Former Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue admitted that the criteria used to decide whether a disability applicant is disabled are so “stringent” that applicants face an up-hill battle from the beginning of the disability process.
Astrue made his comments in a recent article just before his last day as commissioner, Feb. 13, 2013.
Astrue served as commissioner since 2007 after being nominated for the six-year post by former President George W. Bush. A new commissioner has yet to be named, but President Barack Obama is in charge of nominating a new Social Security commissioner who will serve in that post for the next six years and be in charge of an agency that employs 162,000 people and processes payments between $4.5 and $6 billion every month.
Not only did Astrue say the disability determination process is “stringent,” he also said that the backlog in the number of people waiting for a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge is still too long. When Astrue took over in 2007 the average wait time for a hearing was 542 days, but it is right around 365 days by the time he left office.
Astrue said one key to reducing the backlog was for all ALJs to hear more cases.
“We set for the first time productivity standards in 2007, it was actually done by the chief judge,” Astrue said. “At that point in time about 40 percent of the judges were doing 500 to 700 cases a year. And so that’s what we set as our goal.”
The next Social Security commissioner is going to have a lot of obstacles to deal with. The agency’s trustees have indicated that the program’s trust fund will be depleted by 2033. At this time the agency will be able to pay just 75 percent of Social Security benefits to all people receiving Social Security.
Pundits have suggested a number of ways of solving Social Security’s financial troubles including an increase in the retirement age, an increase in the Social Security payroll tax cap, which only taxes the first $113,700 a worker makes, and a reduction in the annual cost-of-living adjustment for all disability and retirement recipients.
Whomever the new commissioner is, it is clear that Social Security could look a lot different by the end of the next commissioner’s term.
To learn more about Astrue’s views on the future of Social Security visit this story.
