TEXT OF THE INTERVIEW
This is an interview with Huldah Lieberman. The
interviewer is Larry DeWitt, SSA Historian. The interview took place on October
18, 1995 at Ms. Lieberman's residence in
Baltimore
,
Maryland
.
Interviewer: Huldah can we start by talking about how
you came to SSA and how you started your career, what the circumstances were of
your first job in SSA?
Lieberman: Sure. I was
going to school at the
University
of
Chicago
as a professional
student in the 1950s. And I decided that it was about time to stop living as a student, sort of hand to mouth, and go get a job
for just a short while. I took, what
was then, the Federal Entrance Exam, and had no idea, no preconceived
notion, about where I wanted to work, what I wanted to do.
I
was interviewed for a job by Paul Webb, who subsequently became a Regional Commissioner, he worked for a long time
in the disability program, and at that time he was equal to an Area Director.
He assigned me to an office the farthest
distance from my home he could get within the city of
Chicago
. I went to that office as a Claims Rep. I most probably could have chosen
to go to a
Program
Service
Center
at that time, and I have no idea why I decided to become a Claims Rep, except
that it was a job with a fairly nice salary. Particularly when you have been
going to school for years and years and years. It bore no relationship to what I was doing in school. I was a
political science major, but I was more interested in international
relationships, I guess. So it bore no
relationship to what I was studying and at that time I had no idea that
it would be a permanent job.
The office
I was assigned to was a very, very large office, for that time. It still
remains a large office. It had a very diverse clientele. Very much like we see
in our inner-city offices today. We certainly didn't have the SSI workload, but
we had a skid-row type workload and we had
a very, very high income workload, people with very large incomes. And
we had in between, and it was busy.
It reminds me of the fact that as I look at my
career in SSA, I'm reminded of the fact of how much things change, but still
remain the same. We were dedicated to
providing good service. We worked very hard. The rules we had to adjudicate
cases and to develop cases were pretty much the same rules that we have some
thirty-odd years later. We had good training, very extensive training The one thing that was not there at the time was any kind of promotion plan or a standardized promotion
plan that was based on equity. So it was pretty hard to determine what
you were going to do next or where you were going to go.
I could also point out that I started working in
the District Office not to long after
the passage of the disability program I started in 1959, and they started,
I think in '56, the real start of the program. And a lot of the activity that
we got into in this large metropolitan office was disability. Not everybody was
that happy about working on disability, we had a long background report, very similar to what we have now. And we had to
develop medical evidence, which was mystifying because you could never
determine how you were going to get it. And we also worked with the State
Agencies, which none of us really understood and they didn't understand
us. Again, how much things remain the same even though they do tend to change.
I was very much involved in training, because, as
I mentioned before, we had a very
large emphasis on having a well-trained staff. I was very much involved in documentation of cases, because I was willing
to, most probably, try to see through some of the criteria and some of
the standards that we had, to best develop cases.
But
I was not happy about remaining a Claims Rep and most probably had gotten
a little bit too accustomed to the salary by now, and I knew I wasn't going back to the University of Chicago, and I
was certainly not going to teach in
an academic setting, which somehow I most probably had lodged in my head at
one time. And I did have this interest in disability and I understood
disability, I was willing to learn to understand it more than most people. And disability was expanding extensively in
Baltimore
at that time.
Baltimore
did a
hundred percent review of every case, no matter where it was filed in the country. Once the State Agency had made the
decision, one hundred percent of the
cases came in for substantive review. So they were recruiting. I couldn't see any kind of promotion in the Chicago Region
because I could never tell how promotions
were made and where they went, and one of the rules was you had to be a Field
Rep, and I wasn't going to be a Field Rep and go into the slums on the
Near Northside.
Interviewer: Let me ask you one
question about that. On the issue of promotion, and comment on that if it's
relevant, and if not, we'll just pass it by. Was there any issue early in your
career or any time in your career, being a woman in the Agency, did you find that in any way hampered your promotion opportunity
at this point in time, or that wasn't what this was about?
Lieberman: Well, in a way this was involved in this activity. The Chicago Region
had a rule that you had to go from a Claims
Rep to a Field Rep. And they did promote
women. They certainly did not overlook women, but they didn't do it as much as they should have because they had a
concern about women going into some of these areas as Field Reps. So if you
wanted to take a promotion as a woman you might have to go some place else. And
you also, and this is a very interesting thing, you also had to drive
and I didn't know how to drive. I had never felt
the need to drive a car when I was growing up in
Louisiana
and when I moved to
Chicago
public transportation was so available, why learn how to drive? So I didn't want to be a Field Rep. It wasn't clear I
could even be one. And I guess, Larry, I'd like to comment a little bit
more extensively later no about promotional
activities as a woman. I think it was somewhat involved in this, but not
greatly.
Anyway,
I knew I wasn't going back to the
University
of
Chicago
, but I had some sort of a
high-caliber education that I had managed to amass over the years and I
thought, "why not go to
Baltimore
and get into policy." Oh how wonderful.
And I would take this job in disability evaluating cases and it
would not take
long before I could get into something called "policy"--whatever that was. I didn't have the foggiest idea,
certainly, what it was in the Agency. I knew what
it was in an academic setting, but I didn't know what it was here. Anyway, I
conspired with my supervisor to get a job in
Baltimore
and almost
got killed
because the manager was furious. I mean there was no set promotion plan and it was almost like a personal
affront to go behind the back and get a job someplace else.
But, nevertheless, I was glad to be out of there
and off I moved to
Baltimore
and got into this large operation that was nothing but sitting at a desk
and reviewing disability cases. But it was expanding so rapidly, that before I
even got out of what was, I think a thirteen week training course on
disability, I was immediately promoted to
the Reconsideration Branch, because reconsideration was expanding so
much. Again, very much the same thing in disability, always denials and
appeals. So by the time I got out of training class I skipped the basic job
altogether and went to Reconsideration.
