Washington Post Screwed Up Big-Time

     From Talk Poverty:

Earlier this month, The Washington Post ran a front-page story about Social Security disability benefits in rural counties, followed this past Sunday by an editorial calling for a wholesale restructuring of Social Security Disability Insurance. ...

The Post’s central assertion—flanked by an interactive map—was that as many as one-third of working-age adults in rural communities are living on monthly disability checks. But the data analysis supporting this argument doesn’t hold up. ...

In a sidebar to the article, the Post says they used publicly available county-level data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) to count “every working-age person who receives benefits through the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program or both.” But the Social Security Administration doesn’t publish the data needed for that calculation. In an email response to our request for these data, the SSA  confirmed that these data are “not readily available.”

The Center for American Progress also reached out to the Post to ask about their data. The Post confirmed in an email exchange that they did indeed rely on publicly available data, and identified the specific reports, tables, and figures they used.

We tried to replicate their analysis, and here’s why their numbers are flat-out wrong....

The analysis overcounts working-age people receiving disability benefits by nearly 500,000. The SSA doesn’t publish county-level data on SSDI beneficiaries in the age range the Post defines as “working age” (18 to 64). SSA’s OASDI Beneficiaries by State and County report does provide county-level data on SSDI beneficiaries (Table 4), including disabled worker beneficiaries. However, of the 8,909,430 disabled worker SSDI beneficiaries whom the table breaks down by county, 472,080—or about 5 percent—are age 65 or older. Including these older disabled workers would inflate the share of working-age people with disabilities.

It overcounts “disabled adult children” by about 750,000. About 1 million SSDI beneficiaries are disabled adult children (DACs)—people whose disability onset occurred before age 22 and who are insured for SSDI benefits based on a parent’s work record. Since the Post claims to count working-age people receiving SSDI, SSI, or both, they need to include working-age DACs. But—contrary to the Post’s data sidebar—there are no data available on working-age DACs at the county level. ...

 It can’t accurately adjust for double-counting the 1.3 million working-age people who receive both SSDI and SSI (a.k.a. “concurrent beneficiaries”). ...

It’s missing data for a whopping 106 counties. Mostly because of small population size, SSA doesn’t publish county-level data on SSI beneficiaries for 106 counties. This would be problematic for any county-level analysis. But it’s especially notable given that the Post’s article focuses on rural counties—as some 97 of the counties with missing data are rural. It’s unclear how the Post treats these counties in their analysis. ...

"From A Dud To A Stud In Less Than 14 Months"

   Rob Clopp, the outgoing Chief Information Officer at Social Security, is proud of what happened with the Disability Case Processing System (DCPS) under his watch. From Federal News Radio:

The Social Security Administration has turned its disability case processing system from a dud to a stud in less than 14 months.

Over the previous four years, SSA had spent almost $300 million for software and had little to show for it.

Rob Klopp, the Social Security Administration’s outgoing chief information officer, said SSA did a complete turnaround with DCPS by taking over the management of the project, applying an agile or dev/ops approach and listening to their customers at the state level.

SSA launched the first iteration of DCPS on Dec. 16 and expects to continue updates and deployments throughout 2017.

 “This time through, we accomplished more for a fraction, really a small fraction of the spend of the previous attempt, and deployed a production actually in December that is now processing cases, end-to-end real life cases,” Klopp said on Ask the CIO. “We’ve completed this 14-month project for a little over $30 million. It was a giant, giant success. By the way, it’s also a fraction of the original estimate, which was not counting that this thing blew up.”

SSA first hired Lockheed Martin and MicroPact to modernize the Disability Case Processing System in January 2011 under a six-year, $200 million contract. ...
By 2014, Klopp said he joined SSA and the program was in trouble and spending well above the initial $200 million estimate.

“The vendor was always one release away from victory, and it just never came,” he said. ...

