Nancy Berryhill, Social Security’s acting commissioner, sent a memo to all Social Security employees and employees at Disability Determination Services (DDS) announcing that Social Security had caught-up and is now current with Continuing Disability Reviews (CDR).
The CDR process reviews the medical conditions of Social Security disability beneficiaries to see whether their medical conditions have improved enough to eliminate benefits.
“This is a major achievement as it is the first time we’ve reached this milestone since 2002, and only the second time in Social Security history,” Berryhill said in the memo.
The CDR initiative will likely result in more people being kicked off disability benefits, but considering Social Security is facing the largest backlog of disability claimants waiting for a hearing in the agency’s history, it seems Social Security is more concerned with kicking people off benefits than improving wait times.
“As part of our program integrity and stewardship responsibilities, we need to ensure that only those who continue to meet our eligibility requirements for disability receive benefits,” Berryhill said.
The CDR process is an important one because people who had previously been found disabled do sometimes improve medically enough to go back to work and should no longer receive benefits, but even more important are the people who have to wait three years or more before they are found disabled and entitled to benefits. This memo seems to show where Social Security’s priorities are, reducing the number of people on disability benefits while more than 1 million people across the country wait years for a disability decision to get on benefits.
Valet Parking Spaces For Social Security Employees?
Social Security’s Office of the Inspector General submitted a request for four valet parking spaces at the agency’s New York field division for leased vehicles. As you can see from the request’s headline, these are not just parking spaces, but valet parking spaces. There is no mention in the request why these parking spaces have to be of the valet variety.