And I wasn't in Reconsideration long before
someone came by and said Policy is
expanding and they asked my Unit Chief to give recommendations, and I was
recommended, because again there was no promotion plan There was no filing for jobs. I went into Policy
and I thought the world had ended. I could not believe that there was
such a dead-end, unresponsive place to work. I figured that nobody had the foggiest idea of what to do to provide
service to the American people. And before long I didn't want to be part of it.
Very much this reaction that most operating people have to a policy job.
Interviewer: This was the Office of
Disability?
Lieberman: Well, the equivalent.
Policy in SSA has remained
pretty constant over the years. There is a law and it is interpreted basically in a very, very strict fashion, and there
is very little imagination or flexibility. And there is certainly a lack of
attempts to change the law when it's really needed to get better policy. I
think there are certain restrictions that you have to be under. When you have a
law you have to
interpret it, there's no two ways about it. And you have certain calls and you
have certain realities in the organization that have to be satisfied. But when
you see that you're doing that and it's not working, it seems to me that Policy
has a responsibility to recommend changes And that's
were I think we really breakdown in this Agency. We didn't do it thirty years
ago and we really don't do it today, to the extent we really should. Now
whether it's the responsibility of the
Policy component, or it's the leadership that just doesn't support it and is unapproachable, you know on that, it could be
that it is a combination of those things.
But I was willing to do
anything to get out of Policy. And one of the interesting
things about Policy, at that time, which I think is so funny, is we had from the beginning of time in the disability
program, we developed the background report on something called the 401. And we
must of tried a million different ways to get the
operating folks in the District Office and in the State Agencies to live with
that form. The District Office folk wouldn't get the complete interview
and the State Agency folk would just take what they got on the form. And so the resolution, which is the thing that shows
some of our ingenuity, was to change the number on the form to 3368. It
remained out there identically the same in the kind of information we
ask, but format has changed and the number of the form.
Interviewer: But the issue is still the same?
Lieberman: It's
exactly the same. That's my point. As much as things change, they remain the same. And the lack of ability in a policy
component to deal with this kind of situation, which is just
mind-boggling.
Interviewer:And frustrating to you, obviously.
Lieberman: It's very frustrating. Let me skip for a minute.
As I got
up the chain in the ladder of responsibility in management in the organization, and you say to yourself,
"can't you do something about this particular problem," the
answer is always back to the operating folks. Move around where you get the information. It was
always going to be solved by getting it with another person someplace
else or with more training. It was never
looked at the root of the problem, and what had to be done to solve the problem at its root. And that problem has been
going on for over thirty years. And even today the way we're going solve it is
by moving around where we take the information and what kind of
training. The expense is unbelievable and we know--and we know.
But,
it just so happened that while I was in Policy,
absolutely appalled at being a part of this, SSA again went under some sort of
an organizational change in which the Regional Offices expanded. And it was
determined that up until that point the
Program Bureaus had no representation in the Regions, and they should be
represented, it shouldn't be just the operating organization. And so they opened a small Disability Regional Office.
One opened in
Chicago
,
were I had been working before I transferred to
Baltimore
, and I went out as a Staff
Assistant.
Interviewer: In the Regional Office, as a
function in the Regional Office?
Lieberman: As a function in the Regional Office. And this was the beginning of
my, really I guess continuing, role for the rest of my career and relations.
Interviewer: Lets just recap the time frames here. You started as a
claims rep around 1959, and were a
claims rep for approximately how long?
Lieberman: Two years.
Interviewer:
And then you were a recon examiner in
Baltimore
for about a year?
Lieberman: A year.
Interviewer:
And then how long were you in Policy?
Lieberman: Well, I was most probably in Policy--I was there until '66--so I most
probably was there about two-and-a-half years.
Interviewer: In '66 is when you
went to the Regional Office?
Lieberman: Right. I went to the Chicago Regional Office and
there I worked in operating concerns and the
disability program, primarily with the State Agencies that adjudicated cases
for us, and to some extent with the District Offices. At that time the folks who ran the District Offices
didn't let anybody in. You really had
to work hard to be accepted and get into the office, much less do a review of your program in that office. And so it was an
interesting time. We were not an Agency that worked well together. There were a lot of little political infighting in the
management ranks.
And nobody liked the
disability program, nobody. Mainly because traditional SSAer's couldn't understand it. It was different from everything else they did. The
retirement and survivors benefit program was the prime program. It was a very
positive program and very straightforward. You came in at a certain
time, and we wanted to
give you benefits. We did everything we could to give you benefits. It
was very much a part of people's lives, they had a social security card, the
applications asked things like "what is your age?: "are you married?:
and very much things people could answer right off the bat.
And here
came the disability program. First of all, it was a program out of the control
of the traditional SSA hierarchy, the States had a big role and yet we didn't
have any control over the States. You have all this medical evidence that was
interpreted and misinterpreted, over-interpreted or not interpreted. Nobody agreed on how it was interpreted, I guess
is the best way to put it. And there was a very, very high denial rate.
There was this tremendous tension with the disability program. And the
management on the District Office side
didn't want to futz with this long hour-and-a-half interview. That was crazy.
You didn't have to do that with any other program. They didn't want to
have to get all this medical evidence. They just weren't going to take their time to do it. And then when people came
in, they weren't going to tell them they were going to be denied. They were
going to tell me that somebody else made this decision.
So
it was a real tension-filled time. And everybody was looking for some way to try to overcome some of the problems. And so,
again, the issue was, well maybe we
can overcome some of the problems if we moved around where we did things. And so they came up with this idea of
doing some activities, I guess some
prototypes, called side-by-side and simultaneous development. And this is the same thing we're doing today. In
side-by-side we would test two experiments.
One would be State Agency people would sit in the District Office, and in the other District Office people
would sit in the State Agency, and they both worked their part of the
claim side-by-side. In simultaneous development
what would happen would be that you would start the case in the District
Office and split it right away, and send the medical portion to the State so they could start working on it while the
DO continued to hold the non-medical. And then after the state did its medical
part you hooked the two back up, and so the two sides would be developed
simultaneously.
