Congresswoman Criticizes Social Security Funding

     From the Shelton, CT Herald:

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, whose district includes part of Shelton, is criticizing the impact of sequestration on the Social Security Administration (SSA).

DeLauro said sequestration “puts the basic functions of Social Security at risk” and the cuts come at a time when the agency — and many other government departments — have been “dealing with funding that has not kept up with inflation and demand over the years.”  ...

Funding for the SSA over the past two fiscal years for routine operations has been essentially flat, according to DeLauro, the senior Democrat on the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee.

“In each of these years the funding level provided was below the president’s request by $924 million, or 8%,” she said. “These cuts have a real impact on our ability to serve our seniors, and to ensure they get the proper benefits they have earned.”

This Is What You Voted For, Oklahoma!

     From KXII in Oklahoma:

The Social Security Administration is closing a Texoma office, citing federal budget cuts and less foot traffic as reasons for the closure.

 Allison Harris spoke with Hugo city leaders who are appealing this closure, saying it's undue and will be a burden for people in the area.

 Hugo city leaders are concerned that southern Oklahomans will be deprived access to social security support. ...

City manager Jeff Rabon says the Social Security Administration is closing its Hugo office in June, consolidating it with the Paris office. ...

"You know, we all breathe the same air, to quote President Kennedy, 'We pay the same taxes;' we don't want to see any services diminished." ...

The consolidation would force many elderly people in the area to either go online for social security help, or drive further -- by up to 85 miles -- to the Paris office.

"We feel like it's our responsibility to represent the people of our area to say, wait a minute, you know, we already struggle for access to services as it is; it's either Durant or to McAlester or, you know, Oklahoma City or Tulsa," Rabon said.

We spoke with an employee at the Hugo office who says many of their clients don't have access to the Internet, nor the resources to drive further to the Paris office.

"A lot of them don't even know how to use a computer. They're very upset over it, they say, 'what are we going to do without this?'

What An Inadequate Budget Does To Public Service

From Acting Commissioner Colvin's testimony before the House Appropriations Committee on March 14.

     What's it like where you are?

What Could Go Wrong?

     Britain is planning to reduce its expenditures under its Social Security disability program by 20%. All it will take is cutting 200,000 people off benefits. One of the contractors hired to do the chopping, Capita, plans to hire "meeters and greeters, buddies if you like, to ensure that people aren't overly anxious as they wait for their assessment." Capita has shown its sensitivity by hiring Stephen Duckworth, a wheelchair bound man, to head the program to assess the disability benefits recipients. Duckworth is confident that things will go smoothly.
     It will be a good thing to have this project going on in Britain as lawmakers in the U.S. are deciding what should be done about the looming shortfall in the Disability Trust Fund. If things go smoothly in Britain, as Mr. Duckworth expects, we could try the same thing in the U.S.

Who Doesn't Carry A Throwing Star?

     From the Bangor, ME Daily News:

An Arundel man remains free on $10,000 unsecured bail after making his initial appearance Thursday in federal court on a charge of possession of multiple weapons in a federal facility. ...

[Elmer] Pepin was summoned after bringing a throwing star, walking cane sword, and folding knife with him into the Social Security Administration’s Office of Disability Adjudication and Review at 1 Portland Square on Thursday, Feb. 7.

     No gun so no Second Amendment issue.

Appropriations Committee Hearing

     Sorry for the confusion. The hearing before the House Appropriations Committee on Social Security's administrative budget did go ahead today. Here are excerpts from Acting Commissioner Colvin's written testimony:

Shrinking resources and workforce, and rising workloads have resulted in people waiting much longer—and becoming increasingly frustrated. On those increasing occasions when frustration spills over into aggression or even violence, our employees, as well as members of the public, are at risk. Since FY 2011, our employees have been exposed to a nearly 20 percent increase in threats. We owe it to our employees and the people they serve to do everything we can to protectand support them. ...

