EQUAL TIME: Making progress against the backlog

In a time of agency contraction, the Disability Determination Services have suffered even deeper cuts than the Social Security Administration as a whole for most of this decade. We have taken steps to reverse this trend, and I am very pleased that the Disability Determination Services will be able to replace all staff who have left or will leave their agencies this year.

This support is a key part of our effort to bring the number of pending cases at the state level below 500,000 for the first time since 1999.

Additional resources are vital but must be accompanied by our commitment to work smarter. If you step back and look at the system as an economist would, we have long had issues of allocation and distribution of resources. The problem of allocation has been painfully clear: Compared with 10 years ago, we now handle about 176 percent more disability cases. We have taken a big step toward resolving that problem by bringing onboard 175 additional administrative law judges and additional staff to support them. If we can resolve space issues, we will also bring on another 14 National Hearing Center judges this year.

In particular, the Chicago and Atlanta regions were dramatically underresourced compared with the rest of the country. Hearing offices in many of the most backlogged cities, such as Atlanta, Cleveland and Detroit, received three to four times as many filings per administrative law judge as offices in southern California and New England.

We have moved swiftly to correct this problem. Where we can address it by changing jurisdictional lines in adjacent locations, we have done so. Our new National Hearing Center, which holds video hearings from a central location, also gives us the capability to move cases quickly and flexibly by conducting video hearings in cities with the worst backlogs. Right now, our NHC administrative law judges are focusing on backlogs in Atlanta, Cleveland and Detroit.

With 175 newly hired administrative law judges, we have made equalizing resources a priority. We are sending 10 judges to Ohio and just one to New England. That is not a regional bias but a data-driven decision that recognizes a strong correlation between filings per administrative law judge and cases pending.

We have made slow and frustrating progress in fixing our service delivery problems, but we are making progress. Changes that will take place between Labor Day and the end of the year —- streamlined online filing, at least 175 new administrative law judges picking up steam, and the full shift from paper to electronic systems in Office of Disability Adjudication and Review —- should produce considerably more improvement next year.

> Michael Astrue is commissioner of the Social Security Administration. This is adapted from his remarks to the House Committee on Ways and Means.

This column is solicited to provide another viewpoint to an AJC editorial published today.