And so they asked the
Chicago Region to have the lead in some of these experiments. The New York Region had the lead in other
experiments--that's where I first met Janice Warden. And we started; and
side-by-side was a catastrophe par excellence. You couldn't take State people
and put them in a District Office. They
have different rules, different work times, different personnel rules,
different management approaches, and there was just tension and battles. And to
put the District Office in the State was just the same problems, but carried
out in the State environment. And so we struggled through that and of course simultaneous development had a chance of
working and slowly but surely was accepted to expand.
And I had been working very closely with that, and Paul Webb, by that
time, had gone into central office to head
up the field portion of the Bureau of Disability Insurance.
Interviewer: May I ask, the
simultaneous development, how did that differ from what we were doing before these two experiments?
Lieberman: What happened was,
the individual would come into the District Office, file a case, and the
District Office would start developing the medical evidence. They would
hold the entire file until they at least got some medical evidence from the
client, regardless of what it was. And their development was very routine, I mean it was just a form that was sent out with
some general questions. Another part of the
theory of simultaneous development was that the State Agency folks, with
their medical training, which the District Office people didn't have, could
tailor the medical evidence request. So that if someone came in with a back problem, the District Office, when they were doing the development, would just
send out a general form and say "please give us all your
information." Whereas the State could go to a specific doctor and
say "please give us his x-rays, give us his range of motion studies,"
things like that.
So very much, again, these models that we
started doing--it's again trying to futz with the same thing, what do you do
with it? But Paul Webb asked me to come in
and try to work with the Bureau of Disability Insurance to expand simultaneous development. And SSA being SSA,
nobody wanted to expand simultaneous development across the board, but
little by little over a period of a couple
of years. I think it took about--I went in, in '69 and I left the end of '72--in
two and a half years we did finally go nation-wide.
Interviewer: So you were back in
Baltimore
at this point?
Lieberman: Right. I went back to
Baltimore
in '69, and I stayed in
Baltimore
and I worked in the field operations organization of disability. Which worked primarily with the District Offices and the States
Agencies, implementing simultaneous development, doing budget work and things
like that.
In December of '72 I went to the Boston Regional
Office, and worked in the disability section there. Primarily on the
operations side, working with the State
Agencies, advising them on SSA procedures and working with them on budget
issues too. It was very much the same as Regional Offices do today. In '75 I
went back to
Chicago
,
in the Regional Office there, to head the Disability Regional Office.
I found
Chicago
to be one of the most exciting,
challenging regions I think we have. The State
Agencies are all, for the most part, very large. The problems, the issues they
deal with are very diverse, such a variety. The State governments are very
strong, very difficult entities to deal with. For the most part, very
conservative, extremely conservative.
It was a time of great challenge. I mean we had
very high workloads, extremely high workloads right after the SSI program was
passed. The State Agencies had more than doubled in size, they were huge.
Little agencies became huge agencies, three and four hundred examiners. And the
States had a hard time coping with that, because the States were very
conservative and they didn't believe in
hiring a lot of people, and didn't believe in working overtime. Their
other agencies that didn't have federal funds couldn't have the same equipment we gave the State Agencies.
There was a lot of contention.
Interviewer: This expansion happened because of SSI,
or the gradual growth of the program?
Lieberman: It was primarily SSI.
There was another interesting feature that
happened right around the mid '70s
that was very important to the disability program. GAO had done one of their famous studies in the mid '70s and came up with the idea that
the program was allowing too many people. And that really started with SSI,
really it's all involved with SSI, because in SSI there are so many concurrent
cases, and so we began to get many, many more cases, many more allowances.
There was a push to move cases. There still is this issue, when you press your
people to move disability cases fast, there is a tendency, there has always been this historical trend, of
allowances increasing. And that review by GAO had been a very, very
tough review and had generated a great deal of argument and animosity within
the Agency. The result of that review really came with the 1980 Amendments. The
big issue that was debated for several years was what to do with the States. It
was the States that were the ones that were at fault in all this.
Interviewer: According to SSA or
according to GAO?
Lieberman: That wasn't the only one. And the bottom line was
that the DDS Administrator, the State Agency
Administrator, reported up through the welfare chain, and if the welfare chain
said "we want more welfare people allowed" there was a tendency for
that to happen.
The end result was that the
Agency--HHS, Health and Human Services, and the
Agency--began to look for legislative ways to deal with some of the problems.
Also they had to deal with the quality assurance aspect. It had already become too cumbersome several years before
to do a hundred percent review of all the State Agency decisions, and
they had gone to sample reviews. And there was a feeling on the part of GAO
that that was unsatisfactory. That when there was a hundred percent review,
things had been much better.
So they began to talk about
legislation, and the result was the '80 Amendments.
And the '80 Amendments, of course made some changes to the way we
related to the States, there were significant changes. Before the '80
Amendments we had a contract with the States. After the '80 Amendments we had
regulations with standards for quality in processing, which was a way supposedly to control the situation. We also had
a pre-effectuation review, which was a mandated percentage review of
allowances. And whether that's good or bad, will always be debated.
That was going on during the period that I was in
the Chicago Regional office, from '75 to about '79. It was a very
exciting time, a very challenging time. I think it was during that period, that was a real big watershed in the disability
program. It was during that time the Regional Commissioners were given more
authority to work with the disability program. As I had mentioned earlier, when
they first opened the disability office in the region they were little separate
entities, the disability office reported back to
Baltimore
And there
was all this friction between the service organization and the program bureaus.
As I said, they wouldn't even let the Program Bureaus in the District Office. So in the late '70s the Regional
Commissioners took over the program bureaus in the regional office. They
all came under their head, and that forced the
Regional Commissioner to begin to bring together the various components. That
was the beginning of the time which you had more of a unified position in the
District Office and a message to the service organization about their
responsibility for the various cases. Because up until that time the District Office would say, "look,
we don't want any part of the disability side", pretty much they did what
they wanted to do, it was you had to convince them. So it was a good
management change at that time.