Hiring Freeze Ends

     From the New York Times:

The Trump administration on Wednesday will lift the hiring freeze that it had imposed on the federal work force, even as it directs agencies to submit plans for personnel cuts and other restructuring moves to fit the budget blueprint released by President Trump last month. ...

The administration is now making clear that it is not giving a green light for agencies to start hiring; instead, the White House is seeking long-term plans from each agency to, in most cases, prepare for cuts. ...

OIG Report On DCPS

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has completed a "Congressional Response Report" on Progress in Developing the Disability Case Processing System as of March 2017. Here are some excerpts from the report (footnote omitted):

SSA partners with State disability determination services (DDS) to evaluate disability claims and make disability determinations. The DDSs use various customized systems to process disability cases.

DCPS is an SSA initiative to develop a common system for all DDSs that the Agency expects will simplify system support and maintenance, improve the speed and quality of the disability process, and reduce the overall growth rate of infrastructure costs.

SSA is using an Agile approach to developing DCPS. The Agency continually identifies functional requirements that are expressed as user stories. Each user story is assigned a level of effort, called a story point. Velocity refers to the number of story points completed during an iteration,or “sprint.” User stories that need to be addressed are considered the backlog. ...

In May 2016, SSA estimated the first release of DCPS would be available in December 2016 — at a cost of less than $38 million — and would support initial disability claims and reconsiderations. However, the Agency subsequently scaled down the functionality it would include in the first release....

At the time of our review, SSA was planning to deliver the functionality needed to process all initial disability claims and reconsiderations (as well as initial continuing disability reviews) by January 2018 at an estimated cumulative cost of $75 million. ...

SSA reported, that, as of March 14, 2017, it had completed 12,810 of the 22,082 total story points identified to-date (58 percent). ...

In August 2016, the vendor that supported the software used by 46 of the 52 DDSs announced plans to modernize its legacy systems over a 24-month period. Our December 2016 report stated that SSA should evaluate its plans to ensure it can demonstrate to Congress and the public that it has chosen the most cost-effective alternative to achieve its goals. At the time of this review, SSA was evaluating the cost and schedule of the internally developed DCPS compared to the vendor-developed alternative....

Hiltzik Doesn't Like The Idea Of Replacing FICA

     Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times doesn't think much of the idea being floated by the Trump Administration of replacing the FICA tax that funds Social Security with some other tax.  Hiltzik's rationale mostly comes down to the logic in this old quote from Franklin Roosevelt:

We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions. … With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.

A Good Response

     From the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

At a time of unprecedented inequality, the Washington Post is quick to seize on the country's real problems: a Social Security disability program that is too generous. ...

Just to get some orientation, the benefit that the Post considers to be too generous averages $1,170 a month. ...

The concern about the low employment rates (EPOP) in the United States is reasonable, but it bears no obvious relationship to the Social Security disability insurance program. The EPOP for prime age workers (ages 25-54) has fallen by almost four percentage points since 2000, with no increase in the generosity of the disability program. In fact, if we combine the number of workers receiving disability and workers compensation, there has been little change in the share of the working age population receiving benefits over this period.

In fact, the United States ranks near the bottom of OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a major international body] countries in the generosity of its benefits, yet it also ranks near the bottom in the employment rate for prime age workers. In its most recent data, the OECD put the EPOP for prime age workers in the United States at 78.2 percent. This compares 83.3 percent for the Netherlands, 84.2 percent for Germany, and 86.0 percent for Sweden, all countries that spend considerably more money on disability benefits than the United States. ...

Kenneth Nibali Passes

     Kenneth Nibali, formerly Associate Commissioner of the Office of Disability at Social Security, passed away on April 4. He was 69.

Living Large On Social Security Disability?

     The Detroit Free Press is running a piece on a woman disabled by multiple sclerosis struggling to find a place to live. Her Social Security disability benefits aren't enough to enable her to pay rent, leaving her and her 16 year old daughter homeless.