Q: Mary, let's start if we can, by having you tell us
how you began your career with SSA and give us an outline of the
jobs you had over the years and what positions you were in.
Ross: Well, it was all kind of a bumbling, inadvertent
stumbling into something. I was between my junior and senior year
in college. I didn't know what I was going to do that summer.
I wound up going to a cocktail party that was given by some people
who knew the Balls, who knew the McKennas, and various other people
associated with Social Security, many of whom were at this party.
I was kind of an awkward, little, shy person who, when they said:
"What are you doing this summer, Mary," I would kind
of look uncomfortable and say: "I don't know." Leona
MacKinnon, who then worked in the Office of the Bureau Director--this
was the summer of 1959, so what's now SSA was then the Bureau
of Old Age and Survivors Insurance-- said: "Oh, we can use
student assistants in the summertime. Why don't you come and work
for Social Security in Baltimore."
One thing led to another, and I found a car I could borrow. I
did work for Social Security that summer. They hadn't yet moved
into the Altmeyer Building, which wasn't built until 1960, so
that was when SSA was downtown.
I worked in the predecessor to what became most recently OLCA,
the Office of Legislative and Congressional Affairs. It was then
called the Division of Program Analysis (DPA) and reported directly
to the Bureau Director, who was then a person named Victor Christgau.
Bob Ball was the Deputy Director, and really the one with whom
we had the most communication. He had previously worked in DPA
himself and he was, in large part, running SSA. Even though he
was Deputy Director, he was really running the Bureau as it was
then.
I came to work for Alvin David who was the director of the outfit.
We were located in the Equitable Building on Calvert Street, near
Baltimore Street, downtown. We parked in public parking up Calvert.
I worked in the front office.
Up until fairly recently, Congress wanted printed hearings, and
they had printed an index to the hearings and they had stopped
doing that. My assignment that summer (I can't believe I did this)
was the Index of 1958 Hearings. It was totally tedious and did
not result in a usable product, though I learned a certain amount
about who were the figures in Congress. I sat in the middle of
an office where a lot of traffic was going on. It was kind of
a control point for assignments and for correspondence, and it
was physically located so it was just outside the Director's office;
anybody who was going or coming went by. I got to know some of
the people and I enjoyed working with them. I never thought I'd
work for the government as a career. Wilbur Cohen's son, Chris
Cohen, was also a student assistant in that office that same summer.
His assignment was to update DPA's Claims Manual.
That summer passed and I went back to school and graduated with
no notion of what I wanted to do. My parents had the notion that
either I continue in school or I become self-supporting, and I
certainly was through going to school. At the end of the summer
I had taken the appropriate Civil Service tests that we had to
take then. I came back to see if I could get a permanent job in
the same place I had worked. A bargain was struck and I and another
person (who put the outfit over its staffing ceiling, we later
learned) began working here. By this time it was out here at Woodlawn
(September 26, 1960).
I had been a grade 3 as a student assistant. I was permanently
hired as a grade 5. I had been a history major. I had absolutely
no credentials of any sort. I was in an outfit that had pretty
clear career ladders. If you progressed reasonably and didn't
screw up, you could more or less expect to be promoted every year
or two. In my case it was more or less every year.
In the Division of Program Analysis there were five branches,
two of which did the kind of work that people now think of OLCA
doing -- preparations for Congressional appearances, hearings
and the like, defending and explaining the program, staff work
for the Commissioner's Office that involved program planning and
program rationale. One of the two divisions was then headed by
Irv Wolkstein. It was called Coverage and Disability, but its
main activity already was beginning preparation for health insurance.
The other division was just called Program Planning and it was
the predecessor of what is now the Division of Retirement and
Survivors-at least until recently. Are they still divided into
divisions?
Q: No, they are combined now.
Ross: We have come full circle.
Within that division they had kind of a neat arrangement. They
were divided into groups. There were five groups, and each had
a group leader who was probably a grade 12, and maybe three analysts
and a secretary. For training purposes, which is what I was involved
in for the first year, you worked in one of these groups for a
reasonable length of time and then you rotated. They were divided
by subject matter so you could get familiar with some aspect of
the program without having to be overwhelmed by the whole thing.
I don't know how many people catch on to what it's all about now.
Even then DPA preferred to not hire people fresh out of college
and right off the street like I was. They preferred to hire people
with field experience. For those of us who didn't have field experience,
we would be sent to a local office for a brief time. After about
a year I was sent to a downtown district office in Philadelphia,
for about a week. I don't know if you would call it suburban,
(I guess it's suburban now) but anyway a less urban center, which
was Westchester, Pennsylvania. I also spent a week in the Philadelphia
Payment Center, as it was then called.
I came to work at the end of the Eisenhower Administration when
just about everything we did (as near as I can recall) was shrouded
with a wonderful paragraph that explained that no matter how good
somebody's idea was, it was bound to have some cost and therefore,
couldn't really be entertained at this time. In a way, they were
beleaguered then as the program has been at times since. The OASI
Trust Fund had been operating in the red. It had been taking in
towards the end of the 1950's slightly less each year than it
was paying out. A very vocal critic by the name of Roy Peterson
was writing articles about the coming "den of inequity that
would be discovered when this basically bankrupt program fell
apart." We were busy debating it, making public replies to
public newspaper statements. What was somewhat worrying was that
we were enabling him to make better and better arguments by our
erudite responses.
Then Kennedy came in the following year. The theme was pushing
Kennedy's Social Security promises that had been in the Democratic
platform. Medicare was clearly in the wind, but it was not the
immediate priority. Part of Kennedy's initial campaign had to
do with the widespread unemployment and so-called structural unemployment
of older people who were out of work and didn't stand a prayer.
They had been out of work for extended periods. Hence, he had
recommended legalizing the definition of disability, which did
not go through that year; lowering the age of eligibility for
men on an actuarially reduced basis; increasing benefits for widows;
and several other things that were enacted in the 1961 Amendments.
Following that, my career consisted of first working in the little
group that worked on age of eligibility, and then working in a
little group that worked on the retirement test and Regulation
1, and disclosure issues. (Editor's Note; Regulation 1 is
the SSA regulation regarding disclosure of Social Security records.)
Then I worked in a little group that (oh, what a nightmare!) did
definition of wages. I then worked with a group that did benefit
amounts, which was a breath of fresh air. I finally moved into
the group that worked on financing dependents' benefits and stuff
that didn't fit into one of the other groups and that serviced
the Advisory Council.
![second black and white photo of Mary Ross](maryr4.jpg) |
Mary (right) in 1963 when she received
a cash award "for her superior contributions in the
Benefit Payments Section." Also shown (left) Joan Claybrook,
and (center) Branch Chief Betty Sanders. SSA
History Archives. |
A lot of what we were doing was sort of being ready. Medicare
had the spotlight, and there were a bunch of cash benefit amendments
that were ready to go once Medicare was set, but the strategy
was not to allow any more cash benefit increases, and certainly
not to allow any that would involve increasing the payroll tax,
until Medicare was launched.
Throughout the first 5 years I climbed up the ladder. I finally
got to be a GS-9. I forget what we made then; it was probably
about $9,000 or $10,000. At this point I felt I could begin to
breathe a little bit. I hadn't taken any leave and I had mountains
of leave.
Finally Medicare got passed, and the 1965 Amendments got passed.
I worked on the 1965 Advisory Council Report at the beginning
of 1965. By then maybe I was a GS-11, or a13 -- some place in
there. At the end of 1965 I took leave for 6 months and traveled
and went around the world. I came back to a new world in the spring
of 1966 where I guess by now I was a senior analyst. We had gone
now from five groups down to four sections. And I think the top
structure had moved up. The branch chief was now a 14, not a 13.
The whole air had lightened a little. Johnson was now President,
and I worked in the financing area during the 1967 and 1968 Amendments.
![group photo of 1965 Advisory Council staff](maryr5.jpg) |
The staff of the 1965 Advisory Council.
Mary is in the front row, third from the left.
Also shown, Seated (l. to r.): Elizabeth Sanders; Evelyn
Keenan; Mary; Ethel Hine. Center row: Irwin Wolkstein; James
Marquis; Francis Crowley; E. Thomas Moore, and Nathan Freedman.
Back row: Robert O'Connor, William Fullerton; and Robert
Smith.
SSA History Archives. |
Johnson had tremendous ambitions and not a whole lot of available
money in the Title II program to do things with. We had a lot
of false starts and developed a lot of wonderful schemes with
large benefit increases and wound up paring them back. This was
unusual to me. In cash benefits, we wound up doing a lot of staff
work on the Hill during that period. The AFL-CIO was pushing a
Kennedy bill (Editor's note: Senator Edward Kennedy),
and Johnson wanted not to have the AFL-CIO to be able to pull
off something more generous than he could pull off.
We were doing staff work with eyes in the back of our heads for
both the Administration and the liberals in Congress at the same
time. The group leader was Frank Crowley. A lot of people who
worked for OLCA at that time wound up on the Hill. Some of the
guys who worked in Medicare wound up on the Hill after a brief
stint implementing Medicare. At that point the group leader I
was working for, Frank Crowley, left and went to the Congressional
Research Service, and I became Acting Group Leader. I guess we
had now become the Office of Program Evaluation and Planning,
and what had been branches had now become divisions. I became
Acting Branch Chief in the Program Evaluation and Planning branch.