The current budget situation is exacerbating the negative effects of over two straight years of funding levels nearly a billion dollars below the President’s budget requests. With fewer employees to serve our customers, we are seeing serious signs of service deterioration. Examples include:

• This week, close to 12,000 visitors to our field offices will have to wait over 2 hours to be
  served, a figure that has almost tripled in just the last 4 months;
• The average wait time for field office visitors without an appointment increasing by 40 percent, from just 21 minutes in FY 2010 to about 30 minutes through January of FY 2013;
• Our 800-number average busy rate increasing from 4.6 percent of all calls in FY 2010 (which equates to 2.6 million calls) to about 15 percent of all calls through January of FY
  2013 (which equates to 3.3 million calls and puts us on-pace for a projected 10.5 million
  calls for FY 2013); and
•  Our average speed of answer for the 800-number more than doubling from about 3.5 minutes in FY 2010 to over 7.5 minutes through January of FY 2013. ...

As a result, we estimate that pending levels of initial disability claims will rise by over 140,000 claims, and on average, applicants will have to wait about 2 weeks longer for a decision on an initial disability claim and nearly a month longer for a disability hearing decision. Visitors in our field offices will wait significantly longer, and callers to our 800-number will wait almost 10 minutes for us to answer. ...

We have worked hard to reduce the hearings backlog. Our results illustrate the enormous good       that can be achieved with a dedicated commitment of resources to an important agency workload. With more judges and employees to decide cases, as well as wider use of video hearings, we reduced average processing time from an all-time high of 532 days in August 2008  to a low of 340 days in October 2011. However, because of cutbacks in the budget, average processing time started trending upwards in FY 2012 and is currently at 382 days. Without adequate funding, our gains in this area will soon be a distant memory. ...
[W]e do not expect to have the ability to hire ALJs until the third or fourth quarter of FY 2014. Until we can hire more ALJs, reducing our average processing time will be impossible. For now, the best we can deliver is a stable average processing time.

Finally, as we have reduced processing times for hearings and the hearing backlog itself, we have seen a significant increase in Federal District Court filings whereby claimants appeal unfavorable decisions. In FY 2012, 16,831cases were filed in the Federal District Courts, which represent a 7.7 percent increase over the 14,236 filings of FY 2011 and an 18 percent increase over the 12,952 filings of FY 2010. We anticipate even more court filings in FY 2013, possibly as many as18,600. While attorney productivity in the briefing of these cases has increased by 8 percent since 2010, we will be hard-pressed to meet the court deadlines of such a growing caseload.

Social Security Subcommittee Hearings On Disability Programs

     The written testimony of Joyce Manchester, Chief of the Long-Term Analysis Unit of the Congressional Budget Office, and  Stephen Goss, Social Security's Chief Actuary, at today's hearing before the House Social Security Subcommittee has been released.

     The Subcommittee has also scheduled another hearing concerning Social Security's disability programs on March 20. The press release on this hearing quotes the Subcommittee Chairman as saying "Instead of relying on objective standards to reach decisions, examiners and judges on the front lines have increasingly had to make more judgment calls. Given the advances in medical treatment and rehabilitation, we need to fundamentally understand how agency policies may be influencing decisions and determine whether these policies still make sense for the times we live in."

Witness List For House Social Security Subcommittee Hearing

     The witness list for Thursday's House Social Security Subcommittee hearing has been released. Only two witnesses are scheduled: Stephen Goss, Social Security's Chief Actuary and Joyce M. Manchester, Ph.D., Chief, Long-Term Analysis Unit, Health, Retirement, and Long-Term Analysis Division Congressional Budget Office. 

     Goss is on record saying that the shortfall in the Social Security Disability Trust Fund is temporary and can be resolved by transferring money from the Retirement Trust Fund.

     Here is a summary of a research paper by Manchester and others:

We use administrative longitudinal data on earnings, impairment, and mortality to replicate and extend Bound's seminal study of rejected applicants to federal Disability Insurance (DI). We confirm Bound's main result that rejected older male applicants do not exhibit substantial labor force participation. We show this result is stable over time, robust to more narrow control groups, and similar within gender, impairment, industry, and earnings groups. However, we also find that younger rejected applicants have substantial employment after application. To what extent this translates into potential employment for new beneficiaries depends on which group among them is considered "on the margin" of receiving DI. If we use initially rejected applicants -- a large and growing fraction of new beneficiaries -- the resulting counterfactual employment rate for younger applicants is low, too. We also find that rejected applicants bear signs of economically induced applicants. DI appears to induce a growing number of less successful workers to apply, an important fraction of which ends up without benefits and non-employed.