4th Circuit Hears DOGE Case En Banc After SCOTUS Leaves Them In A Quandry

      From Courthouse News Service:

An en banc Fourth Circuit debated the role of appellate courts during a testy hearing Thursday concerning an attempt to stop Department of Government Efficiency employees from accessing Social Security data.

A federal judge blocked DOGE from accessing the systems in March, questioning why officials needed large quantities of sensitive information on Social Security recipients. The Fourth Circuit denied the government’s attempt to stay the injunction ruling on the side of labor unions and retirees.

“The crux of this case and the crux of plaintiffs’ position is that government cannot grant itself an all-access pass to confidential, sensitive information merely by boldly asserting the word ’need’ or even the word ‘fraud,’” attorney Alethea Swift of the Democracy Forward Foundation, representing the unions, said.

The Supreme Court issued a June order reversing the Fourth Circuit’s conclusion and implemented a stay on a 6-3 vote. The high court majority said President Donald Trump was likely to succeed in the litigation and would be injured if the justices didn’t intervene, but did not issue an opinion to explain their reasoning.

Eye rolls and sighs dominated the day as the judges fiercely debated their role at this juncture, with Republican-appointed judges arguing the court should simply affirm the Supreme Court’s decision. In contrast, Democrat-appointed judges viewed the appellate court’s role as one requiring deeper analysis. …

     Here’s another report on the oral argument. 

From The ISRP On The Future Of Occupational Data And Disability Adjudication

     From the newsletter of the International Association of Rehabilitation Professionals:

… Dr. Michelle Aliff and Ryann Hill recently met with SSA leadership including Jay Ortis (Acting Deputy Commissioner for Disability Adjudication) and Acting Chief ALJ to discuss efforts to improve disability determinations. 

• DDS Delays: SSA acknowledged long wait times and is exploring tech-based solutions to streamline case processing and flag idle cases. 
• Vocational Experts (VEs): SSA reaffirmed the essential role of VEs at the hearing level and emphasized that human adjudicators will continue to make final decisions.
• Occupational Data: Concerns were raised about the limitations of the Occupational Requirements Survey (ORS), including its lack of data on issues like cane use, absenteeism, and full-time work. SSA agreed ORS should not be the sole occupational data source. 
• ALJ Expectations & DOT: Some ALJs still expect VE testimony to align with the outdated DOT. SSA recognized the need to resolve this inconsistency as part of modernization efforts.

SSA Modernization Efforts: What’s on the Horizon for VEs?

SSA is revisiting proposed regulations that threatens utilization of vocational experts (VEs) by replacing the DOT with ORS data and relying on internal software (VIT) to determine job availability and potentially allowing ALJ’s to input RFCs without expert input. These changes, originally drafted but never released under the prior administration, may soon be issued as a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. If the NPRM is issued, a public comment period will follow. This will be a critical opportunity to advocate for the continued role of vocational experts and ensure that decision-making remains grounded in expert analysis and not just algorithms. …

Whistleblower Complaint Triggers Questions

      Senator Crapo, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee has questions for Social Security over a recent whistleblower complaint but is he really willing to hold this Administration to account?

Gutting Congressional Affairs Office Turning Out To Be Not Such A Good Idea

      From Government Executive:

A Social Security Administration office tasked with resolving beneficiary issues brought to its attention by federal legislators has shrunk from about 50 employees to as few as three, according to an agency employee.

In addition to constituent casework, employees in SSA’s Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs provide technical assistance to lawmaker offices when developing Social Security legislation and answer questions from Capitol Hill staffers, among other legislative and regulatory responsibilities.  … 

[After recent cuts] OLCA was left with just three staffers, two of whom were brought over from a different office.  … 

SSA did move a congressional casework team to a different component and remaining OLCA staffers have been instructed to contact other offices to help with their responsibilities, according to the employee. …

[An] employee said that some OLCA staffers were asked to return, potentially increasing the number of workers in the office …

Your Social Security Is Your Wealth

      From the New York Times:

Social Security is the most valuable thing most Americans have.