I did that for a very brief period. Health insurance was still
administered by SSA, and by then we had the Division of Health
Insurance in OLCA, and the Branch Chief job in the Health Insurance
Benefits Branch became effective. I worked for about a year as
Branch Chief in the Health Insurance Benefits Branch. At that
time we had the Advisory Council on Medicare for the Disabled.
I guess their report was submitted at the end of 1968. It seems
to me I left there shortly thereafter, and became Deputy Division
Director back in Retirement and Survivors Insurance. I was Deputy
to Betty Sanders who had been Director of that Division since
before I came, probably since 1957 or 1958.
![black and white photo of Mary Ross](maryr1.jpg) |
In 1968 Mary received a Commissioner's
Citation, which is SSA's highest award for outstanding job
performance. This was her formal portrait taken for the
OASIS magazine story on the 1968 awardees. SSA History Archives. |
By now we are in the fall of 1969. My mother died, which meant
I inherited this house that I still live in, in Washington. Betty
Sanders had been saying for years that she was going to retire
when she turned 65, and I was kind of an heir-apparent to the
Division Director here in Baltimore. I had no idea of what I wanted
to do. I didn't know if I wanted to live in the house and work
in Washington. I didn't know if I could live in the house in Washington
and work in Baltimore. Although I always had my eye on that job
in one sense, by this time I didn't really know if I wanted to
be responsible and grown-up and all that good stuff that it was
going to take to do it.
I got assigned to Alvin David's front office, in which they set
up a GS-14, or was it GS-15, job for me. It was a Social Insurance
Research Analyst job. It was a lot easier to do things back then;
and they detailed me to Washington, which let me live in the house
and gave me some time to figure out what I wanted to do.
This now was when the Nixon Administration Family Assistance
Plan was beginning to move. So I was lurking around the Department
working as kind of a Social Security liaison or freelance analyst
type person. Sometimes I was working for Tom Joe on various projects.
I'd go in to try to figure out what was the ideal way to organize
the Family Assistance Plan, and what should be the appropriate
relationships between HHS and Labor, which caused me to learn
a great deal of discouraging news about the WIN Program, which
was the Work Incentive Program then, and AFDC.
There was a split jurisdiction between HHS and Labor. I was detailed
to a guy named John C. Montgomery who was hired by the Secretary's
Office to kind of oversee the whole Departmental effort to provide
the logistics to further the Hill activities and begin planning
for how they would implement the Family Assistance Program, once
you got it through Congress. I guess it was as Tom Joe's person
that I attended a bunch of the planning meetings with Bob Patracelli,
the Assistant Secretary for Program Evaluation and Planning, or
whatever was that predecessor outfit. That was an exciting period.
Then, of course, it became clear that Family Assistance was not
going through and SSI was. In the meanwhile, the Nixon Administration
was also simultaneously pushing automatic adjustments of Social
Security benefits, which was a big deal.
Some place in the course of all this, I came back and did take
the Division Director's job in DRSB. I sort of handed-off SSI
when that got serious. I worked for a while in the Office of the
Assistant Secretary for Legislation. I guess the deputy for Welfare
Legislation was then Jim Edwards. John Trout and I both worked
there. I came back to OLCA and pretty soon John Trout came over
to OLCA. We were back into clearly cash benefits, and a separate
staff was set up to worry about SSI. The automatics were then
added to a debt -ceiling bill. It was a very chaotic legislative
period, but I guess that's saved for another session.
By now I decided I could live in the house in Washington and
work in Baltimore, and stay over in Baltimore a couple of nights
a week. I would try to arrange to get myself sent to Washington
every so often. I'm trying to think when the super grade came
through. I was by then a grade 15. They tried to get a grade 16
for Irv Wolkstein, who had been head of the Health Insurance Division.
It was in the early Nixon years. They had been trying to get a
super grade for one of the Division Directors in OLCA for a long
time. They first targeted Irv Wolkstein's job because he had done
such a superb job in the Medicare fight. He had remained on as
Division Director until 1968, and that had fallen through. Then
they had tried to set up a super grade Division Director to run
SSI because SSI legislation indicated that there would be room
for additional high grades to administer the program, and because
it was thought that somebody with both Social Security and welfare
could do it. There were oodles of rationale. I remember writing
that up six ways to Sunday. That did not come to pass. I was by
then very cynical about the whole operation. I was sure it was
going to come to nothing. They wrote it up for DRSB, which was
the Division of Retirement and Survivors Benefits, that I was
in charge of, and it went through.
Q: So were you the first super grade then in the organization
at that time?
Ross: Well, no. The Division Director, Mr. David, was
a super-grade and his Deputy, Jim Marquis, was a super-grade.
Alvin was a 17. I don't think there was an 18. It seems to me
McKenna was a 18, and some of the big operating staffs. Obviously,
Joe Fay was, but I'm not sure whether Alvin was a 18 or just a
17.
And the 1970's perked along. Two things were immediately clear:
1. There would have to be legislation to repair the methodology
in the automatics.
2. The economy was going to hell in a hand basket in the mid 1970's.
You no sooner had the automatics enacted in 1972 ,with the first
increase to take effect in 1975, then inflation went through the
roof. The Congress came back in 1973 and enacted a two-stage benefit
increase of 7 percent right away and a catch-up that would bring
it to an overall 11 percent later. There was constant legislative
pressure in 1972 and 1973. Some of it was short-term and some
of it really caused the actuaries and everybody else to rethink
the long-range projections to the program. With the short-range
experience and the revised long-range estimates, it was clear
that the method of doing COLAs that was built into the 1972 legislation
had to be revised. A lot of 1973 and 1974 went into stalling around
on that subject because none of us knew how to do it in terms
of was the right way, what would work, and what didn't. There
was increasing pressure from one or two hot -shots in the Department
and in OMB, and still it was mostly technicians. Politicians didn't
have a whole lot of yen to reopen the fight for automatic increases
in Social Security, though they sure knew they had to do something
about the enormous deficit.
At the end of 1974 and 1975 there was a very intensive effort
to design so-called decoupling schemes -- methods of separating
the treatment of future beneficiaries from the treatment of current
beneficiaries. It was more like what we have now and what the
Civil Service system had all along. A detailed comprehensive plan
was developed and advanced by the Ford folk. Hearings were held.
Ironically, the aspect of it that attracted the most attention
was not that it would bring future benefits back into line with
what the Congress intended, but that the transition period would
involve a little cost. That was the last part of the Ford Administration
(the last year). The whole thing was spruced up and presented
in the Carter years and went through in the first part of 1977.
1978 in my memory was unremarkable. I think we had some reorganizations.
That was Stan Ross' era. At some point in here OLCA no longer
reported to the Commissioner, and health insurance went to HCFA.
That was Califano's year. At some point in here I also took a
substantial amount of time off.
During the mid 1970's the other thing we had going was the Advisory
Council on Social Security, which really was some help both because
there were sharp people working on it and because it was an action-forcing
event for us in developing a decoupling system. In that context
it worked out well.
Leaping ahead, by now we were into the 1978-1979 Advisory Council
which started off with Stan Ross as Chairman of the Council, appointed
by his friend Joe Califano, and Larry Thompson as Executive Director.
At some point in there we began doing increasing amounts of staff
work for that Council. Ultimately, I wound up working quite closely
with Larry and spending most of my time in his Washington offices.
Somewhere in the course of all this, Stan ceased to be Chairman
of the Council and became Commissioner of Social Security. Larry
continued to wear two hats. He continued to lead the Advisory
Council effort, and he was in charge of the Office of Policy,
which was the intervening office to which OLCA now reported, which
in turn reported back to the Commissioner. Their headquarters,
which had initially been in the Humphrey Building, finally got
a wing in the Schweitzer Building located in the HEW South Building.
It seems to me I was there for most of 1979 and probably a good
part of 1980.
At some point John Trout became head of OLCA and wanted me to
come back as Legislative Reference Officer, which I did. It seems
to me that must have been the beginning of 1981.
Then we charge to the Reagan years. I really enjoyed that time.
It was less intense. There were great people. I had great supervisors
and some star employees all the way along. There was a kind of
camaraderie. It's hard to believe running through all this in
less than an hour where you go from a world where things couldn't
have been more formal. All the bosses were Mr. and Miss and Mrs.
whatever. I would have been Miss somebody, except I was so young
and dim-witted-looking. Well, a couple of people called me Miss
Ross, but I managed to get through mostly on total informality.
The guy--I don't think the structure called him Deputy-- who
was second in command was Grayson Snurr. He really knew the nitty-gritty
and did just about all the day-to-day operating, supervising,
and keeping track of who was doing what. Throughout much of that
period while John Trout was Director, I was quite free to work
on whatever it was he wanted me to do, and wherever he felt I
would be most helpful to him. Later, one of the assignments that
came to occupy a lot of my time, because it was convenient for
me to do so, was liaison with the Department on legislative programs.
As the 1980's wore on, the Department became more involved in
SSA legislation. OLCA always had some direct lines to the Hill
and continues to do so to this day, I'm sure. You also always
had an obligation to not get too crossways to the Department's
legislative activities and let them know (at least to some extent)
what you were doing on the Hill and be aware of what they were
doing. Toward the end of 1980's, I guess I was spending a third
of the time in Washington. I worked very well with Gil Fisher
and John. Then we began to have some very rapid turnover in directors
in OLCA, and a lot more hit and miss activity.
Q: Also, you began to get political appointees in that job.
Was that something new, that hadn't been a case historically?
