgau, Terri Farina, Nell Gallagher, Leona MacKinnon, Mary Alice Bearden, Rita Pulos, Carol Boch, Gladys Sander, Clif Gross, Robert M. Ball, Jackie Ball, Doris Ball, Delphien Bjerragaard, Jack Futterman, Nancy Long. SSA History Archives.

Waiting In Illinois

From the Northwest Herald in McHenry County in Illinois:

LuAnn McAuliffe ... realized that she couldn’t work anymore, so in summer 2005 she filed an online application for Social Security Disability Insurance.

It wasn’t until January 2008 that McAuliffe started receiving payments. ...

But industry experts say that’s not the only reason the system is so backlogged.

Many people are being denied after a first or second application because they don’t know how to complete the paperwork.

“If you don’t do this every day, you’re not going to be an expert,” said Rebecca Ray, corporate communication manager for Allsup, an SSDI representation company.

I am glad that Allsup is generating this sort of article. I do not mind them getting the publicity. I have been quoted in the press before and I never got much business out of it. Allsup probably does not either. But telling claimants that the problem is that they did not fill out their paperwork properly? Come on, that is a typical claimant misconception. Do not mislead people that way. The problem is not that simple and Allsup knows it.

$2.4 Billion More Needed Just To Get Current On Continuing Disability Reviews

From The Oregonian:

The Social Security Administration has fallen behind in reviewing the medical conditions of 1.7 million Americans on its disability rolls, potentially paying up to $11 billion in benefits to people who are no longer disabled.

The agency's failure to tackle those pending disability reviews allows tens of thousands of undeserving people to bleed government funds that Americans count on when they become too sick or injured to work, The Oregonian found in an ongoing investigation of Social Security.

"It's lost money to taxpayers," said Rick Warsinskey, past president of the association representing Social Security's field managers. "There's going to be less money available to pay people their Social Security. We're setting aside money for them. ... It's going to be spent." ...

The reviews have a phenomenal rate of return, last year saving $11.74 for every $1 spent, according to agency records. But Social Security's leaders have pushed those potential savings aside to confront another embarrassing backlog -- 766,905 people waiting to plead cases for benefits before the agency's corps of judges.

Social Security's chief priorities -- speeding up disability claims and serving customers -- leave the agency scarce funds to conduct disability reviews. The agency processed about one in three that came due last year, says Kelly Croft, the agency's deputy commissioner for quality performance....

Officials at Social Security's Baltimore headquarters say 1.7 million medical disability reviews are now overdue. Another 1.7 million of them will come due next year, but the agency says that it expects only enough funding to process 1 million. ...

Astrue, confirmed as commissioner in early 2007, declined through a spokesman to be interviewed about the disability review problem, saying he was too focused on the agency's budget and backlog of disability claims. ...

Astrue's budget officers now estimate that Congress would have to make special appropriations of $2.4 billion just to get current with medical disability reviews and return the agency to its historic volumes of SSI eligibility reviews. And they estimate, even with that funding, it would take until 2013.

Agency officials acknowledge that the Bush administration hasn't sought nearly enough money from Congress to fix the disability review problem.

If $2.4 billion is how much is needed to get up to speed on continuing disability reviews (CDRs), how much is needed to get up to speed on holding hearings for disability claimants and answering the telephones at Social Security?

Potemkin In Indiana

Here is another example of the Potemkin effect, this time in Indiana. A TV story on Sheila Dorrel, a claimant who had been waiting for three years to receive Social Security disability benefits, brought about a quick and happy resolution for Ms. Dorrel. Social Security told the TV station that they could not move up a specific case, but apparently did, approving Ms. Dorrel shortly after the TV story. If we could just get several hundred thousand media stories on invididual cases we could solve the backlog.

New Regs On Hold

On November 21, 2008, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) cleared proposed regulations to make "technical revisions to our rules on income and resources to conform with previous changes to the Social Security Act" and "to extend the home exclusion to individuals who leave a home because of domestic abuse."

Ordinarily, proposed regulations appear in the Federal Register within a week after they clear OMB. This one has not yet been published.

I can only surmise that the Obama transition team has asked Commissioner Astrue to put a hold on all regulatory activity until after the inauguration and that hold includes something as innocuous as this proposal seems to be.

Update: I spoke too soon. The proposed regulations will be in the Federal Register on December 9.

Can't Spend The Money Fast Enough

Take a look at this post by Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman to his blog at the New York Times. Krugman believes that our economy is losing jobs at an incredible rate. The new conventional wisdom is that we need massive infrastructure spending to prevent an economic calamity, but Krugman fears that it will take most of a year before infrastructure projects can kick in. We may be at double digit unemployment before infrastructure projects can even help the economy in any significant way.

As I read this, I wonder how Social Security would fit into a situation in which it becomes urgent for the federal government to spend money rapidly. A temporary moratorium on the FICA tax? Large bonus payments to Social Security recipients? Interim benefits for Social Security disability claimants? Massively increased operational budget for the agency? Obviously, every agency in government would be affected, but Social Security distributes more money than any other agency.