And then,
as far as my career was concerned, in '79 the biggest thing that ever happened to me, I guess, happened, and that is
someone asked me, while I was in
Chicago
, if I would become a Director of a
Program
Service
Center
.
And I would say, I thought they were crazy. First of all I couldn't
imagine personally managing someplace with three thousand people. I had no knowledge of Unions, I mean. And this had been a
Program
Service
Center
that had been through a very hard period. It had huge workloads, huge
numbers of
problems. Julius Berman had been the manger there, and he retired after
bringing it through it difficult period. And Jane Presley had been there for
just a few months, and then had gone to
Baltimore
.
I was
never so scared in my entire days, but it was such a wonderful opportunity nobody could ever turn down. It was so
different from anything I had ever
done. And of course I just absolutely loved it. I really loved the mechanics of
working with a large operation. It is so different then doing something
rather small. I was impressed with the people. Up until this time I had always
worked with a staff of SSA folks, but they were analysts and they were known
for their knowledge of a particular analytical feature that they worked with. I worked with the States, who did
some operating things. And I never
worked with people who had responsibility for bringing together all these
folks and making them understand all these small parts of an organization put
together. It was very clear as the Director, sitting up on the top floor in one corner of an office with three
thousand people, and literally hundreds of thousands of cases a week coming
through, that you didn't do the work. I mean, somebody else did the work and
you have to find out how those people
did it and what made them run, and how you could bring them together as a team, so that they all did their particular
responsibility and it all came out
right at the very end. And they of course expected you to be consistent, clear
and fair And to do the things that were necessary, to
make sure you did the things that were necessary so they could get their job
done.
I came to have such great respect for the people
in SSA, beginning right then, because
they did do such a wonderful job. They understood the work they had to do. They
brought to it a personal commitment. They brought to it originality and
ingenuity and just such respect and such a willingness to give to the people
they served.
Unfortunately,
I was only in the PSC for about a year, a little over a year. And then they
asked me to come into
Baltimore
to head a special task force that would
implement the 1980 Disability Amendments, and work in the Commissioner's
office, and I did do that.
A number of things happened. We set up the quality
assurance program as we know it today. They did put its standards into the regs. I think the same standards we put in, in 1981, are
still there today, they never had the leadership ability to change them. And
while I was working on that, the leadership in SSA went through a dramatic
change, because there was a change in the
Washington
scene, from a
Democrat to a Republican, after a large number of years. And there was great
confusion, and I sort of ambled around after that with not very much to do,
which is very symptomatic of being on the ninth floor.
And then Nelson Sabitini came in and said "I want you to go to the Office of Disability Operations." And I thought, oh my
God, he wants to fire me, because
ODO had the reputation, for ten years, of being the worst thing in the world
they had. They had task force after task force after task force trying to get the workload under control and trying to get
the people satisfied, to be happy. And every task force had failed. He said
"no, you know you have a disability background, you understand
disability, where as a lot of people don't." And Nelson did understand disability,
he was a product of disability too.
And he said "and you've been in a PSC, and ODO is just a big PSC, it's just
bigger." It had like about seven thousand people in it at that time. And
they didn't even have a place to put them and they were trying to break it up,
and that was another thing, they were trying to physically break it up within
the city of
Baltimore
.
So, I didn't have any choice, I needed a job.
And I
went there, and I would tell you that it was the most rewarding job I had ever
had in my entire career. It was an operation where the people were so tired of being called dumb and inefficient and
ineffectual. They would have done anything to get themselves
straightened out. And they did. We worked overtime four hours a night and eight
hours on Saturday, and sometimes on Sunday, when the pending was frequently up.
And in those days five and six hundred
thousand cases down to like a hundred and twenty-five thousand cases. And they
cut out overtime completely, reduced the pending and became an
organization that really had a lot of confidence in itself, and a lot of
respect for itself and provided a very high level of service.
And
again, it really had to do with all the things I saw in
Great
Lakes
, a staff that understood
their job, were committed to make changes, willing to do the things necessary
to get the job done. And what they expected of me was to provide them
with the wherewithal and the support. And the leadership in those kinds of
areas where they needed tools, regardless of what kind tools that may be. I really felt so proud of that
organization. It provides such a good service
to the American people. And no matter what has happened to disability it
has always been there to do what it needs to do. And I think it also provided a wonderful, wonderful place for
people to start their career in SSA, in central office. Its provided a large number of analysts and mangers, who have gone up the ranks, on the so-called
"other side of the street," the
Altmeyer
Building
and
Operations
Building
,
West High Rise, and I think it has been just a wonderful, wonderful place.
I don't think anyone has really understood the
kinds of problems they have. The complexities of the work that they have
to do, and the pressures many times under
which they do it. Nor has anyone ever understood how, regardless of what
is thrown at them, they can find a way to get it done. They don't just sit
there by rote over and over again. They really make changes. And I don't think
anyone in SSA really realizes what a horribly, nasty thing it is to be in an operating component, right next door to a major
staff component, and the hell you
take, and the sort of looking down your nose thing, and the pressure you get. I
mean people out in the regions, in
San Francisco
,
or in
Chicago
,
or in
Kansas City
are not under the scrutiny the Office of Disability Operations is under for
everything they do. And they don't have staff that run to Barbara Mikulski and
Senator Sarbanes, and then Senator Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski call the
Commissioner and then it all reverberates back down. Or Kweisi Mfume (former
Congressman, D-MD). So it really is the managers over there just
have a huge amount of responsibility and they handle it with great skill and
purpose. I think they are just
wonderful, wonderful people and they do a good job.
Interviewer: Another thing that
happened around this same time, as a result of the 1980 Amendments, was the
Continuing Disability Reviews that were accelerated and became a big issue and a big public policy issue. Did you have any
involvement in that or any observations about that part of the 1980
Amendments and what happened around that?
Lieberman: You see, that was a distinct part of the GAO
findings. It was that we had put many people on the rolls that should not be
there. And that there were rules that had
not been followed correctly. And it was costing the Trust Fund huge amounts of
money. It was draining the Trust Fund, because once a person got on the
disability rolls they stayed on, and for the most part had a family, and so they had very high benefits paid out for a long
period of time. During the late '70s we put on a lot of people on the rolls who
did not have severe impairments that were supposed to be permanent.