Ross: Yes. There had been rumblings from time to time
that OLCA should be politically headed, but it did not come about
until the latter part of Dorcas Hardy's stint as Commissioner.
The existing head of OLCA when Dorcas came in was John Trout.
They did not hit it off. Gil Fisher was the Deputy of OLCA, and
quite often he was Acting.
When Dorcas came in, she brought with her from the Department
a guy named Mike Astrue, who had been the Deputy Assistant Secretary
for Legislation for Welfare, and the guy who had worked with him
on a lot of Social Security matters was a fellow named Doug Badger,
who had come from the Hill and done lobbying groups. They were
both clearly political folk. They had worked ably on Social Security
stuff and knew Social Security by the time she brought them over.
As I said, John Trout had been Director when she came in and he
was followed by Elliott Kirschbaum, but she wanted to put Doug
Badger in the job and set it up as a political job, I gather,
for Doug. I don't know if he ever encumbered it officially. He
acted in the job briefly. I remember working with him in particular.
At that time the Congressional Relations Staff was not part of
OLCA, and I remember working with him in particular on a paper
which was a pros and cons discussion on whether the Congressional
Relations Staff should be part of OLCA and what more OLCA should
be doing in that area and that kind of stuff. He very quickly
became involved in working with Dave Rust, who was head of the
Disability program on the Disability Advisory Council which was
going at that time. That became his full-time job.
Who came in and ran OLCA was a girl named M'Liss Solove, whose
married name I think was Houston. She had worked previously for
Senator Graham in Texas, and had very little background in Social
Security. (It was Senator Domenici's daughter who worked with
us in Washington.) She was bright. She didn't have a whole lot
of patience for learning nitty-gritty. That may have been an okay
use of the term because it wasn't entirely clear that the Commissioner
had a whole lot of patience for nitty-gritty.
The Commissioner developed some notion that OLCA was not thinking
along the same wave lengths that she was, and she had a lot of
OLCA-type work in the DRSB, like development of retirement proposals
to greatly liberalize or eliminate the retirement test, alternative
ways of pricing out the retirement test proposals to take account
of the additional revenue that might or might not come in because
of additional people who worked. There was a whole stir of activity
around that subject. Mike Astrue would come over from the Department,
and Doug to a lesser extent, and one of the actuaries, Bruce Schoble,
would become intensely involved then and OLCA was lucky if it
got a last minute chance to review and comment on some key papers.
It wasn't really until towards the end of Dorcas period as Commissioner
that there developed good working relations with OLCA.
It seems somewhere along in here M'Liss became pregnant and then
left, and it was a difficult pregnancy. Even though she encumbered
the job, she was certainly not in Baltimore and not really available.
I think she was housebound and then bed-bound for a substantial
period. Gil was running the shop on the scene and she was on the
telephone. Between Gil and Michael Carozza, the Deputy Commissioner
to whom OLCA reported, OLCA's relationship with the Commissioner's
Office was repaired.
Also towards the end of that period I was spending a good deal
of time in Washington. I had an office there when Doug Badger
was on the scene and most of the time when M'Liss was on the scene.
I began doing some retirement test work for the Commissioner.
She began to develop a little staff over there. Although they
also had other jobs, they were doing OLCA-type staff work for
her. Dalmer Hoskins was not only doing some international Social
Security stuff, he was also doing a lot of work for her on the
role of private pensions and the ability of the private sector
to supplement Social Security, and the need to broaden the extent
to which ordinary people thought about supplementing their Social
Security. One of Dorcas' concerns was that people relied exclusively
on Social Security as though in every case it was going to be
enough for them to live comfortably in retirement. They didn't
realize that to really get along in retirement, they probably
would need something supplementary to Social Security.
I guess I was increasingly working on the fringes of that activity
and one or two other things that she had going in her Washington
office. Something I suspect few people saw about her was the number
of nights after she would have been in Washington all day, she
would show up in the Washington office around 5:30 and sit down
and start working, and there wouldn't be anybody around. (I tended
to come in a little late and stay late.) She would just be alone
sitting in there pouring over whatever had accumulated during
the day.
Gwen King became Commissioner. Gil Fisher had been for years
the Deputy in charge of OLCA, and with the turnover in OLCA directors,
he had been serving as Acting Director for substantial periods
when there was no Director. He had also been the continuity and
the daily grind making the shop work consistently day-in and day-out
for many years. He left OLCA to become Deputy to Andy Young in
the Office of Policy. Ann Erfle became Deputy in OLCA.
For several months before Gil left, Gwen brought in a new Director
named Gayle Cozens, who had substantial exposure to Hill work
representing the Governor of Illinois in the state of Illinois'
Washington Office. She'd also had organizational technique experience
with the Beatrice Company. I personally hit it off very well with
her. I liked her a lot. I wish I could think what my excuse for
spending so much time in Washington was in the Dorcas Hardy period;
it absolutely escapes me. In some ways I got to know Gayle, especially
in the very beginning of her heading up OLCA and spent a lot of
time in Washington. Ann and I did not work well together on a
number of things, particularly on relating to the Department on
legislative program matters. They needed somebody that would work
well with the OLCA front office. That's when Dick Griffith came
back to the front office to work on that. I was more or less permanently
in Washington. I got up to Baltimore maybe once a week. In contrast
to the earlier period when I was in Baltimore, unless there was
some excuse to be in Washington, I was now in Washington unless
there was some particular reason to be in Baltimore. I moved out
of the LRO Office, although I remained LRO on paper.
I talked earlier about getting a super grade (Grade 16) back
in 1973, which meant that when SES came along in the later 1970's,
I converted into SES, which meant to a considerable degree that
my grade followed me around when I left. That's the way SES worked.
When I left the Division of Retirement and Survivors Benefits,
that was no longer a super grade position. It was diverted to
a 15. Similarly, as I traveled through the Legislative Reference
Office, although I never changed jobs again on paper. That would
have been in the year following the Bush election which would
have been late 1989 and early 1990 that I really started spending
all the time in Washington and not effectively running the Legislative
Reference Office any more. I continued to hold that position on
paper, but I was effectively working out of Washington doing whatever
anybody thought up for me to do, or whatever I thought I could
do myself.
It involved strange and fascinating assignments. I did a lot
of work with Rhoda Davis and Dr. Fleming on wild fantasies on
how we would finance a greatly revised and expanded SSI program.
We were sort of tangential to the SSI Panel of Experts that were
coordinated under Fleming. I seemed to get into disability stuff
a good deal. I subsequently worked with Lou Enoff on a paper which
fortunately was never published. We used to say we'd never published
on problems and solutions in the disability area. Whatever would
have been published would have been so quickly outdated, and new
and fresh perceptions of the causes of our disasters were moving
so fast. I did a long piece for Rhoda on the role of state agencies.
This was in connection with re-engineering the role of state agencies
in administering disability--not really their role administratively,
but the Congressional interest in having the state agencies in
the picture and the political issues inherent in changing their
role in the administrative setup. I spent a couple of months doing
a chronology of health and welfare legislation for Debbie Steelman,
who was Chairman of the 1991 Advisory Council on Social Security
that appears as Appendix A in the main volume of that Council's
report. In short, I was kind of generally available for short-term
emergencies because I was sitting there in Washington and available.
"Can you rush over to so and so's office and get such and
such done?" I was also engaged in various longer-term projects
such as what I just described. I can't believe, was I really there
for 4 years? It didn't seem that long. I retired last year, right?
Q: You tell me.
Ross: It was 1994. I can't believe I was there that long;
well, I guess I was.
I stayed into the Shirley Chater Commissionership, long enough
to just sort of see it. There were going to be traumatic and wonderful
developments that I couldn't bear to miss, but it didn't seem
that such were about to occur so I thought I could miss the rest
of this. At that point, after 34 years, I didn't feel I was going
to be learning a whole lot new and fresh and wonderful or contributing
a whole lot new and fresh and wonderful; I packed it in.
Q: All right, if we can, now let's go back to the beginning
of your career again and tell us a little bit about what it was
like working at SSA during that time, you alluded to some of it
as we went along, about the formality and so on. Describe a little
bit about the people you worked with, like Vic Christgau, and
the climate, and how you did work back in that period.
Ross: Well, at the time things didn't seem archaic. I
can't even remember for sure if all the secretarial staff had
electric typewriters; I think they did. I know it was a big deal
when we got ones where the carriage didn't move and the ball jumped
around. I can remember when we got our first Xerox machines, which
I think was about 1961. Before that, you used carbon tissues and
typed the whole thing from scratch. If you needed more copies
than you could get clear tissues in one run, or you used sort
of a mimeograph, a so-called ditto machine where when you typed
your original file and whatever other copies you typed, you also
typed a stencil. Then you ran that off on a machine and got your
fingers all purple. There were no hand-held calculators. There
was one enormous adding machine, and it was an archaic machine
even by those standards. It had a personality, so that only a
few people were allowed to get near it and it lived in the Benefits
Branch. The notion of just punching numbers into a little hand-held
calculator and getting the results is nice. It seems to me you
had to have beautiful originals more frequently than we do now.
When they did a mailing to an Advisory Council, you didn't type
a Dear Member letter, or you couldn't tell a word processor to
change the address and type the same letter. You typed 12 originals
to different people. When you wrote in the original the material
on such and such a topic is found behind the salmon tab in the
book and then you discovered in the book there were no salmon
tabs, you had a crisis. Or since it was late at night, you had
to write on the blue tabs "This tab is salmon."
