Bipartisan Unhappiness Over Effects Of Field Office Closures

      From Oswego County Today:

 U.S. Rep. John Katko (R, NY-24) today led an effort calling on the Social Security Administration (SSA) to implement new and flexible options for Central New Yorkers who need to submit required documents during the ongoing pandemic.

This effort comes in response to calls Katko has received from Central New Yorkers who have been impacted by the continued closure of SSA field offices in Central New York. Rep. Katko led this bipartisan effort alongside U.S. Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D, VA-7), Dusty Johnson (R, SD-AL), Lauren Underwood (D, IL-14), and Elise Stefanik (R, NY-21).

For more than a year, over 1,500 Social Security field offices across the country, including the locations in Syracuse, Oswego, and Geneva, have been closed to the public due to the ongoing pandemic. Field office closures have particularly impacted Central New Yorkers who need to show original documents, such as a driver’s license, to process SSA claims, obtain a replacement SSA card, or access benefits. ...

     If you're a field office employee, steel yourself. The field offices will reopen to the public before the end of the summer. If things stay on their current trajectory, by July 1 most businesses in the country will have reopened. Baseball games will be played before full crowds. There will be outdoor and indoor concerts before full audiences. It will be impossible to keep the field offices closed for long once we get to that point. Field office employees can talk all they want about ventilation and cubicles being too close together and Covid variants and so on but the public won't care. Andrew Saul is jerk but the agency will be within its rights to reopen the field offices once we get a higher percentage of the population vaccinated. I would guess that the agency will go back to something like telework as it was before Andrew Saul came along but the field offices aren't going to stay closed indefinitely.

Retirement Benefits Slowdown

      From Bloomberg News:

The rate of growth in retired Americans who collect Social Security has slowed down sharply, and the drop may be due in part to the disproportionate number of deaths from Covid-19 among the elderly.

The number of people who received retirement benefits from the Social Security Administration rose 900,000 to 46.4 million in March, the smallest year-over-year gain since April 2009.

While the Office of the Chief Actuary at the government agency said it is still too early to assess the impact from Covid-19, the year-over-year change appears to reflect excess deaths. About 447,000 people who died from the virus were 65 or older, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or about 80% of total deaths. ...

     I'm with the Office of Chief Actuary. Deaths among retirees may not be the only thing going on. Remember that the number of SSI claims filed is down sharply. That is widely attributed to field office closures. There could also be a slowdown in the number of retirement claims filed due to field office closures. We know there's a slowdown in processing people onto benefits after claims are taken which would have the same effect. Also note that the weirdness in the chart in 2001 and 2002 with no Covid-19 to explain it.

SSA Management Slow In Reviewing Union Contracts

      From Government Executive:

Unions at the Social Security Administration reported that the agency’s leadership continues to stall on efforts to reopen contracts negotiated during the Trump administration, three months after President Biden told agencies to do so via executive order and a week after a self-imposed deadline for SSA to review its collective bargaining agreements. ...

In March, the Office of Personnel Management issued guidance on how agencies should implement the order, which instructed agencies to reopen union contracts “as soon as is practicable.”

Later that month, following complaints of slow movement by Social Security Administration leadership to implement Biden’s workforce policies, officials at the agency said it was in the midst of a review of all labor contracts and that officials had asked the unions for their input. The self-imposed deadline for that process was April 23.

But a week after that deadline, the labor groups said they have not seen any new action by SSA leadership to reopen old agreements. ...

The Eric Conn Saga Goes On And On

     From the Richmond Register:

A Kentucky judge has ordered court officials to purge hundreds of lawsuits filed against clients by a disgraced disability attorney who masterminded the largest Social Security fraud in history, the Lexington Herald Leader reported.

Eric Conn pleaded guilty in 2017 to bribing doctors to falsify medical records for his thousands of clients and then paying a judge to approve their lifetime disability benefits. His plea agreement would have put him in prison for 12 years, but a few weeks before his sentencing Conn fled the country, leading federal agents on a six-month chase that ended when he was caught outside a Pizza Hut in Honduras. He was sentenced to an additional 15 years for his escape.