So I think there was a
feeling within the new administration that this was part of the thing that had to be corrected. And
when you started correcting it, then the politicians didn't like it. And
the issue was to change the law, because under the law that existed when we
started doing the Continuing Disability Reviews,
if you took up a case for review and the individual was not impaired when
we reviewed the case, that was a bases for ceasing.
And so we started to do just exactly what we were
supposed to do, and what the powers that be really looked like they
wanted. What really happened is that it didn't take the States long to figure
out, particularly the DDS' that were part of welfare, that the welfare rolls in
the State were going to explode, because
all these people coming off the disability rolls would go on State welfare
And it became a State issue of pressure on the federal government. What it
looked like though was that the bureaucrats were doing something wrong, and
they were not. What had to be changed was the law to put in a provision that said, when you pick up a case to
do a Continuing Disability Review don't deny them
unless there's medical improvement. And so they finally did pass that
law.
Now, by the way, the ironic
thing is that, that had been in the law back in the '50s,
that you couldn't deny unless there was improvement. That had been the
rule, and there had been a Supreme Court case or some court case that had
reached a decision and had
said, "no, you don't need medical improvement to cease." And so the
Agency had not been using medical improvement for a number of years. Maybe for about ten or fifteen
years, I forget the exact number of years, and so when this period came along
it became more apparent because we had so many more cases. We had not been
using medical improvement as a standard, but we did have that many cases
we were reviewing and so it looked like the bureaucrats were doing something. I
think the more complicated assessment would be that the States themselves saw
what was happening, they pulled the "states rights" thing, refusing
to process cases. And we never stepped in,
we as an agency didn't show any kind of balls, any kind of strength or backbone to go in and say to the States,
"you wanted to process the
cases, now either you follow our rules or you get out of the program." You
know they weren't going to get out of the program, they never have. But
we didn't have the kind of leadership that wanted to do that, and so the
bureaucrats took a fall and they finally changed the law.
A lot of other things happened during that period
that I think have been bad for the disability program and we're paying
for it now, again. One was that the States started closing down the mental
institutions and having people live outside of the
mental institutions, even though they still had problems. When people came out
of the mental institutions, our criteria--not the medical improvement, but just
the criteria we used to evaluate mental impairments-- indicated that these people were not disabled. They could function to
some extent and we would deny them. So they changed the standards for
evaluating mental impairments. And the standards that, you know, anybody can
qualify for disability with a minimal impairment.
And
if you pursue a case, with the criteria we have and with the developmental
things we have, it's very hard to deny a case. I think the issue here is that
now they're looking at criteria. The States have used the disability benefit to support people's lives outside the
institution. They don't have to provide any kind of support and so it's a very
tough political issue of, "how are you going to bring this cost back under
control?" And it's very much the issue that's involved with so many
AU J (Administrative Law Judge) reversals,
it's very much involved in that. If someone appears at a hearing they can sound
like they're disabled from some medical impairment, mental impairment, in
particular. It's very hard to deny them.
And of course the issue of how we wrote those
regulations for evaluating mental
impairments was what I consider the very best example of confusion in leadership, that has really hampered the disability program
over a number of years. I mean, every time a
problem comes up from some advocacy group or some political group we try
to find a way to placate them, regardless. And we are very short-sighted and we just look at the very tip of our nose and
if we can get them off our back
tomorrow we don't try to see what's happening to the program down the
pike. That has been very apparent with SSI children. We were very willing to do just about everything we could to get them
off our backs, to allow as many kids as possible. To write criteria, to
write
development sheets, to do
development in such a way that we could find ways to get our critics off our back and let the
other problems be settled five, ten and fifteen years down the road. It's been very chaotic for the people
who run the program, very chaotic and it makes it look
like it's their fault and it really isn't. I think it has been a huge number of
very conflicting type signals that are
given. You continue to have a program of great severity and you have administrators
or leadership that's coming under that program, trying to find little ways to
placate the various groups.
Anyway, I went from the
Office of Disability Operations in '86 to the Office of Disability. Dorcas Hardy had come in as
Commissioner, and for the very first time we had a political appointee as the Associate Commissioner for Disability.
Interviewer: So you were back in
Policy again?
Lieberman: So now I'm back in
Policy. And so that Policy person was looking for somebody with great
strength in the program to help them out while they took care of the political
side of the thing. This is the first time there had been a political Associate Commissioner and so I became the Deputy
Associate Commissioner for Disability.
I would say the interesting thing about that, was that we came in and
Dorcas Hardy's main emphasis was to improve
management of the program. This was in '86. In the early and mid '80s we
had gone through the devastating Continuing
Disability Review crisis. The States had pulled out of the program and wouldn't do cases. And to get them back in,
they had pumped money into the States like crazy. And there was all this
money out there and all this staff, and no work to do because we were not going to do
the Continuing Disability Reviews. So the question was, how do you bring
that under control?
\
Interviewer: At this point, we were not doing the
disability reviews because there was a moratorium
placed on them at one point prior to the '84 Amendments, and we, for
whatever reasons, didn't get back in the business. Is that right?
Lieberman: Well we got back into
the business, but because of the change in the medical improvement standard we were going to do many
fewer cases. And we were going to pull up cases by some sort of profile when we
thought there was going to be a
greater chance of medical improvement. So there was going to be many fewer
cases.
Anyhow, we were not having any great growth of work in
the initial disability claims. And I think the major thrust, for the
year-and-a-half or so I was in Disability, was, again, from an operating
standpoint, trying to get the States to begin to economize and to take out some of the
money, the budgets had grown extremely large, and
to institute some efficiencies. And so there were rowdy times.
I
appreciated working for Dorcas and David Rust. They were not afraid of the States.