There was a formality, and I don't know how much of that was
me or because I was so much younger than the other people around
there. They had known each other for years and years. An awful
lot of people were in OLCA when I came to work there who had come
to the Federal Government out of high school in the Depression
or during the War. They had been with SSA for years and years.
At least during office hours they were Mr. David, Mr. Marquis,
Miss Sanders, Mr. Fowler, Mr. Moore, Mr. Solomon. I can't remember
when everybody really got on first names with each other. All
of a sudden when Joe Califano became Secretary of HEW then, suddenly
you would hear: "Joe wants it this way," or "Joe
needs a memo on so and so." It took me several double takes
to realize that we are calling the Secretary, Joe. There was only
one Joe in the world and everybody hopped if Joe wanted something.
One thing that is still fairly formal is a memo to the Secretary.
You go through umpteen miles of clearances, and you look up umpteen
references to make sure you have the format right and the cover
sheet right, and this and that. We had this person named Sarah
Brown who, among other things, was a real marshal of troops to
background books for legislative hearings. She got famous because
she would send "See below" memos to the Secretary. She
would have a "See Below," and then below would be Mr.
David, Mr. Marquis, and all the people who were involved in hearings
-- the Secretary, the Under Secretary. She would send out these
"See Belows" saying: "Please insert the following
pages behind Tab so and so," or "Here's the update for
the material at tab so and so in your background book." Everybody
was just dumbfounded or astonished or awestruck when they realized
that Sarah was sending "See belows" to the Secretary.
There was just a delicacy of what would or would not be said
in front of a 22 year-old kid who was fresh out of school. Suddenly
everybody was self-conscious of their language. I think more so
than is the case now. I think young ears we thought to be more
delicate than is thought now and than they are now. We weren't
in that television culture yet in 1959.
There was a very clumsy machine called the monster. As far as
I know, it's still up there unless somebody has gone to the trouble
of removing it. It was in a closet in the Commissioner's office.
They have a new one; there's no longer the clumsy machine. It
took 2 and a half minutes a page to FAX materials from Baltimore
to the Commissioner's office in Washington. It made a lot of noise
and it lived in a closet, and it was called "the monster".
We "monstered" things to Washington. You got copies
on the other end that were hard to read and certainly could not
be used as an original. Whereas, today with the Faxes we have
now, you can almost call them originals.
There was so much more transportation between here and Baltimore.
It seems to me we were forever having to get originals over there.
It was partly to move people around, go to hearings, and go to
meetings. An awful lot of that shuttle schedule was to get documents
to Washington. Speaking of which, when I first came here, the
whole road system wasn't here. The Beltway didn't extend beyond
Route 40. Social Security Boulevard did not extend beyond Rolling
Road. Rolling Road going by here and all north was just a country
lane. There was no I-95 between here and Washington. There were
almost no eating establishments. There was Hersch, Franklintown
Inn, Mill Race. There was almost no place that served crabs. It
seems to me the first one right around here that was built was
a restaurant on the hilltop where the Red Lobster is now. Is the
Red Lobster still there, or is that something else?
Q: Yes.
Ross: Ingleside was two lanes and real windy and steep
at the bottom. That was the route to get back to Baltimore.
Q: Can we talk about some of the people who were there that
you worked with. Alvin David was the head?
Ross: He had been head of it since it was still called
(I think) the Analysis Division. When I was here, it was DPA,
the Division of Program Analysis, and he was head of it. Jim Marquis
was his deputy. The Division at that time included not only the
two planning type branches that conducted the kind of work that
OLCA now conducts, but it also included the short-term actuary,
who was Larry Alpern. He was a very exacting, awesome and expert
actuary. Harry Ballantyne worked for him. There was an Economic
Studies Branch. It was headed by a guy named George Trafton. There
was a branch called Coding and Classification which was headed
by somebody named Bill Cummins. Subsequently, that branch was
spun off to the Central Office of Operations or whatever it was
then.
The shop was substantially reorganized after Bob
Ball became Commissioner of Social Security in 1962 under
the Kennedy Administration. He set about dividing the Social Security
Administration on the one hand as we know it now, which was the
old Bureau of Old-Age and Survivors Insurance, and a separate
Welfare Administration. The Commissioner before Bob Ball was Bill
Mitchell, and he was Commissioner when I came to work. The Social
Security Administration included in addition to the Bureau of
Old-Age and Survivors Insurance, which was us, the Children's
Bureau, the Bureau of Public Assistance, Housing Administration,
Bureau of Federal Credit Unions and various other folk. After
Bob became Commissioner, he made this split which also entailed
a split of the staff of the immediate Office of the Commissioner.
That staff included Ida Miriam in the Office of Research and Statistics,
and Bob Myers in the Office of the Actuary. Both of them came
with SSA, and whatever other research and statistics functions
there were in SSA including this Economic Studies Branch in DPA
were transferred to Ida's shop. The short-term Actuary, Larry
Alpern's shop, was transferred to Bob Myers. Another piece of
the super structure of the Commissioner's office had been a legislative
staff under Charlie Hawkins, and that went with the Welfare Administration.
In compensating for that component going with the Welfare Administration
and also with the loss of the Economic Studies Branch and the
Actuary Branch, DPA, Alvin's shop, set up a Legislative Reference
Office which was initially headed by Sarah Brown, the person I
mentioned earlier. She had been in the Disability Branch, but
had always been a whiz at putting together these many copies of
these monstrous three-inch black binders that were background
materials for hearings.
It's hard to talk about some of these people -- you mention Christgau
in particular. I never knew him that well. He was a cherubic older
gentleman by the time I got here. He had come sometime in the
1950's, during the Eisenhower Administration. He was formerly
a Congressman from Minnesota, but I don't think he had come in
right square in 1953 with Eisenhower; I think he came in later.
He was just a charming, charming guy. I personally worked on a
lot of speeches for him. This was shortly after the Disability
Program had got up and running, and SSA was still growing. When
I first came to work, in 1960, there had been about 60,000 employees.
We grew to over 85,000, I guess.
Q: Now we're back to 60,000.
Ross: Now we're back to 60,000. In the meantime, we gained
health insurance, and gained public assistance and lost them both
again. One of the activities that he was into was running around
the countryside making a presence and opening new district offices.
I guess there was some rivalry and enthusiasm with members of
Congress to have district offices opened in their districts. It's
probably not fair to him, but I tend to think of him as a ceremonial
person, and Bob Ball was the guy who was really running the show.
It was a pretty youthful, long ago and far away perception.
Q: How about Alvin David?
What was his managing style like or what was his personality like?
Ross: Gosh, it's hard to begin to describe him. Well,
he was a slight man, exacting. I have no idea really why, but
one did not wish to displease him. The notion that Alvin wouldn't
like something or another was a very strong reason not to do it.
He was quite a perfectionist as far as both the content and the
appearance of the product were concerned. If the content were
absolutely stellar, untouchable, wonderful, but the margins were
crooked, or the O's were smudgy, or the attachment wasn't legible,
you were in the doghouse for a long, long time. He came down hard
on secretaries. Anybody who had read a thing and had his initials
on the file box was equally responsible in Alvin's mind for the
total product when he saw it.
One of the things about him and to a greater extent even some
of the others, they would ask you to do what now seems somewhat
outrageous -- things that would take you all night or things that
would involve looking through volumes and volumes of something
in order to be able to say: "It wasn't there," which
was a deadly task. Almost anything that anybody there would ask
you to do in those days, they would have done themselves, and
could have done themselves, and could have done better than you.
No matter how unreasonable it seemed to you, you knew that they
could do it and would do it and had done it. Increasingly, that
was less and less so and also increasing as the pace of things
changed. I suspect by the time he left in 1976 or so, Alvin could
no more compute a benefit. Earlier he could and would.
He had enormously high standards for himself. He was a perfectionist
towards his own products, and he was conspicuously so. I guess
the whole staff admired him beneath it all, but they used to make
a little fun of him in the sense of asking him some piece of trivia
just to see if they could trip him up. Occasionally we would wind
up pursuing some trivia item that had not been a serious question
as it turned out. He also did a lot of speaking and work with
outside organizations and outside individuals. Unfortunately,
from my telling of it, a great deal of it was in the coverage
area which is not something I ever had much expertise and understanding
of. In the area of convincing State or local groups or nonprofit
groups that had an option to come into the program, why they should
come in and why they should come in under these circumstances,
and why Social Security would be a good deal for them, he did
a lot of talking around the country.
Q: I want to talk in more detail about the Nixon Administration
and the Family Assistance Plan (FAP). The first thing I've always
been curious about was even though this was a Nixon Administration
proposal, how much of it, how much of the motivation, if any,
came from within SSA? Was SSA as interested in this issue or did
this sort of come from the Department and come from the Administration
and we reacted to them or did we initiate any of this?
Ross: This was entirely initiated by SSA; it came out
of the political process. One of the moving forces was the riots
throughout the country, in Chicago in particular, in 1968 following
Martin Luther King's death. And there was the so-called Kerner
Commission report which came out in 1968, while Johnson was still
President, which recommended, among other things, that the adult
assistance categories be federalized. I can remember the Department
was preparing (Wilbur Cohen was then Secretary) a formal response
to the Kerner Commission recommendations. I can remember a meeting
I attended in Commissioner Ball's office with Alvin David, who
was Director of what was then the Office of Program Evaluation
and Planning (OPEP), and my immediate boss, Betty Sanders, who
was director of the Division of Retirement and Survivors Insurance.
