Does Political Messaging Matter?

    From the Washington Post:

 In that Jan. 25 meeting [with the President], [Senator Bernie] Sanders pushed the president to fully fund Social Security for more than seven decades by expanding payroll taxes on affluent Americans, rather than just on workers’ first $160,000 in earnings, as is the case under current law. Sanders also asked the president to back his proposal — highly unlikely to pass Congress — to not only defend existing benefits but also increase them. He wants to provide another $2,400 per year for every Social Security beneficiary.

This previously unreported discussion between Biden and his onetime presidential primary rival reflects a broader behind-the-scenes effort inside the White House to decide how, or if, the party’s message on entitlements should go beyond criticizing the GOP. ...

Biden aides have in recent weeks discussed proposing raising payroll taxes on the rich to fund Social Security, but it is unclear if the president will ultimately endorse that measure when he releases his budget in March, according to three people familiar with international deliberations. ...

“There’s a faction inside the White House that feels some need to offer a plan, though I personally feel that’s misplaced,” one senior Democratic pollster said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with senior administration officials. “Stick to our basic message: Hands off our seniors. That’s working.” ...

    Note that these are discussions about political messaging. No tax increases are happening with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives. The Republican message that "We'll never agree to tax increases so Democrats, not Republicans, must propose benefit cuts" won't ever lead to a solution.

    It's apparent to me how Social Security's long-term financing issues will be resolved. Eventually, Democrats will have a great election cycle and have enough strength in Congress to pass a bill. Until then, it's just posturing but today's political messaging can become tomorrow's enacted fix for Social Security so the posturing matters. If Democrats don't have such an election cycle in time, it's going to be a train wreck, mainly for the GOP which will be caught between its ideology and the great majority of the country which loves Social Security and doesn't want to see it cut.

Good Decision Out Of CA4

    The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important decision yesterday in Shelley C. v. Commissioner of Social Security.

    The Court found that summary statements assigning "little weight" to the opinion of the treating physician on the grounds that it "is on an issue reserved for the Commissioner and . . . is inconsistent with the medical evidence of record. [His] treatment notes do not indicate any significant symptoms that would render [Shelley C.] unable to perform basic work activities” does not comply with the agency's own regulations. An ALJ decision must identify the alleged inconsistencies between the treating physician's opinion and the medical evidence. The Court also held that the ALJ decision must explicitly show consideration of each of the six factors in 20 C.F.R.§404.1527(c). I think that in practical terms the Court held that merely using canned language won't cut it. If an ALJ gives "little weight" to a treating physician's opinion, the ALJ is going to have to explain why.

    By the way, the Court didn't even deign to discuss the "opinion reserved to the Commissioner" language in the ALJ decision, which is about how much attention one should pay to makeweight language implying that Social Security has some right to summarily make decisions without regard to the evidence and without being held to account by anyone. Taken at face value, that arrogance would render judicial review meaningless.

    The Court also held that the ALJ "could not dismiss Shelley C.’s subjective complaints based entirely upon the belief that they were not corroborated by the record’s medical evidence."

    The Court did not remand the case. It reversed it and ordered payment of benefits. That is uncommon at the District Court level and quite rare at the Court of Appeals level. This was a bad day for Social Security's Office of General Counsel and for canned boilerplate in ALJ decisions. Show your work, ALJs.

They Call This The Waterfall Chart

Click on image to view full size

The Dubious Benefits Of Ticket To Work

     From Effects of the Ticket to Work Program: Return on Investment and Overall Assessment of Outcomes Versus Design by Paul O'Leary and Emily Roessel:

The Ticket to Work (TTW) program was established by 1999 legislation to expand access to vocational rehabilitation services for beneficiaries of Social Security Administration (SSA) disability benefit programs. We evaluate TTW and compare its outcomes with the intentions of its authorizing legislation. We also compare the program's costs with the benefit savings resulting from the reemployment of successful program participants. We analyze unadjusted descriptive statistics, then consider potential participation bias among individuals who received employment services by devising an econometric analysis that accounts for the seriousness of a participant's interest in work. We find that TTW improved employment outcomes and generated net benefit savings to SSA for many employment-service clients, but the savings did not fully offset program costs. However, these estimates should be regarded as lower bounds of TTW's positive effects because they do not account for higher service needs of TTW program participants. ...

Bad Conditions In Wisconsin -- And Most Other Places

     From some television station in Milwaukee:

They can’t work, have little money to fall back on, and are waiting months for the approval of [Social Security disability] claims that could put a roof over their heads. The delays are impacting some of Wisconsin’s most vulnerable. ...

Back in 2019, it took 116 days on average to get an initial disability decision in Wisconsin. Today, it takes 247 days on average. Decisions are made by the Disability Determination Services (DDS) in Madison. ...

Doug Nguyen, regional communications director for SSA, tells Contact 6 they’re working to "reduce the backlog of disability cases that developed during the pandemic." However, he says they need "adequate and sustained funding."

Nguyen says SSA received 55% of the increase President Biden requested for its administrative budget in 2023. He says SSA has experienced historically high attrition at DDS locations and is having difficulty hiring new workers, "similar to the larger labor market."

Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) also blames a transition mid-pandemic to a new federal system for processing disability claims. A DHS spokesperson says Wisconsin’s old system was more efficient. ...

MFA For SSA

      From Federal News Network:

The Social Security Administration is getting $23.3 million from the Technology Modernization Fund to implement multifactor authentication across its internal systems, part of a trio of recent TMF awards focused on cybersecurity and reliability. … 

“Millions count on Social Security for their benefits, and we are committed to secure systems that protect their personal information and allow our hard-working employees to provide the daily services and assistance American retirees and other beneficiaries depend on,” Sean Brune, SSA’s chief information officer, said as part of the announcement. “This investment will improve security and protections of our programmatic systems while avoiding potential agency costs and potential disruption of services.” 

The funding will help SSA accelerate the implementation of its phishing-resistant, single sign-on MFA solution across all internal systems and services. Using phishing-resistant MFA is a key requirement for agencies under the federal zero trust strategy. … 

The TMF award comes as SSA is also planning to soon release a new IT strategic plan, Federal News Network reported last month.

Worsening Service

      Lisa Rein at the Washington Post has a piece up on Social Security’s worsening service delivery problems, including a quote from me that some of you might not like.

ARS Down

     Social Security's Appointed Representative Services (ARS), also known as ERE, that allows attorneys and others representing claimants to access their client's files went down yesterday and is still down this morning. I heard that there were some problems yesterday for Social Security employees but do not know whether they are still having problems. There's been no announcement from the agency about this outage.

    Social Security should make an announcement about this sort of thing when it becomes extended as this episode has. You can pretend that there's no problem but people like me can't.