I don’t mean this in an abstract sense. In purely financial terms, the Social Security check that you are getting now or have a right to receive when you are older is your most valuable financial asset.

That statement is true for nearly everyone except those in the top 10 percent of the wealth distribution in the United States. And for people right in the middle, Social Security amounts to roughly one-third of their total wealth, on average, according to an eye-opening study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. …

The budget office report, “Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989 to 2022,” found, in fact, that Social Security amounted to roughly 20 percent of the $199 trillion in total wealth of all American families in 2022. Social Security, in other words, was worth about $40 trillion to Americans in 2022.

For the median family, it found that Social Security accounted for about one-third of total wealth, more than the value of cars or homes, retirement accounts, whatever. On average, the wealth of people right in the middle added up to $504,000, the study estimated. …

The Untold Story

      Pro Publica has a fascinating piece titled The Untold Story of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security. You’ll want to read the entire article. Here are just a few snippets:

On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.” …

DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.” …

DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?” 

Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly. 

Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor. … 

In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic. 

DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.” … 

Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn’t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” said a senior SSA official who was in the room. “Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff?” the official said. “It really wasn’t clear by that point.” … 

[Behind] the scenes, [Dudek] began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. … 

As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. “If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,” Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency. …

Regulatory Agenda

      Federal agencies are required to publish quarterly summaries of agency rules under development. Not all of these come to pass and it can take time, often years, for the rules to be adopted. We shall see but delay may be a bigger problem now with reduced staffing levels and the loss of experienced employees. Basically, current Social Security management may have what I would consider evil intentions  but have little idea how to be evil or have the staff to accomplish the evil.

     Anyway, here’s Social Security’s most recent list. You can read a brief and often maddeningly elliptical summary of what is being considered by clicking on the RIN link for the rule.

Agency	Agenda Stage of Rulemaking	Title	RIN
SSA	Proposed Rule Stage	Combatting Fraud and Similar Fault to Strengthen the Integrity of Social Security	0960-AI10
SSA	Proposed Rule Stage	Civil Monetary Penalties, Assessments, and Recommended Exclusions	0960-AI49
SSA	Proposed Rule Stage	Improvements to the Disability Adjudication Process: Sequential Evaluation Process	0960-AI67
SSA	Proposed Rule Stage	Rescinding the Burdensome Use Restrictions of Dedicated Accounts	0960-AI92
SSA	Proposed Rule Stage	Rescission of Changes to the Definition of a Public Assistance Household	0960-AI94
SSA	Proposed Rule Stage	Removing Bench Decisions To Improve Decision Efficiency and Accuracy	0960-AI98
SSA	Proposed Rule Stage	Incorrect Terminology in Regulatory Text; Correction	0960-AI99
SSA	Proposed Rule Stage	Setting the Manner of Appearance for Disability Hearings	0960-AJ00
SSA	Proposed Rule Stage	Notice of a Hearing and How to Request a Hearing Before an Administrative Law Judge	0960-AJ01
SSA	Final Rule Stage	Revised Medical Criteria for Evaluating Cardiovascular Disorders	0960-AI43
SSA	Final Rule Stage	Penalty Inflation Adjustments for Civil Monetary Penalties	0960-AI72
SSA	Final Rule Stage	Extension of Expiration Dates for 13 Body System Listings	0960-AI95
SSA	Final Rule Stage	Rescission of the Extension of the Flexibility in Evaluating "Close Proximity of Time" to Evaluate Changes in Healthcare	0960-AI96

Security Is Security, Right?

      From WTOP:

U.S. Park Police Chief Jessica Taylor will be retiring from the force to take on a new role with the Social Security Administration, according to the Department of the Interior.

Taylor will serve as the chief security and resiliency officer, which will make up part of the SSA’s newly announced executive leadership team. …