Bob was asking, "How should we respond to the notion of federalized
adult assistance categories," the implication clearly being
it would be administered by SSA. And we went around the table
and we all said, in one form or another, that despite this or
that disadvantage, we thought it was the right thing to do. And
Bob was opposed, and the major reason why he was opposed was that
the aged, blind and disabled were the "good guys" in
the welfare pot, and that by creaming them away from the AFDC
crowd, he feared that nothing would ever be done to get AFDC right,
and that separating the adult categories would have a really bad
long-range effect on the programs for families with children.
I don't know what the Department's ultimate response was, but,
as far as I know, that was what Bob told Wilbur
(Editor's Note: Mary and I got our wires crossed on this question.
I was asking about FAP and she was answering more about SSI. FAP
emerged from within the Administration and SSI from within SSA.)
Q: Sometimes I've gotten the impression that within the agency,
there was sort of a resistance to SSA being involved in these
adult categories because we didn't want to associate welfare with
the title II program. That wasn't the nature of the resistance--
it was the opposite of that; it was concern about the welfare
side?
Ross: That was what was driving to Bob.
Incidentally, when three of us said we were for, and Bob said
he was recommending against, Betty Sanders said, "Gee, there's
nothing democratic about this process," and something that's
impressed me ever since, Ball said, "I should hope not. Let
me know if you ever find anything democratic about the way I run
this place. A well-run institution is not democratic."
This was when it was clear that we were going to administer adult
assistance and when it was being discussed much later (in the
SSI context) there was a lot of concern that the public should
understand that the programs were separate, and that what they
contributed to title II was not being spent on title XVI folks.
I never heard, though it would have been a hard thing to have
talked about, the SSI clientele being objectionable to the title
II clientele or in close proximity. I gather we've had facilities
problems where some people don't necessarily want a Social Security
office in the building if it's going to mean a lot of SSI traffic.
And I don't remember any anticipation of that kind of thing.
Q:. How about--I don't know how to describe it except philosophical
antipathy toward welfare as a program as opposed to social insurance
as a program? Was there any of that?
Ross: I don't remember any of that at an official level.
Q: So how did we get then from the Kerner Commission . . .
Ross: Well, you didn't, you had an election intervening,
and you got Nixon elected by a very narrow margin.
The parties weren't that far apart and one of the things about
the Social Security Amendments which were running parallel from
1969 to 1972 as the FAP stuff was, was that both party platforms
called for automatic increases--a Social Security benefit increase
and automatic increases thereafter, and liberalization of retirement.
I'm not sure what was in the Democratic Party platform on welfare,
but there were ideas out there kicking around: there were various
forms of guaranteed annual income, negative income tax; all those
kinds of proposals from the left. There's always a notion of popularity
for really reforming the welfare system from the right. The whole
thing was, in my mind, there was sort of an added seriousness
because of this feeling that if blacks and poor people didn't
share more in the good stuff that was America, we would have riots
in our cities all the time. And there was a real fear element
that pervaded, for example, the Kerner Commission report.
I haven't actually checked the text, but I gather that when President
Nixon announced in August of 1969 that he was about to propose
the Family Assistance Plan--it was a nationwide television broadcast--and
in it, there was a reference to it being administered by SSA.
I've come across some memos that I had no idea at that time existed
in which the Secretary's top people were touching base with Bob
Ball as to whether that was something that could be done.
The official Ball response was that if it were to be administered
by an existing agency, the only two with a network that could
do anything were Internal Revenue and Social Security, and between
the two, Social Security was clearly the better. The other point
he makes very strongly in his memo--and I guess it's because Social
Security had such a good record for efficient administration and
low administrative costs relative to benefit payments and so forth--the
other point he makes very strongly in that initial August memo
was that we could not expect low administrative costs by the very
nature of any assistance program. We have to continuously check
that the people who, if you're paying benefits by household, were
in that household are in that household and income and resources
haven't changed, is inherently an expensive proposition to administer.
We should plan on that from day one.
The notion that it would be administered by Social Security was
not popular anywhere, and the Administration immediately shied
away from it. As far as I know, it was never committed to how
it would be administered. But there was an awful lot of talk as
the thing progressed, and I think the Ways and Means Committee
leaned this way of having an independent or a wholly new income-security
administration, or whatever they would have called it, run the
thing. Whether they would have contracted to use SSA offices in
various locations, who knows. As the thing went through Congress,
it was not a political plus to associate it with Social Security.
Q: After Nixon announced his proposal, (or before the proposal
was announced), there was a working team at the Department level
with White House involvement that drafted the plan itself. Did
we have any involvement in helping them draft the plan that you
know of or was it the case that the first time we got involved,
they already had a plan on the table?
Ross: I never quite figured that out at the time.
There were two things that were talked about. One was a task
force headed by Finch, and that's mentioned in hearings and when
people are given a run-through of how all this came about. I don't
know who was on that task force as an interagency thing, and it
had to have been fairly large.
What was referred to internally as the real founders, the developers
of the plan, were 4 people. And I'm certain that Dick Nathan and
Pat Moynihan were two of them. And I think the other two were
Jerry Rossow (who wound up at the Department of Labor,) and Bob
Patracelli, who wound up as sort of honcho for the FAP at HEW.
He had different titles--he was essentially the Assistant Secretary
for Planning and Evaluation. And Nathan, once the Administration
got itself set up, was the high mucky-muck at OMB; he wasn't Director
but he was the top dog. And towards the latter part of the FAP
effort, he came over to HEW. He was Deputy Under-Secretary. I'm
not sure when that transfer occurred, I know he was in HEW at
the end of 1971, and had been at OMB when the effort was being
mounted. Those are the people that really got the core thing going
in terms of covering the working poor, having a strong manpower
component and saying, "Yes, this Administration will support
a huge increase in the assistance roles, coupled with a manpower,
and childcare and whatnot effort to assure that people don't stay
on the roles forever."
Q: Now where did people like Tom Joe and some of those folks
come in? Did they come into this later in the process?
Ross: No, Tom Joe was one of the early people, as was
Venneman and as was Finch; they're all from California. Tom Joe
had been an assistant to Congressman Burton from San Francisco
who was a raging liberal--you can say that because somebody has
just written a biography of him called "Rage for Justice"--a
raging liberal who had done a great deal to revamp the California
welfare program in the late 1950's and early 1960's. And Tom Joe
also had considerable background in Federal-State relations and
in State finances.
This was the era before revenue-sharing with the States, which
was one of the things that came in the early 1970's, and there
was a lot of a sense of pinch in State governments; the tax base
was eaten up by the Feds and they needed some form of revenue
sharing when they needed this and they needed that. And there
was also a movement where the States were going out of their way
to shift costs and caseloads from State assistance or from purely
State funded assistance like general assistance to a Federal-State
program like FAP or AFDC or whatever.
Q: Now, who for SSA's part was involved in this in the early
stages? Did we have anyone working on this as it began to make
its way through the Congressional process? Did we have a team
or what?
Ross: We very early detailed a number of people, myself
included, to work on this project. Bob, I assume, attended the
meetings and I don't know if anyone was working on that.
Q: So yourself and who else from SSA was working on the project?
Ross: Well, somewhat later on, but not a whole lot later,
there was a really strong contingent headed by John Schwartz,
who was considered an SSA comer and was in the personnel line.
Through a lot of this period, Pete Wheeler was detailed to the
Executive Secretariat and worked very closely with Jack Venneman,
the Undersecretary on this reform stuff. And John Trout was, for
a lot of this period, in the Office of the Assistant Secretary
for Legislation.
But the real FAP administrative planning staff was headed by
John Montgomery, who had a California welfare background. And
he was hired, not in the initial planning stages, but early the
following year to set up administrative planning to check how
the think was coming on. And that's were Schwartz and some of
his people. . . I don't know if I mentioned some these folks,
Bob Cahill and Barry Powell, who I think was over there. Somebody
I thought was real sharp named Carolyn Betts who wound up in OHA
somewhere. There was a bunch of them.
Carl Dahm, who had previously been detailed from the Atlanta
region to OLCA years and years earlier, he was known around there
to sort of head up a FAP legislative planning staff based in the
HEW South Building.
Charlie Hawkins, and once he was appointed, Jack Costa, who was
head of SRS. But those guys didn't have an initiating-type role,
but they were consulted from time to time on those early stages.
And so were we; I found where we commented to OGC, I guess, on
an early draft of the adult-assistance call. And that was institutional;
that wasn't because we had details over there. We had a couple
of people and as time passed, there were more people back here,
at least in OLCA and what was then OPEP and I don't know where
else, that were spending more and more of their time on adult
assistance.
I can't exactly remember exactly where this sort of stuff was
coordinated from, but substantial background books were being
prepared and revised and pages changed, throughout this period.
So the thing hangs over and we get into 1970.
Beginning around September 1969, I was sort of detailed without
portfolio to Washington. I had just inherited the house I grew
up in and due to personal reasons, very much wanted to be in Washington.
And I no sooner got myself detailed over there, than I was detailed
to work with Tom Joe on whatever he was doing on the Family Assistance
Plan. He and I were something of a mismatch from day one.
A lot of the work he asked me to do was stuff I had no clue about:
design an ideal administrative setup; describe how different departments--
Labor, HEW, Housing, Food stamps--would work together; and that
kind of stuff. I noticed throughout the period, when I was going
through my files, I had a number of administrative-type assignments
(I don't know, I may not do them as poorly as I think) but it's
not a type of activity I'm comfortable with. And I did not have
good communication with Tom Joe; I couldn't sort of read his meaning
a lot of the time. He has a sarcastic way of speaking, and he
uses a lot of humor to convey meaning, but I wasn't getting a
lot of the meaning a lot of the time.