Their aim was, if we have something we need to do in Social Security, we should find a way to do it and convince the
State to come along with us. When the States scream, find a way to work
with them so that they adjust and they accept, because the States will scream a
lot and say they're going to pull out. And they never did, but just in case she
said, if anyone ever gets the idea that they might want to pull out, we really
need a federal presence to adjudicate cases in case the States won't do it, or
in case the States had such a big workload
they can't do it. And so, Dorcas had the idea of setting up something called
the "Federal DDS, in
Baltimore
.
And it became my job to develop that from scratch and to put it into
place.
Now, the
States didn't have a problem with that, but there was an awful lot of internal SSA people who had a problem with it. And that was a
year-and-ahalf of battling and scrounging and carrying on, but
finally it came to be, and it operates. It was not only a DDS to
adjudicate cases in case a State pulled out,
or to help with big workloads, which it does, but it was also to be a test bed
where they would test procedures, or equipment, or what have you, before it
went out to the States. And I understand that's what it is now, a test bed to test some of the Modernized Disability System. So
I consider that an achievement in my career and a contribution to SSA. The big
argument in SSA was where it was going to be placed, and should it continue to
be part of the Office of Disability.
And of course everybody wanted it. I don't think anybody knew why they
wanted it. And of course its remained where it is, and
it has functioned well.
Interviewer:
So that was the resistance that you referred to earlier within SSA, was the
issue of who was going to own
it organizationally?
Lieberman: That's right, who was going to own it.
And it was nasty. I mean there were times
when components that really needed to work with us refused to do so-- just
like when the States wanted to pull out of the continuing disability program--SSA components. You know that's part of
life and it's what makes life interesting in a bureaucracy.
So I consider that was
another milestone in the disability program that I had been part of, like simultaneous development. Bringing ODO into some sort
of control.
And then I got into another significant change in my career.
Someone said to me, we're going to have another
reorganization and the Deputy Commissioner for Operations is going to have three components under him.
One is going to be the field component, the
other component is going to be systems,
and the third component is going to be those operating components
that are just pure operating components and don't belong to staff. That's like the Office of Disability Operations,
the Office of Central Records Operations
and the Office of Systems Operation, and would you come handle that component that has those three entities in
it? Well I certainly knew ODO,
and I knew a little bit about the Office of Central Records Operation, and of course it's a big processing center so
while it's not exactly like an RSI Processing
Center or Disability Processing Center it was easy to go into that, but I knew nothing about Systems and I knew
nothing about mainframe systems of the Office of Systems Operations.
Interviewer: This was for Herb
Doggette?
Lieberman: That was for Herb Doggette. And that was a very exciting
time and one where I really learned a lot.
And
the Office of Systems Operations went from a computing center that had something like two or three small processors in
it to one of the largest operating
centers in the world. That was not without a great deal of contention, because GAO didn't want us to buy any
of the equipment and Herb Doggette
was busy trying to get them to stop blocking us within Congress to get the money to buy some of the very big processors
we needed--the state-of- the-art. We operated with whatever we had, I
mean it was really held together with rubber bands and chewing gum--cast-off
equipment.
So it's very interesting, he was very successful
in getting GAO to back off. We got
the fiscal support we needed from Congress and worked through the internal
problems and began to buy the state-of-the-art equipment that allowed that center to support the District
Offices and the
Processing
Centers
as they
expanded into a greater automated environment.
Interviewer: There are two questions I want to
ask you about this period, and they have to do with your relationship first, with the people in
the Office of Systems Operations who were, in some sense, different type of
personnel, technicians of a different type then you had ever worked with
before. In fact, I remember you calling them
"technology Cowboys" in those days. So I want you to tell me a little
bit about how your relationship as a manger was with that organization. And the
second question is, can you tell us about the relation of your organization to
the rest of Systems, because now you have taken one piece of Systems and
separated it out, but clearly connected in some way to the rest of Systems. So
could you talk about those two issues?
Lieberman: Well, I think I would have to come back to a point I made when I said
I went to the
Chicago
Program
Service
Center
and was impressed
with the people and their knowledge of their jobs and their commitment to their
jobs. And
their commitment to
serving the American people, and doing what was needed to make Social
Security run. That was very much the cornerstone and the heart of what I found
in Systems.
What I found in the
Office of Systems Operation was a component that had been sort of isolated out from the mainstream of
management and personnel policies and operations. It just sort of did
its thing, and was very inbred and very much looked at just technology, the day-to
day-technology. It didn't look at the bigger picture, it didn't really
try to get itself involved in the bigger picture,
even in some of the machinations that were going on within SSA as to the
future of Systems. It was just sort of isolated And I
think, if anything, that's what I did to bring it out, and that is why I called
them "technology Cowboys." I mean,
if they had a problem it was the technological solution, and that was
all that mattered to them. Never did they really look at anything else.
For instance, let's say
that they had something new, that they were going to get a new product that
they were going to install over a weekend. They were so excited about this new product and the effect it would have on the
service they could eventually provide, faster service, larger capacity,
could handle
more programs.
Well, it was immaterial to them that they hadn't tested it, and that maybe that
would bring the system down a whole week and the District Offices wouldn't be able to use their terminals. That never
dawned on them, you know. It was just that they were in a hurry to get
in this new thing and it was going to be better in the long run. So if
anything else, we got a risk assessment.
And that was the "technology cowboy." I still have them come up to
me and say, they still remember that. And they got a big joke out of it, and
they took it well, you know.
There was a lot of inbreeding in promotions and
selections of people, and things
like that. And not a lot of, you know, trying to reach out and to be balanced
in what they did. And I think I worked with them, but they were really very
receptive people, and very dedicated, very willing to try to learn, to do what you wanted them to do. And they wanted it
to be right, no matter what. If you
could point out to them, look if you did it another way, if you tried some
other things, they were more than willing to listen And they were very, very
understanding of the District Offices and the Processing Centers and that the people out there depended on them. They just
had to view that in a slightly different light.
