Martin O'Malley's Positions On Social Security

     Back in 2015 Martin O'Malley was running for President. He didn't get very far but he did take these positions on Social Security:

• Increase Social Security benefits. O'Malley proposed increasing minimum Social Security benefits to 125% above the poverty line and raising benefits for low- and minimum-wage workers, who the governor claims currently don't receive enough benefits and often don't have any retirement savings at all.
• Raise the cap on the payroll tax for workers making more than $250,000 a year. O'Malley claimed that raising the payroll tax — along with raising the minimum wage and enacting immigration reform — will pay for many of his proposed reforms.  ...
  

    Please remember that as Commissioner, O'Malley would have no ability to adopt such plans. Congress has to do that. As Commissioner, he probably couldn't even lobby for such plans. That seems to be an unwritten rule these days. It's not always been that way, though. I've read the autobiography of Arthur Altmeyer, the first Commissioner of Social Security and an extremely important figure in the history of Social Security in this country. As Commissioner, Altmeyer was engaged in lobbying Congress almost full time. Other people were actually running the agency. By the way, I do not recommend reading the Altmeyer autobiography. It's really dry and tedious.

     Also by the way, the White House has lined up quite a number of endorsements for O’Malley’s nomination but none from Republicans.

O'Malley Nominated To Be Commissioner Of Social Security

     From the Washington Post:

President Biden announced Wednesday that he will nominate former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley to lead the Social Security Administration, as the agency faces enhanced scrutiny over new management failures.

O’Malley, who ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, would oversee an embattled agency...

Fee Payments Have Declined

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a report on payments to attorneys and others for representing claimants before the agency. The data was already available but they've added charts. Below are a couple of them.

Can't Say Whether Some Automation Projects Have Helped

      From Manual Processes for Resource-intensive Workloads, a report by Social Security's Office of  Inspector General

Our objective was to determine whether the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) automation enhancements (1) reduced manual processing for resource-intensive workloads and (2) were cost-effective. ...

SSA’s automation enhancements reduced the need for manual processing for some workloads from FYs 2019 to 2021. These initiatives aimed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of SSA’s operations; however, they were not always immediately cost-effective. Additionally, SSA could not identify cost or savings estimates for some enhancements; thus, we could not determine whether they were cost-effective.  ......

Deaths During Waiting Period

     From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (footnotes omitted):

This report provides information on 610,219 Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries whose claims were approved at the initial claim level by various state disability determination services (DDS) during Calendar Years (CY) 2020 and 2021. In each case, disability examiners (1) determined the beneficiaries had disabling conditions that were permanent and that medical improvement was not expected, and (2) established a 7-year medical review diary. As of December 22, 2022, SSA had terminated the DI benefit payment status of only 319 (.05 percent) beneficiaries after determining they were no longer disabled. However, SSA had terminated the payment status of 75,857 beneficiaries who died after SSA approved their claims, including 4,444 beneficiaries who died during the 5-month DI waiting period. ...

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CCD Comments On Proposed Regs

  

   The Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD), a large umbrella organization of non-profits who aid the disabled, has filed comments on Social Security's proposed changes in its regulations on manner of appearance at hearings. Their most important comment is to oppose changing the default manner of holding hearings from in-person to telephone. Now, if you don't specify, you get an in-person hearing. The proposed regulation would flip that.

ALJ Levinson Removed From Job

    Social Security wanted to fire Administrative Law Judge Michael Levinson of Macon, GA for some very unjudicial conduct. The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) has jurisdiction over this kind of matter. An MSPB ALJ decided to suspend Levinson from his job as an ALJ for 2 years and to downgrade him in rank. Both Levinson and Social Security appealed to the full MSPB which changed Levinson's penalty to what Social Security wanted, firing.

    It's a tiny minority of ALJs who behave as Levinson did but we have to get them out of their jobs. I'm shocked that the MSPB ALJ thought that anything less than firing was appropriate. The behavior here was way beyond the pale.

    By the way, Levinson approved claims at a somewhat higher rate than most ALJs. Would things have proceeded differently if Levinson had a low allowance rate?

The Appropriations Situation

 

    From Yahoo News:

As Republicans start laying out their proposals for what spending to cut next year, Social Security Administration employees are warning that their budget could mean longer wait times and potentially dire circumstances for beneficiaries.

In a letter to the House Appropriations Committee, the American Federation of Government Employees — a union representing hundreds of thousands of government employees — said that the GOP's proposed funding levels would "devastate the agency's ability to serve the American public."

Republicans on the committee released their Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill last week, including a $183 million cut to the Social Security Administration.

The union warned that the already underfunded agency could see its standing issues, like long wait times for accessing benefits and long lines at its offices, only worsen. As of June 2023, the average wait time for callers to Social Security's customer service and information number was a little over 43 minutes, per the Social Security Administration's data. ...

    I think that we should not worry too much about what the House Appropriations Committee is doing now. The bill they're working on is absurd for many, many reasons that go way beyond Social Security. I'm not sure the bill could get a majority vote in the House of Representatives. It's a non-starter with the Senate and the President. A government shutdown would be a far superior outcome. Nothing like that bill is going anywhere.

    I see three possible outcomes:

• Republicans eventually decide to vote out an appropriations bill based upon the previous agreement between the President and the Speaker of the House. Differences are sorted out between the Senate and House and the President signs the bill. We don't seem to be heading in this direction.
• There's no agreement on a Labor-HHS appropriations bill (which includes Social Security's administrative budget) and we see endless continuing resolutions for the entire fiscal year. This hurts Social Security but there are worse possibilities. I think this is the most likely outcome but what do I know?
• There's no agreement and the House of Representatives is so dysfunctional that it can't pass a continuing resolution so there's a government shutdown. This would be politically disastrous for Republicans but, hey, if you're a Republican members of Congress from a district that Donald Trump carried by 30 point in 2020 (like most House Freedom Caucus members), what do you care? Your constituents expect you to be as obstreperous as possible. They're in the "Keep Government Out Of My Medicare" camp.