I did discover a really strong note I wrote on his behalf (this
would have been sometime in 1970) I wrote over my signature, telling
John Montgomery that Tom Joe is really upset that a lot of the
legislative planning (or the planning activity for administering
FAP seems to be going in the direction of re-imposing all the
suspicions and anti-dignity.
Q: The old philosophy that they were trying to get away from.
. .
Ross: Tom Joe was a real "do it by affidavit and
don't look behind the affidavit" type; I don't know if he
still is; don't ever look behind--that's the kind of person he
was.
The Administration introduced its FAP proposals in October, as
well as Social Security benefit increases and cost-of-living adjustments.
And Ways and Means began holding hearings almost right away in
October and November. And Patracelli had a small staff of people
from ASPE and it seems to me there were weekly meetings in Patracelli's
office. It seems to me I attended them and I reported to a number
of people about them, though I must not have done that in writing.
Because I know I reported back to Tom Joe about them and I think
I also reported to Alvin or carried messages back to SSA. I went
to them and Fran White from the General Counsel--somebody must
have been there from Legislation, though I don't remember who.
And this corps of people from Planning and Evaluation which included
Alair Townsend, who later when on to work in Budget and who worked
for Mayor Koch for years in New York as Budget Director for New
York City; Jody Allen, who I think went from there to the Urban
Institute or someplace; and wound up--well she's now on the editorial
staff of the Washington Post; Mike Mahoney and Jim Story who did
some policy stuff but did an awful lot of numbers crunching, and
a woman named Mary Jane Cronin, who wound up doing an awful lot
of work on refuting the notion that there were adverse incentives
in the FAP system.
But even with this ballyhooed reform, there were still situations
where working people were worse off than people who didn't work.
I noticed throughout that, at different moments, different people
are kind of taking up the reins to do public information--prepare
pamphlets and chart books; and I guess the White House was also
doing a certain amount of it; they had done fact sheets for the
company that did it.
Q: Now, you were not doing just administrative planning at
this point, you were still making some policy decisions about
how this would all work; is that right, or were these primarily
administrative type issues that you were dealing with?
Ross: For Tom Joe, it was this pie in the sky stuff; for
Patracelli, it was more putting out fires, responding to whatever
ways and Means was calling attention to, providing rationale for
this that and the third.
One of the disconnects that ran throughout this planning was
that the people that were really working on reform were not well
tied in, I thought--and I had trouble getting myself tied in--with
the people in SRS who knew something about how assistance was
working already and what did and didn't work in the States.
And of course, in the midst of it all, the Congress passed the
15 percent benefit increase that December that sort of took some
of the push out of doing something on Social Security.
So the thing hangs over and we get into 1970 and Ways and Means
does a report on the Family Assistance Plan. And in the Family
Assistance bill, there were substantial changes in adult assistance.
There was a Federal minimum stated. Previously, there were 4 adult
assistance categories in the law: aged, blind and disabled in
three separate titles, and there was one title--title XVI under
which States could have a combined adult-assistance program.
Part of the original FAP welfare reform proposals would have
eliminated the other three--the three original categories--and
required that all adult assistance be channeled through title
XVI, which would have provided for aged, blind and disabled at
the State level.
Q: Still at the State level but not federalized?
Ross: Still at the State level, but with an option for
Federal administration, which States could have elected. and there
was a slight financial incentive to encourage that in terms of
administrative costs, but not very much.
Q: Now you mentioned that Ways and Means did pass out the
FAP. But I also understand that they were skeptical of the idea
of having SSA be the administrative agency.
Ross: I don't remember if this is written into their committee
reports, that's something I didn't check, but they clearly leaned
towards a wholly new agency. Nobody was particularly enthusiastic
about having the existing Welfare Administration do it. We just
had too much baggage over there.
Everybody admired Charlie Hawkins, who was the legislative person
for Welfare, and Jack Costa certainly wasn't tarred with any of
the old feathers. Which I guess is why John Montgomery's shop
was established to make a showing of a whole new Social Security-style
approach that would not have been there otherwise.
Where we really ran into trouble was on the Senate side. The
Finance Committee held hearings at the end of April and the beginning
of May and took the proposal apart from every possible angle.
And it was Senator Harris on that committee who had, for a long
time, supported a guaranteed income plan and there was Senator
Talmadge who wasn't going to be too much and Senator Williams
of Delaware who was the ranking Republican who very quickly latched
onto devastating tables that we used throughout that process--creative
cases that showed horrible notches where you earn another dollar
and you lose all X Y or Z, where Medicaid and food stamps and
public housing and what not would come together to create tremendous
disincentives and notches and whatever.
Finch testified with Venneman and Patracelli and Hawkins; the
record is just rife with requests for information; and an awful
lot of them say at the bottom of the page in the printed record,
"As of the date of publication, this information was never
received."
At the end of that period, around noon Friday May 1, the Finance
Committee went into executive session and invited Finch in with
them and came back very quickly and announced that the Administration
was going to reconsider its Family Assistance Plan and would resubmit
it with amendments which would deal with some of these problems.
Then everybody went to lunch, and that's all the public record
shows.
But there was a further hearing that afternoon, I'm certain of,
and it's not in the record. The only Senator I can remember being
present was Ribicoff. The only person I can remember sitting at
the witness table was Finch. They had a sort of friendly but distant
discourse. "I appreciate so much you're being willing to
come back on a Friday afternoon," and so on, and when they
got over the pleasantries, there was some substantive back and
forth. And it seems to me Ribicoff said something like, "Gosh,
Mr. Secretary, if I didn't know better, I would think the performance
that your department has put on here the last 3 days is deliberately
designed by the White House to undercut their own proposal."
And Finch said, and I love this line, "Senator, this scenario
could not have been contrived."
Things were going from bad to worse, the Administration was being
attacked from the right because all these people were being put
on welfare and there weren't really any incentives to get them
off, "can you show me that these manpower programs will really
work to get people trained and into jobs, and don't we all have
a terrible record," and they were being attacked from the
far left by the National Welfare Rights Organization, which along
about this time, staged a sit-in at Secretary Finch's office.
Q: In connection with Senator Ribicoff's question: In recent
years, some information has come out in Bob Haldeman's diaries,
for example, that suggested that Nixon wasn't necessarily all
that interested in FAP and may not have been really pushing it
vigorously, sort of as Ribicoff suggested. Did you see any evidence
of that when you were there working on it, that the Administration
wasn't really serious about this and they were just going through
the motions? Was there any evidence of that at all?
Ross: I didn't see anything to that effect in the first
2 years, in 1969 and 1970. In 1971, they asked the Finance Committee
to discontinue its work on FAP while it considered income-tax
proposals. But before that overt thing, it seems to me once they
failed to get it through in the first 2 years, it didn't seem
to have the same priority at the White House.
As late as December 22, 1970, there was a letter from Nixon to
Jerry Ford, who was still in the House of Representatives saying,
"We've got to get this thing done this year." And I
think part of that was that the agenda is moving on. And then,
of course the whole thing died at the end of 1970 and the effort
to push it in 1971 was half-hearted, I guess.
Q: So, what did you do then in response to the rejection,
or the rebuff by Senate Finance?
Ross: Well, everybody goes back to the drawing boards
and Finch, by this time, was not in good health.
We were doing--I was doing a certain amount of legislative support
that they weren't accustomed to on the welfare side. Like back
in those days, when you had a significant bill like H.R.16311
(the FAP bill) we would produce an annotated bill and you would
go through the whole bill and write in the margins in plain English
what each section did and why it was good and why it was there;
we were doing all that kind of stuff. The bill originally proposed
by the Administration was shot through with vague statements--I
forget how they described who was going to be referred for employment,
but it was everybody except those who would not be referred because
of illness or advanced age. "What do you mean by illness
or advanced age?" The bill was shot through with vague statements
like that and with parenthetical expressions such as, "In
accordance with regulations to be prescribed by the Secretary."
Nobody knew what that meant. Or, "and other resources in
accordance with regs." So one of the efforts that we did
in May and June, and later that year, was to provide written explanations
for what was meant by these vagaries or to redraft the legislative
language to clarify what was income, what was earned income, what
was unearned income, and the like.
It was interesting work in a way because you had people who have
been dealing with it in a welfare context for so long that everybody
knows what they mean, and the Social Security types who are so
precise but sort of get tripped up by such things as, "If
you treat it as earned income . . ."--by the fact that having
income hurts a person.
But the Administration did ultimately submit a new plan and some
of the issues were partially dealt with by a proposed change in
housing legislation. I think later came the notion of cashing
out food stamps, although that could have come up then, and a
further notion that you would have a kinder, gentler notion of
dealing with the Medicaid notch-- the point at which somebody
suddenly doesn't get Medicaid. And the Administration then planned
to submit a Family Health Plan (HIP) the following year. But the
notion that it was going to take a year to work out FAP was another
reason why the Finance Committee could delay action.
Q: So they resubmitted a revised version of the FAP in 1970?
Ross: Yes. In June of 1970. And at some point
about late June or early July, Finch resigned and Secretary Richardson
was appointed. And he then was going to carry the ball. His first
big public thing to do as Secretary of HEW was to return and testify
further on the revised Family Assistance Plan. He was a terrific
guy. But an awful lot of staff work was done at that point to
give him all the information on the background. He was asking
good questions right, left, and center since he had not been part
of the original planning of the thing. And he got up to speed,
and mastered the stuff and worked the staff to a frazzle. And
he really testified well.