Before his downfall, Conn would pay doctors $400 to evaluate clients and then file small-claims lawsuits to recoup the cost, according to the lawsuit.

Pike Circuit Judge Eddy Coleman ruled this week that Conn wasn’t eligible to practice Social Security disability law during the time he was suing clients. Coleman said there were still hundreds of Conn’s small-claims actions on the Pike District Court docket. He ordered the court clerk to purge them all. ...

Does This Come As A Surprise?

      Look nearly all the way down to the next to the bottom circle on this graph, if that's the right term for it. You'll have to click on the image to see it full size and even then you may have to put your face up to your computer screen. What was the second most likely group to donate to Donald Trump -- the disabled. You'd think Republicans would care more about this group.

Independent Agency?

     Mark J. Warshawsky, who was a Trump policy appointee at Social Security but who got forced out when the Biden Administration came in, writes for the Baltimore Sun about SSA's odd "independent agency" status. Surprisingly, I don’t fully disagree with him. The Social Security Administration can never be truly independent. It's too restrained by the budget process and the Office of Management and Budget's veto power over regulations. I think that cabinet status is long overdue for the agency. By a wide measure it's the largest and most consequential of the independent agencies. However, unlike Mr. Warshawsky I believe the Commissioner should serve at the pleasure of the President. A highly partisan figure like Andrew Saul (or Mark Warshawsky) should never be serving at Social Security, much less during an Administration he's at odds with.  Let's end this "independent agency" farce. It hasn't worked.

From The Senate Finance Committee Hearing

      I've watched today's hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. There's certainly a lot of concern about people having to mail their drivers licenses or passports to Social Security. The response from Social Security's witness, Grace Kim, on this issue was basically "We're looking into it" but there was no commitment to do anything different, only to get back to the Committee within two weeks. The problem is that this is just the issue that the Senators are hearing the most about from their constituents but there's a much bigger problem with people who need in-person help filing claims, particularly SSI claims. There's no option for them to get the help they need.

     Kim was asked about when field offices might reopen. Her responses didn't include any sort of timeline. She said Social Security would have to wait on guidance from the White House.

     Kim was asked about negotiations with the employee unions. She said that there were negotiations over the agency's workplace safety plan but not about anything else.  I was surprised that there were not more questions on this. The unions want to redo contracts that were imposed upon them during the Trump Administration.  This would certainly happen if President Biden could appoint a new Social Security Commissioner.

     Here's a couple of tidbits from the written Kim's written statement:

... Limiting visitors has also resulted in an influx of incoming mail and phone calls. To illustrate the magnitude of this increase, before the pandemic, field offices scanned and uploaded about 150,000 paper documents weekly for processing. Offices are currently scanning and uploading approximately one and a half million paper documents weekly. In FY 2020, the unit time for the 47 million field office actions increased by 20 percent in part due to scanning, copying, indexing, and returning mailed documents, which significantly reduced our productivity. ...

Similarly, field offices are now handling three times as many phone calls as they did pre-pandemic. We are on track to answer over 60 million calls in our field offices in FY 2021—up from 20 million calls handled in FY 2019. ...

Senate Finance Committee Hearing Today

      The Senate Finance Committee will hold a hearing at 10:00 EDT today on "Social Security During COVID: How the Pandemic Hampered Access to Benefits and Strategies for Improving Service Delivery." It will be possible to watch the hearing online. Grace Kim, Deputy Commissioner for Operations will be the witness for the Social Security Administration.

    One might have expected that the Commissioner would be the witness for Social Security. Leaving aside the question of whether Andrew Saul is legitimately serving as Commissioner, there would be a major problem with him testifying. The hearing would quickly devolve into angry accusations by Democrats that Saul has behaved in an inappropriately partisan fashion as Commissioner followed by spirited counter accusations of something -- I don't know what -- by Republicans. That might be useful in its own way but I expect that it was obvious to all that this only distract from Social Security's current situation.

     I hope to hear detailed information about the agency's dire service delivery problems as well as news about reopening plans. It would be nice if some improvements in relations with employee unions could be announced. It may be too much to hope for but Social Security really needs a supplemental appropriation to help it get through until the next fiscal year, which begins on October 1.