Pete Peterson's Project To Cut Social Security Disability Asks For Proposals

     The Pete Peterson "project" to cut Social Security disability benefits, fronted by former Congressmen McCrery and Pomeroy, has put out a call for proposals for "innovative ideas to improve" Social Security disability benefits. The "project" has listed a number of suggested topics but nothing about removing the cap on the F.I.C.A. tax or transferring monies between Social Security's Trust Funds. The deadline for submitting proposals is November 1, suggesting that the "project" already knows which proposals it's interested in and is already committed to paying people to write those proposals. Proposals from others won't get funding and are unlikely to be published.

     This isn't about improving Social Security disability. It's about using the possible funding shortfall in the Disability Trust Fund as a pretext for cutting Social Security disability benefits. This "project" is designed to place a bipartisan veneer over a right wing plan to cut disability benefits.

Social Security Still Trying To Make People Pay Ancient Debts They Didn't Incur And That The Agency Can't Prove

It's Got To Be Opioids And Fraud!

     The Birmingham, AL News recently ran an article trying to explain the fact that Alabama has one of the highest rates of Social Security disability benefits receipients in the country. The explanations that the newspaper came up with were high rates of opioid usage, high percentage of the labor force in manufacturing jobs, fraud and the fact that many people qualify for Social Security disability benefits based on "muscle pain." Apparently, the authors of the article didn't understand exactly what the word "musculoskeletal"means.

     All newspaper articles are reductive. This one is more so than most. The reporters really should have concentrated more upon one factor they identified, the high percentage of the Alabama labor force in manufacturing jobs. The article doesn't explain the connection, perhaps because the reporters didn't understand it; perhaps because they were in a rush to get to drug abuse and fraud as possible explanations. It's simple, though. Manufacturing jobs are more physically demanding than office jobs. They put workers at greater risk for workplace injuries and repetitive motion disorders, like worn out shoulders, carpal tunnel syndrome, bad knees, etc. It's harder for a sick or injured worker to return to a manufacturing job because of the higher physical demands of the work. See, that's not hard to explain. It's not a bit controversial, either. Also, the reporters should have talked about the low educational attainments and poor work skills of the Alabama population and the poor health care available to low income people in the state. All of those contribute mightily to the incidence of disability but why bother talking about such boring explanations when you can talk about drugs and fraud? And, by the way, workplace injuries and repetitive motion disorders tend to be painful. Opioids are often prescribed for such disorders for good reason.

Rep Payee Problems

     The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports on problems in Social Security's representative payee system.

I Warned You But You Didn't Listen

     When it proposed new regulations to force a claimant to make a decision on whether to accept a video hearing soon after a request for hearing is filed -- and long before a hearing is actually scheduled -- Social Security was implicitly making a bet that the result would be a decrease in the number of claimants objecting to video hearings. I warned at the time that the result would probably be the exact opposite, an increase in objections to video hearings. Those early choice letters started going out in my area in the last week or so. What I'm hearing so far from other attorneys and from claimants themselves suggests that Social Security is going to lose the bet it made. In my area, I looks like there will be vastly more objections to video hearings.
     So, what's next, mandatory video hearings with all the Administrative Law Judges herded into a huge warehouse where they only do video hearings and can be completely overseen by wise central office taskmasters?

Let's Simplify Work Incentives

     The Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD) has issued a proposal for simplifying and improving the work incentives in Social Security's disability programs. Here are the major points:

• Benefit offset level: $1 benefit offset for every $2 of earnings over the earning disregard threshold
• Earning disregard threshold: Initial earning disregard should be set no lower than the current law Trial Work Level (TWL) period earning threshold of $770 for 2014 ... The earning disregard threshold for SSDI should be indexed ...
• The earned income disregard in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program should also be increased to the level it would be at if it had been indexed since its inception. The earned income disregard in the SSI program should be indexed after it is increased.
• Eliminate the Trial Work Period. A Trial Work Period would no longer be needed with a benefit offset.
• Eliminate the Extended Period of Eligibility (EPE) ... [E]arnings should never cause an SSDI beneficiary’s eligibility to be terminated. Instead, benefit eligibility should be put in suspension in any month that a beneficiary’s earnings rise to the level that no benefit is payable. An SSDI beneficiary’s eligibility should only be terminated if the individual has medically improved and no longer has a disabling impairment according to the Title II definition of disability.
• We recommend improving the administration of the IRWE [Impairment Related Work Expenses] by making the reporting of IRWEs easier – allowing online submission of evidence of expenses that might be eligible to be counted as an IRWE and reducing the frequency at which someone must provide evidence of the IRWE – e.g. create a presumption that the expense continues at the same monetary amount unless SSA is notified. If needed, verification of the expense could be asked for annually.
• The current SSI blindness rule should be applied to both Title II and SSI disability claimants and beneficiaries to allow the consideration of all work expenses, not only those that are “impairment - related.”