Then the Department of Labor went. Labor had also changed Secretaries
in this period. There was no Undersecretary Shultz, but Secretary
Hodgeson. But in both cases accompanied by Jerry (Jerome) Rossow,
who, I gather, was one of the original planners of FAP. I haven't
reread their testimony, but from what little of it I can remember
from the hearing, they talked a good game, but they didn't have
a convincing way of responding to criticisms. In the past, Labor
had talked a good game and nothing had happened.
Q: Now, this second round of hearings happened at the end
of July ?
Ross: At the end of July and the beginning of
August. Then the Finance Committee moved on and held public hearings
with public witnesses, and then they went into executive sessions.
They were also, at the same time, holding hearings on the Social
Security cash benefit bill which, by now, was H.R.17550. And at
some point in early October, it was becoming clear that the Finance
Committee was not going to report a separate welfare bill; they
had a committee vote that was 14-1 against the Family Assistance
Plan.
The June submission had been called the Revised Family Assistance
Plan; they then submitted in October and published in November
something that was subsequently called "revised-revised."
And it included what the Administration considered to be the core
FAP bill that they were still supporting, with some further modifications
to deal with incentive problems and cost problems. Each time a
new set of cost estimates was prepared, the cost of the same things
seemed to be going up; the things were changing so that it was
hard to make direct comparisons; the caseload estimates were going
up and the costs were going up.
In addition to the so-called "core" bill were additional
amendments that the Administration was cooler about but would
entertain--which included pre-testing of the Family Assistance
Plan in select jurisdictions. And out of the core package, there
was put together a Ribicoff-Bennett plan which I believe included
the pre-testing. Senator Bennett was a moderate Republican from
Utah and Senator Ribicoff, of course, was from Connecticut (and
a former Secretary of HEW). We put together for them, at their
request, a Ribicoff-Bennett Amendment which failed in Committee
by a vote of 10-6, which was already some progress.
Q: Why was there such a difference in the reaction between
Ways and Means on one side and Finance on the other? What was
the politics or what caused there to be such a different reception
to the FAP on both sides?
Ross: Ways and Means was a more liberal committee,
but I think they were much more inclined to believe that nothing
could be a whole lot worse than what they already had. A lot of
the comparisons that were accepted in the Ways and means Committee
where you could show that FAP was better than old law, seemed
to go down. On the Finance Committee side, you had to show that
FAP had no flaws; and you had to be showing it to extremes. Senator
Harris was discounted somewhat--but not really because he becomes
a player on the Senate floor.
The Finance Committee did report out the adult assistance (or
some adult assistance amendments) but much less. But the notion
of a guaranteed minimum--which was now $110, which was higher,
I think the second or subsequent individuals got less than $110,
but I'm not specific on that. But the $110 in the House bill was
$130 plus $70 in the Senate bill; the Senate bill was $130 per
person and $70 for each additional person in an adult-assistance
household. It also included some punitive--or what were viewed,
particularly by liberals, as punitive--amendments having to do
with residency--countering the effect of the liberalizing Supreme
Court decisions. These provisions had to do with saying residency
requirements were okay and lien requirements were okay and it
was a crime to cross State lines to avoid paternity responsibilities
and child-support responsibilities.
Q: One of the things that was going on around this time was
sort of a cultural change or a philosophical change with the beginnings
of this idea of welfare as an "earned right." I don't
know if the Kerner Commission reflected that or not, but around
this same time that philosophy became prominent and there were
lots of welfare-rights advocates and activists pushing that idea.
Did that idea motivate either the House or the Senate, either
favorably or unfavorably? Was that in the mix in any way that
you could see?
Ross: Well, it was certainly in the mix; it
was reflected in Senator Harris' approach to the whole thing,
and it was reflected in Senator Mondale's approach; Senator Mondale
subsequently introduced the National Welfare Rights Organization
bill.
This, of course, was one of the reasons that we could do for
the aged, blind and disabled things that you couldn't do for families
with children; somehow, it's a lot easier to think that people
who are old or blind or disabled have a right to something.
I also did a certain amount of letter-answering and it seems
to me we used to get that complaint. The Administration response
was that this was not a guaranteed income; anybody who could work
had to work, and that there were requirements and responsibilities
imposed on recipients. I guess there was an underlying notion
that people had a basic right to a minimum income.
Q: Now we were talking about the Ribicoff-Bennett amendment
and how it had begun to move the Senate a little bit.
Ross: Well, it moved the Finance Committee,
but not much other than it gave some small encouragement to the
Administration.
So the Finance Committee reported out what few welfare provisions
they were going to have in the Social Security bill 17550, and
they also tacked onto that bill a bunch of trade amendments. That
bill hit the Senate floor in December, and was the subject of
a subtle but effective filibuster.
Interestingly enough, a lot of this was led on the Senate floor
by Senator Williams who, in the guise of trying to get everybody
off the dime, kept proposing unanimous-consent requests, because
they had to operate by agreement. He would never get unanimous
consent. The people who opposed the trade bill, which included
Senator Javits, who was basically somebody who would have been
mildly supportive of family assistance, wanted to be sure that
they could get a clear-cut vote on the trade title in the bill.
The people that supported FAP wanted to be able to get a clear
vote on the Ribicoff-Bennett Amendment. But even within that,
there were some who only wanted to be able to vote on that amendment
(this is Senator Harris) only if that amendment in turn would
be amendable because he wanted to modify it. So it was caught
between the folks that didn't want anything to happen, those who
would make it easier for the trade section to go through, and
the folks that wanted some sort of a vote on the family assistance
section. In the course of all this filibuster (negotiating around
for a modus operandi here)-- which went on from the 16th to the
29th of December, so it was half the month and pretty much every
day that they were in session with just a couple of days off at
Christmas-there was a certain amount of substantive debate on
the family-assistance business, but most of it was a rehash of
what had happened in Committee and no minds were changed, one
would say. But the point was that it was becoming clear with each
passing day that there wasn't going to be time to go to Conference;
Congress was going to adjourn. Under the Constitution; the 91st
Congress dies at the end of January 2. And with each passing day,
there wasn't going to be time to go to conference, there wasn't
going to be time to iron out differences between the House and
the Senate bills.
Q: Now, the House passed the bill earlier in 1970?
Ross: The House had earlier passed H.R.550,
the Social Security bill, which was now the sole vehicle. They
had also passed the benefit assistance plan in 16311, which included
adult assistance, some of which had squiggled into 17550 on the
Senate side. Finally, the Senate stripped off the trade stuff
and they stripped out some of the welfare stuff and passed the
bill on December 29. But already, on the House side, Mills and
Burns were saying, "There's not going to be time to Conference
this bill; we can't get the benefit increase."
For those who were working computer systems at the time, on the
Social Security side, there were nightmares with each passing
month as to whether or not there was going to be a Social Security
benefit increase (which was going to be either 10 percent in the
Senate bill or 5 percent in the House bill) or what month it was
going to be for and whether or not it was going to be retroactive
and this whole debate would go on past whatever the cutoffs were
for doing a benefit conversion--a lot more lead time was needed--and
whether there were going to be pass-through provisions. It seems
to me the assistance folks were writing memos through Bob to Ways
and Means for ever and ever.
But it was not only becoming clear that there wouldn't be time
to conference the bill, but people were now talking in terms of
when they do have the benefit increase making it retroactive to
when it would have been, and Burns and Mills were promising to
introduce the Social Security Amendments and welfare early in
the next Congress which was going to be the 92nd Congress convening
in January of 1971. And so the bill died. In January, the Ways
and Means Committee did introduce the Family Assistance Plan and
the Social Security Amendments and they proceeded to go through
Ways and Means.
It seems to me, at this point the Ways and Means version got
a little more serious about SSI, though I'm not sure about that.
And then, of course they had the 10 percent benefit increase enacted
on a separate bill in March which took, again, some of the pressure
off doing something, because the beneficiaries had been promised
something last December and finally got it.
I think the adult-assistance program was substantially shifted
from what it had looked like--from a strengthening of the existing
State programs to something much closer to SSI. Ways and Means
got through with the bill I guess at the end of May or June and
I think it still included family assistance. And here's where--I
think it's got to be where--the Administration was pushing its
tax-reform proposals ahead of family assistance and welfare reform
on the Senate side.
By this time, a guy named Jim Edwards was running the Department's
legislative effort. I was doing more work back here in Baltimore--I
think I actually came back to Baltimore as Betty's staff assistant
for a while there. But it also seems to me I was working much
more closely with the legislative people and they were taking
up the cudgels on PR activities; they were issuing a rebuttal
to the welfare-rights criticisms on the one hand and a rebuttal
to the American Conservative Union criticisms on the other hand.
Q: Was anything happening on the Senate side while this was
going on?
Ross: There was a certain amount of positioning,
it seems to me; of course, I kept finding as I was going through
stuff, revised versions of the Ribicoff-Bennett approach and solely
a Bennett bill that didn't go anywhere near as far but I guess
he thought it's got a chance, and a Ribicoff bill that was separate.
And a long in here is when McGovern introduced the National Welfare
Rights version of the bill.
