Your Government Shutdown News

     You can follow the government shutdown news minute by minute by going to the National Review's tweettracker but I can tell you that there's nothing of consequence going on. 

• Republicans in the House of Representatives are going ahead with small appropriations bills covering a few agencies. The Senate will reject these. 
• The polls look bad for the Republicans but those most committed to the confrontation over the Affordable Care Act believe that this will turn around. 
• Democrats may insist that any solution to the government shutdown include a solution to the debt ceiling problem as well. 
• There is much discussion about divisions within the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and divisions between House and Senate Republicans but no discussion about divisions among the Democrats.
• Republican pundits seize upon minor details such as the closure of the World War II Memorial in Washington.
• There is no sign of any significant discussions between Republicans and Democrats to resolve this crisis. Basically, each is waiting for the other to crack. Just about everyone, including most Republicans, believes the GOP will crack first.

Shutdown Questions

     Some questions about the shutdown, for anyone who can answer them:

• What was it like in the office when employees came in Tuesday to be officially told they were furloughed?
• Am I correct that the next scheduled payday for most federal employees is October 11? Whatever the date is, it's important. No federal civilian employee gets a paycheck until the shutdown ends, even if they've been working through the shutdown.
• What's it like for Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) and others working in mostly deserted offices?
• If you've been furloughed, how are you spending your time so far?
• Is there some word on the street about when or if the employees furloughed at the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) will be called back to work despite the shutdown? Is there any risk that instead of calling the other ODAR employees back that the ALJs will be sent home instead? I think we can all agree that it's impractical to have the ALJs working without support staff for more than a short time.
• Has there been a problem with claimants not showing up for hearings and appointments, thinking that Social Security is completely shut down?
• The Appeals Council receives lots and lots of faxes. The fax machines I'm familiar with print out received faxes. If the fax machine runs of paper, the fax machine stores the fax in its memory but that memory is finite. Faxes can be lost if the machine runs out of paper and memory. The faxes coming into the Appeals Council won't stop. Will there be someone there to stock the fax machines with paper? Is there sufficient memory to cover days, maybe weeks, of faxes?
• The Office of General Counsel (OGC) has to process lots of attorney fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA). I'm afraid I know the answer, but will OGC be able to process these during the shutdown? More generally, how will OGC discharge its core responsibilities with something like 90% of its staff furloughed? There must be scheduled hearings, trials, settlement conferences, oral arguments, etc. Is OGC just getting all of these continued?
• For employees still at work, are there bottlenecks caused by the large number of furloughed employees?

New Republican Plan

     Roll Call is reporting that House Republican leaders are now planning to pass several separate bills to reopen a few government agencies. They have not yet decided which agencies but one would think that the Social Security Administration would get strong consideration.
    Update: Democrats seem uninterested in this Republican plan.
     Further Update: And now Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader in the House, says that his party isn't planning to try to pass any new proposals.

There Was Also Some Opposition To Social Security

Prepared by a hopeful vendor

     From Jeff Shesol writing for the New Yorker, making the comparison between the passage and implementation of the Social Security Act and the Affordable Care Act:

When Congress debated the Social Security bill, in 1935, hysteria on the right certainly ran high. The business lobby, echoed by its Republican allies on Capitol Hill, charged Franklin Roosevelt with a plot to extinguish liberty in America—to establish “socialistic control of life and industry,” as the National Association of Manufacturers put it. “Never in the history of the world,” declared Rep. John Taber, of New York, after what one trusts was a thorough review of the history of the world, “has any measure been … so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery [and] to enslave workers.” To another New York congressman, James W. Wadsworth, Social Security represented “a power so vast” that it threatened to “pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.” Still, its opponents in the House, and later the Senate, buckled in the face of popular opinion, swallowed their hatred of Roosevelt, and the Social Security Act passed by wide margins.

Another wave of panic crested on the eve of the 1936 election—an eleventh-hour attempt to seize on public anxiety about the Social Security payroll tax, slated to take effect on January 1, 1937. The Republican nominee, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, called the program “unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted and wastefully financed.” He and his campaign raised the specter of mass fingerprinting, of Washington snoops pawing through people’s “life records,” and of a bureaucratic scheme to erase workers’ names and replace them with numbers. This rhetoric reached its crescendo on Halloween, fittingly enough, when John Hamilton, chairman of the Republican National Committee, stood before a crowd of twenty thousand in Boston, clutching a stainless-steel “specimen” tag stamped “Social Security Board”; Hamilton thrust it in the air and insisted that if F.D.R. were reëlected, tags just like it would be “hung around the necks of twenty-seven million” working men and women. The Roosevelt Administration, he asserted, had already sought bids for machines to manufacture the tags. (Hamilton refused to divulge where he’d gotten the sample, but after the rally, he let reporters pass it around and inspect it.)

Lanhee Chen Nominated To SSAB

     From the Washington Post:

It seemed like a timely stroke of bipartisanship: the White House announced Monday, on the eve of a government shutdown, that President Obama would nominate a top adviser to Republican Mitt Romney's campaign to an administration position.

Obama intends to nominate Lanhee J. Chen -- the policy director on Romney's 2012 presidential campaign who, yes, repeatedly attacked Obama's Social Security plans -- to the Social Security Advisory Board, which advises the president as well as the Congress on Social Security policy.

But that's not quite the full story. The board is independent and its membership is bipartisan. Although the president nominates members, the nominees alternate between the political parties. This vacancy was for a Republican member, a White House aide explained, and Chen was actually the pick of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Poll

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Abandon All Hope

     If you have some residual hope that a last minute deal will prevent a government shutdown at midnight, take a look at the National Review's tweettracker.

Acting Commissioner's Broadcast E-Mail To Agency Employees

From: ^Commissioner Broadcast
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2013 12:20 PM
Subject: COMMISSIONER'S BROADCAST--09/30/13

 

 A Message To All SSA and DDS Employees

 

Subject:  Possible Shutdown - Update

 

With less than 24 hours remaining to avert a government shutdown, I join you in hoping that Congress will pass a resolution so we may continue delivering the full scope of our services to the American public.  While Congress does still have time to act, we must continue to take careful and prudent steps to prepare for a potential government shutdown, including informing the public about the specific services they can expect us to provide.

 

To provide you with up-to-date information, we established a special website for you at www.socialsecurity.gov/shutdown/employees.html.  This is an external site so you can easily access it from anywhere you have Internet access.  This website provides you with a toll-free telephone hotline (1-866-909-6876) that will relay critical information including when SSA employees should return to work.  While all of us will be paying close attention to the news media since they would most likely be the first to broadcast any general announcement advising Federal employees to return to work, SSA’s national hotline will be the only way to get updated information specific to our status.  Included on this special website are Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), a sample letter for creditors, as well as information about outside employment and unemployment compensation. 

 

To keep the public informed about our status, we continue to use our social media channels as well as post information on www.socialsecurity.gov, including updated FAQs. Today we launched a webpage at www.socialsecurity.gov/shutdown that clearly explains the effects of a shutdown.

 

Again, I thank you for your continued patience and the hard work you do every day for the American people, even as we prepare to dial down some of the services we provide.

 

Let us all hope that our required work to prepare for a Federal shutdown is unnecessary.

 

Carolyn W. Colvin

Acting Commissioner