     These are common sense reforms. They would make the work incentives much easier for claimants to understand and for Social Security to administer. Congress has added one work incentive after another over the decades. It's gotten to the point that almost no one understands the incentives and that includes front line Social Security employees. How can incentives work if the people you're trying to incentivize don't understand the incentives and there's no one available to explain them? It's time to take down this Christmas tree loaded with ineffective incentives and replace it with something simple and workable.

     I don't think this proposal if adopted will put large numbers of people back to work. The vast majority of Social Security disability recipients are too sick to have any realistic hope of returning to work. I do think that this proposal will make a difference on the margins and be much easier to administer. That's all anyone should hope for.

NCSSMA Newsletter

     The National Council of Social Security Management Associations (NCSSMA) has finally posted its June 2014 newsletter online. I'll bet it was distributed to members months ago. NCSSMA is a major organization of Social Security management personnel. This issue of the newsletter contains a long interview with Kenneth Rivers, Social Security's Associate Commissioner for the Office of Telephone Services. Here's one small excerpt:

As NSBR [Network Skills Based Routing] rolls out across the nation, how will it enhance telephone service delivery for the FO [Field Office]

NSBR provides the ability to route incoming FO General Inquiry (GI) calls to other FOs within an SSA Region, before reaching the 15-min max wait time. We are nearly at 70% project completion for this effort, having installed this tool in nearly 800 FOs nationwide. NSBR has afforded us the opportunity to improve telephone service delivery by increasing call answering pools of available FO agents in neighboring offices throughout the country to assist and answer calls from the local public. To date, neighboring offices have answered over 120,000 callers, who might have otherwise walked into our FOs to receive the same exact service that they were able to receive over the phoned. Additionally, we minimize performance deterioration on our N8NN [National 800 Number Network] platform by deploying NSBR, so that FOs can assist each other. 

     Note the concern with the maximum 15 minute wait time on calls to Social Security Field Office. Apparently, that's the point at which the telephone system automatically disconnects you even if no one has talked with you. They're trying to route calls to other FOs before the callers are automatically disconnected.

Want More Effective Government? Hire A Million Bureaucrats!

     The excerpt below is from an opinion piece in the Washington Post written by John J. Dilulio, Jr., a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Dilulio served as the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush. This was abstracted from Diulio's book, “Bring Back the Bureaucrats."

 We all know that the federal government has gotten a lot bigger in the past half century. ...

And yet, the number of federal civilian workers (excluding postal workers) has barely budged. ... 

This is the dirty secret behind all those debates over the size of government. Yes, government is big and is dangerously debt-financed, but it is also administered by outsiders — and that is what guarantees that our big government produces bad government, too.

Post-1960 Federal America has become a grotesque Leviathan by proxy, in which an expanding mass of state and local government workers, for-profit contractors, and nonprofit grant recipients administers a vast portion of federal money and responsibilities.  ...

We don’t need fewer federal workers; we need more of them — a lot more. More direct public administration would result in better, smarter, more accountable government. ...

[W]ith little regard for performance or results, Washington’s proxies lobby for federal policies, programs and regulations that they are paid to administer. The proxies rarely lose, which is a big reason government never stops growing. ...

Today’s federal civil service is not bloated — it is overloaded. We have too few federal bureaucrats monitoring too many grants and contracts, and handling too many dollars. Many federal agencies are in crying need of more workers. By 2025, for instance, the number of Social Security beneficiaries will exceed 85 million , and the Social Security Administration will disburse nearly $1.8 trillion a year. But the SSA projects that it could lose a third of its workforce by 2020, when some 7,000 headquarters workers and 24,000 field employees become eligible for retirement. Unfortunately, in recent years, because of a congressionally mandated hiring freeze, the SSA has been unable to fill positions left open by employee retirements. ...

How many more federal bureaucrats are needed? Here’s a rough measure: In 1965, the ratio of full-time federal civil servants (1.9 million) to the total U.S. population (193 million) was about 1 to 100. In 2013, with a civilian workforce of 2.1 million and a U.S. population of 316 million, that ratio was about 1 to 150. The Census Bureau estimates that the nation’s population by 2035 will be about 370 million.

If the federal workforce grew back to its 1965 ratio, then by 2035 it would need to have 3.7 million employees. If, instead, the federal workforce merely maintained its 2013 ratio, then by 2035 it would have about 2.5 million workers. The midpoint would land the federal personnel roster at about 3 million by 2035, with roughly 1 federal bureaucrat for every 125 citizens.

Crude as it is, that calculation is probably in the ballpark of what’s needed: 1 million more full-time federal civilian workers by 2035.