And there were a lot
of very interesting things going on when I came. They were in the
process of installing the last of the TAP (Terminal Acquisition Project) terminals,
the very first effort to get terminals into the District Offices, and that was
very disruptive and we were expanding the very first applications of claims
taking, the famous Modernized Claims System 2.5. I'm almost forgetting those
acronyms, Larry, after three months and they're all gone. There were things that just didn't work, you know. And when they
didn't work it was very disruptive to services in the District Offices.
And so there
a lot of coordination
needed, a lot of making them pull back.
This was
not just in OSO, but primarily in the other part of Systems. I think that's
where the issue comes in, in the relationship. It was a tough relationship because I think that the folks in
the Office of Systems Operations were so desirous of doing anything you
asked them, that it was hard for them to refuse the another parts of Systems
when they came to them and asked them to do
something. And yet, you have to sort of make both sides see that there
was this need, from a service perspective, out in the field, to either not do
something at a certain time, or do it a little differently, do it slower, or
something like that. So there was that kind of contention, but I think, just as
always, we all finally came together to work.
There
was always good communications. It was just that we all had our own view of
things that we sort of had to coordinate I like to believe that OSO came out as
a much stronger organization because of this period where they were off
separate from the rest of Systems. They had always been thought of like
the stepchild in the Systems organization, because they weren't as glamorous as software development. They didn't
give the field office a new version
of the Modernized Claims System or something like that. They were much more
transparent to the field, except on those days when the system came down. The operating components saw them as,
those people over there that caused
us hell for one, two, three, four, five days and we couldn't do our work. So the one thing that I did was say we have
to stand on our own two feet, and I
think they became more and more able to put forth their own message and
stand own their feet, and refuse to do things just because the software people wanted them to do it. Like for
instance, put up something that was not fully tested.
There was the famous situation in which the head
of the software component, who then
became the Deputy Commissioner for Systems, had a very important piece
of software that had to be out at a certain time, and he wanted it up, and I
refused, because we just weren't ready. We didn't have the capacity, and to put
it up without the capacity meant that he would make his deadline, but we would be not providing good service. I think
that's always been a joke and a laugh about some of the problems that went on
with that kind of thing. After OSO
won that battle, and it was very important that they could see that things
could be adjusted, I think that their relationship became much better, I
mean a much more even one-on-one type
situation.
Interviewer:
What's your assessment of that organizational structure as a way to deal with those workloads, because we changed that
organizational structure shortly after this
and went back to the old structure where Systems had all the components in
one organization?
Lieberman: I think it
should be in one organization. I think it could work the way it was, I mean we
could make it work, but I just think it's better to be in one organization. I
think that for the time period that it was out, and what I accomplished, it was fine. I think I accomplished
everything that needed to be accomplished to make it a stronger, viable
place within the Systems organization. You
know someone could argue that it didn't have to be taken out to achieve
those things, and that's true, I would agree to that, but in the meantime it
was taken out and it did achieve and it did make it a stronger organization. I
think it went faster, because it was out. I have no way of proving that, but it
was a very interesting time for me and a very exciting time. I learned a lot
about what SSA needed and what was needed for the future of SSA. And I think that when I went to my next job, which was
the Deputy to the Deputy
Commissioner for Operations, I understood more about what went on in
Systems and could bring that to bear on working with the field.
Interviewer: Let
me just get the time frame down. You went into the job in 1988, this job where you were talking about when you had the Systems
organization?
Lieberman: '88, right. Then in '90, I think it was like in the summer of '90, back in
July of '90, then for the next almost five years, four-and-half years I worked
with the field organization. And that would be all the Processing Centers, the Teleservice Centers, District Offices, and primarily
through the Regional Offices.
That job is mainly providing
service, and I think under Janice Warden's leadership
we were able to do a lot of good things. One of the things that I'm proudest
of is that many of the divisions that existed between the various components, within Operations, were broken down.
One of things I've talked about through my career was that there was
always this sort of infighting within SSA. And the biggest infighter of all was
the field organization, I mean they are the prime organization, they always
have been. They have never wanted to acknowledge anybody else to get near them,
and they have always been very critical of
other components. Sometimes rightfully so, but many times not, not
justifiably so. And I think more then anything else Janice made it clear and
did the kinds of things that stopped all of that.
For
instance, at one time there was great infighting between the District Offices against the Teleservice Centers. I mean the District Office mangers and the field organization did
nothing but complain about the
Teleservice
Centers
,
day in and day out. There was nothing they could do right. Well, now you
know they work together. And the same is true with the
Processing
Centers
and the District Offices. And with ODO and the
District Offices. And she made sure that that began to stop and that
people worked as a team, and there was more
cooperation within workloads, moving workloads around. No one component
owns a workload, it's all something to serve the individual.
And I also
think budget-wise we did a lot to make sure resources are shared. And I think a
lot stems from that, I mean if you can share resources and work together on that, a lot flows from that. A lot of
training, a lot of moving of people,
promotions between components opened up. And just much more of one
organization dedicated to service And to use all the
resources you have, wherever they may be. I mean even in the field it used to
be that one District Office would never give
up its workload to let another District Office help. That stopped. Workload
moved into the PSCs and out of the PSCs. The same is true in the Teleservice Centers, and of course that's even designed to stand even more as more and more of the phone calls are picked up in other
places. And there is more of a hand-off of telephone calls.
Operations definitely started in
the last few years to provide a variety of service any way people wanted it.
They make sure people are serviced the way they wanted it, however they wanted
it, and that whatever resources we had, we
would find a way to devote to that. We just wouldn't say to people, you have
to take service this way, this is the way we're doing it, because the American
people change and they demand how they want to be served.
Certainly, the effort to
improve the metropolitan office was outstanding. That's our biggest service
component, size-wise, complexity-wise, it's very diverse.
If there is ever one
issue I feel is tough there--and I don't know what the answer is--is
that policy-wise we continue to run a program that's based on Anglo-Saxon
traditions and characteristics. And that's just not the public we're serving.