I don't know whether people were already starting to look to
the 1972 election; somehow the bipartisanship (what there had
been of it) which Nixon had really used well in a lot of respects
in his first 2 years--and needed to because he didn't have a huge
mandate before 1972--was fading.
Oh, there was a reorganization of Montgomery's FAP staff. At
the time I wasn't as well acquainted with the organization of
the Department as I became since. One of the things they did with
John Montgomery as coordinator of the FAP--planning to administer
a welfare reform-- was that they put him in several different
jobs at once. He was an Assistant to the Secretary so that he
could report to the Secretary; he was in ASPE as Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Income Maintenance and reported through ASPE, I
suppose, for that. Even without legislative authority, the Department
began the so-called Vermont Experiment, and contracts with Mathematica
to do a Seattle study, and a New Jersey study to show how recipients
respond to work proposals and incentives, and what-not, which
was run out of the Assistant Secretary for Planning, and he was
Director of the Family Assistance Staff.
Well, there were some SRS detailees and detailees from the Office
of Child Development, but it was 20 people from SSA-and, as I
look back on it, it was quality people, it wasn't detailing people
you hope would leave. It was a really serious effort. But although
it was more smooth running, less was really happening to change
the kinds of minds that had to be changed in order to get something
to happen.
I got intensely involved in some silly Work Incentive (WIN) amendments
that had some very strange opportunities. When you're suddenly
in a place where there's not another soul that knows about anything--even
if you don't know much about it yourself, as I didn't know anything
about the work-incentive program that HEW and Labor -were supposed
to be jointly administering--I at least had heard of it and knew
that there was such a thing. And I was among people who had barely
had heard of it, which was one of the problems-it was why the
Administration didn't make, in some respects, a better showing
when they had to talk about this welfare and work coordination
and how it was going to work. They had so little notion--and I
didn't have any notion either; I just knew it was there in a way,
and knew it was there in a way it would matter to Congress- there
was a whole history of a work-incentive program that had not worked.
And I turned into an instant expert on that in about a month in
1971.
As you implied, did the White House lose it's enthusiasm? I don't
know. I can't read the motivations. Was Senator Long slyly scuttling
the thing from Day One, or was there ever a moment when he was
open-minded about it? Tom Joe, I would say, lost enthusiasm--as
an idealist loses enthusiasm-- when other people are messing in
the idea and it isn't going someplace, and they let it go and
go on to other things.
I was beginning, by this point, to get increasingly involved
to some extent in adult assistance and, to some extent, the Social
Security bill. Back in the 1969-1970 period, when the Finance
Committee was carrying the water on blocking FAP, Ways and Means
was blocking the automatics which, I guess, finally passed the
House. But really, nothing much further happened which was new
and forward-moving in the family-assistance world in 1971.
That about winds down my real involvement.
1972 was a fascinating year. The Finance Committee was still
holding hearings on H.R. 1. The House finally passed H.R.1 at
the end of June or the beginning of July. The Finance Committee
held hearings in August through September and suspended them while
the tax bill went through. In those hearings--they weren't the
grueling experience for the Administration that they had been
the previous year--they created the record with mountains of material
and 6 volumes between that and the resumed hearings in January
and February of 1972, which was a really strong effort again for
welfare reform and for a bunch of other things, and for beefed-up
child-support enforcement.
Q: How did this idea of peeling off the adult categories from
the whole Family Assistance Plan come about? Did that happen in
1971 at the end of this as it began to lose its steam? Were they
developing that idea?
Ross: The fact that the Finance Committee reported
some adult-assistance amendments, and the notion of a Federal
floor in adult assistance, was acceptable to the Finance Committee.
Q: When did they decide to do the H.R. 1 strategy which ended
up becoming the SSI program?
Ross: I think that's Ways and Means in the spring
of 1971, and that's what I really didn't dig into. But I think
that's when, for example, we first had this question of it becoming
clear--or being clarified--that benefits for disabled people could
extend to children under 18, which isn't of too big moment if
you've got a FAP out there that's picking up children under 18
anyway. It becomes of huge moment; if you don't make reforms in
the category for families with children and you just add that
in the title XVI context. So it's in that connection that there
was correspondence between Bob Ball and Alvin David about what
kind of a definition of disability--at least initially, one of
the drafts in the spring of 1971 would have provided that you
just looked at whether they met the medical criteria without any
test of SGA and without any test of vocational factors--for children
under 16. The implication in the series of notes is that "Well,
it's better than nothing but we really should have 18 rather than
16 before we have to look at vocational stuff."
Q: So, it's very clear that people were aware that one of
the implications of H.R. 1 was going to be that children would
be eligible for this program. Is it also fair to say that nobody
anticipated how large a component of the program that population
would become?
Ross: Nobody anticipated the Zebley decision.
Remember, this is 1972. I guess we already had a 1-year prognosis.
I think the notion was that we were going to do a very strict
test of disability, as, for example, we had in effect for widows
for years; they look only at medical criteria. The language that
we have seen Tom Joe take credit for, which I have no idea if
it was appropriate, the language that got into the law of "comparable
severity" I don't know that anybody foresaw how that would
wind up being stretched.
I was astonished to see at the very end of the 1970 debate on
December 29, Senator Dole got up and made a speech saying, "Well,
it's been a long debate and I won't prolong it much longer but
other things being equal, there's two amendments I would have
offered. And one of them is ..." and it was an amendment
that was in the context of the old State assistance programs.
But he has a rationale about how disabled children are not adequately
dealt with in the AFDC program, because they do have special needs
and their disabilities do require special attention, and they
would be better served, in his view, at State option I guess,
if they were taken care of under the programs for disabled people.
It takes away the old requirement that to get aid to the disabled,
you had to be 18, and it makes very explicit a requirement that
for assistance to disabled persons under 18, it would take account
of income and resources of the parents. He didn't press it because
the bill was dying minute by minute.
Q: But eventually that sort of became part of the SSI program.
Ross: Absolutely.
Q: One other thing that just occurred to me in terms of a
contemporary controversy--and I'm wondering whether anybody foresaw
or had any debate about it back in this time--was drug addicts
and alcoholics and their eligibility for these adult categories.
Was there any conversation about this at the time?
Ross: Yes, there were mountains of conversation
about it on the Senate side, and in particular, with the Senate
staffer Tom Vail. Some of the upshot of that was just the opposite
of what was intended. Because we were saying, for example, that
we would expect to treat DA and A the way it was then treated
in title II, which was, "Nobody gets assistance on the basis
of simply being drunk or being high. You have to have a physical
impairment--regardless of whether you got cirrhosis from drinking
or from being struck cirrhotic--if you meet the definition you're
disabled." And I guess this is where the Social Security
planning types, like me, were not meeting mentally on the same
plane with the welfare folk who knew perfectly well that there's
a bunch of addicts and alcoholics out there that need assistance
and how are you going to get it to them? So there was a blind
spot there into which Tom Vail, who was Chief Counsel and Senator
Long's man on this stuff, kept leaping. And as a result of the
language that got in the law--and I don't know the precise phrasing--it
made it perfectly clear that you were, in title XVI, going to
be dealing with alcoholics and addicts; and you were going to
have the same definition of disability in the two titles--we wound
up with a back-door liberalization of the way alcoholics and addicts
can get on the rolls in title II. I think that was absolutely
not anticipated by the committee.
I think the Committee anticipated a much different kind of administration
of the requirements for rep payees for alcoholics and addicts
in treatment and all that good stuff. It's hard to say that what's
happened since was anticipated because, arguably, if (a) Social
Security had either aggressively implemented those provisions
or (b) gone back to the Committee and said, "We can't implement
those provisions," something else would have happened.
I don't think that anybody could have foreseen that those provisions
would neither be very aggressively implemented nor be looked at
again in 20 years or whatever it was. I think there's an area
where no one anticipated benign neglect and we paid the price.
But yes, it was very much on the Finance Committee's mind in 1972,
as I recall.
Q: The one last question I have, you talked about this earlier
and maybe you already answered it. You alluded to the fact that
there were concerns about how this type of program would be administered.
Did anybody at this time have any premonition of the kind of chaos
that was going to happen with the SSI program, when it became
implemented and faced all these administrative challenges that
seemed, at the time, to be much greater than anyone imagined?
Was there any premonition of that at this point in time?
Ross: It was known that it was going to be a
huge deal and there were provisions that were made in the law--I
have forgotten the whole nine- yards-but for startup costs coming
out of title II and being reimbursed and so on.
It seems to me it was understood, if it wasn't made explicit,
that we were going to be reaching personnel ceilings and doing
a lot of stuff, but that was in 1972, with an effective date of
November 1974. I think where a lot of the hassle and confusion
comes from was the extent of the SSI amendments that occurred
in 1973; the program was amended a whole lot before it was ever
implemented which had two effects: (1) it shortened the lead time,
and (2) it diverted the attention of Art Hess and others who were
involved in planning the implementation.
I don't know that anybody anticipated--and I'm sure there are
a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacks on this--the loading up of
the welfare rolls that occurred (for purposes of getting people
on the rolls) in 1973 so that they would be converted into the
SSI program in 1974. I think there were people who thought about
that and saw it coming and just didn't say that much.
Anybody in their right mind, if they were going to implement
a welfare program in the future, would have the effective month
in warm weather; nobody could have foreseen those buses of people
in cold climates in line outside New York and other offices in
the middle of January.
I don't know enough about the Sumner Whittier operation to know
if they were behind schedule at all; I know that at some point
in there, we switched Secretaries again and we've got Califano.
(END OF INTERVIEW)
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