We write our development procedures that way, we write our adjudication procedures that way. People who come
into the office don't understand what we're asking, and we don't have a
way of explaining it. It's just that our manual says we need xyz piece of
evidence, and most probably that piece of
evidence doesn't exist. We just have not made an effort to write our
policy in such a way that's responsive to the diverse population--with serving our metropolitan offices. There have been
some efforts to try to expose the
policy people to those kinds of issues and to bring to their attention the
kinds of concerns we have about it. I don't know where that is, we were just starting
that.
But in the
metropolitan offices other things have been done--we have improved the facilities, making both the staff
and the public more comfortable so that they have the same high level
service that someone gets in any office, regardless.
Interviewer: Let me just make sure I
understand the point you were making about the change in the policy. Is part of
that about service to the non-English speaking or are you talking about
something different? Are you talking about adjudicative policy, as such, in
terms of proofs that we us and the procedures we go through? I'm not sure I
entirely grasp what your point is.
Lieberman: Well, it's
everything. I don't think it's just the non-english speaking that's an issue for us, but that's a big part of it. And I think it's
hard to separate that from the proofs and
adjudicative issues, because we continue to ask for certain things that
just don't exist, or people just don't understand. The public being what they are, they'll do a lot a
things to satisfy you, and then we find out later on that that's
not the right kind of thing, that we shouldn't have gotten what we did. It's a
fraud case, or it wasn't done right. It's a very confusing area, we have not
adapted what we are doing to the changing population.
Interviewer: Let me
ask you a couple other general questions for your overall assessment. You talked a lot about the disability program, and the
difficulties and the tensions and the
problems that are present there. I would like your assessment of how
much of that is inherent in the nature of the disability benefit and the nature
of the evaluation that has to be done, or how much of that is failed
management, or opportunities for better management, or better policy, or better ways to deal with it, even given its
complexities. How do you assess that? Where do you see that? So people
say, for example, that the problems in disability are insoluble because they're inherent in the nature of the work. Is that
your view, or do you think there are dramatic or noticeable improvements we
could make if we managed it better?
Lieberman: Some of the problems are inherent in the disability program. And I
mentioned earlier that we have had a lack of leadership in the area of
willingness to go forth and ask for legislative changes. Or if not legislative
changes, regulatory changes. There is no
doubt about it. And I put a lot of that down to leadership. Unwillingness
on the part of leadership to do what is necessary to try to get this program
straightened out. Through the years they have gerrymandered the standards of
adjudication so that they are no longer responsive to the definition of
disability that we have. The definition of disability that we have determines how much money we have in the Trust
Fund, and how many allowances we show. And someone on the leadership side has
to take care of that tension. They either have to go to Congress and say,
you're going to have to change the definition of disability, okay. And if
Congress says no--which is clear they most probably will and the
leadership might be getting vibes to that underneath--then the leadership has
to do something to change the standards, which
is what "disability reengineering" was about. But, leadership is obviously
vacant here. They're not doing anything.
Interviewer: You
mentioned the "disability reengineering", what is your assessment of
that and its prospects for
addressing some of these issues?
Lieberman: I thought it had some hope. I guess, as I left SSA, I saw that hope
dim.
By the way, I didn't fully answer
the first part of the question. I think that there are some things inherent in
the disability program that we need leadership to work them out. I also think
that there are some management possibilities. I definitely think there are some management
possibilities, only we don't have anybody with guts that will deal with them. I
mean, as far as I could see the States are
doing a bang-up job. You couldn't ask more of your own federal employees, in terms of
responsiveness. But I do believe, that the situation with appeals is terrible. Now, whether it has gone on so long,
that it's too late to do anything about it, from a management perspective, that might
be so. But there were certainly some management possibilities, it takes a
great deal of guts to do that. The last time they had somebody with guts who tried to deal with it, Bob Trachtenberg, he got
thrown out. He went on to have a great career in other places, but
nobody in the leadership wanted to stand by him.
And so that's a real on-going problem, but it might be too late to do anything
about it. But, that would take a political solution, and the leadership would
have to get in there and do the kind of political work underneath that's
necessary to pave the way to deal with the sensitive situation that it is. So I
think it's a combined thing. I think we have a tremendous absence of leadership
in the disability program. I think when push comes to shove, the leadership becomes more concerned about their own
political position, then they do about the
program.
Interviewer:
Now the disability redesign that you touched on, you said you had hope in the beginning and you
have less hope now. Is it because of the passage of time or do you have any
unhappiness with the basic design or the basic approach that was planned
originally?
Lieberman: Well,
I believe that the basic plan that was put out had a lot of good things in it that could be of value to the program. I don't
know that I endorse everything, but I think it's good for the most part.
I think that this idea of taking five years is ludicrous, and once they started
that it was dead in the water, because it showed they didn't have the political
desire to stand up, as everyone said in reengineering, you got to make that
first cut. Make it hard and then stand by it.
So the good things that are in it, and there are a number of good
things, are going to fall by the wayside.
You see,
again, what they are trying to do, and when I left--and I have to say I don't know what happened since I left four months
ago--but when I left they were still doing what everybody had done since
the beginning of time and that is to try to
resolve the problems in disability by moving the work around. I described what
we went through in the '70s with simultaneous development. And they are going back to some of the those same old things from twenty-five years ago.
So it just seems to me that they haven't gone to those things in disability
reengineering, which are the change in the standards, which have
the meat in them. Because it's a given, and I don't know why
I have to even say this, I mean it's the
most fundamental thing that all the policy, procedures, operating
techniques we have come from the standards. I mean if you have a certain rule
that you have to implement that's where everything comes from. So if you find that you are really at the end of your road,
and you can't find other ways to implement it you got to change that
standard. And again, its been gerrymandered so that it
doesn't have any meaning. It's been so convoluted. What started out as a pure
standard, as a way to evaluate disability, has become completely incompetent.
So I have
very little hope for it, because the good things that were in it, I just didn't
see them doing anything with it. And again, the powers that be wanted so hard
to resolve the pending horror in appeals, that's what they are focusing on. I think you have to get those workloads down,
but you just see them saying, "if I get the
workloads down, my ass is out of the crack, and I don't have to do
anything else." I mean its just like I can see
them saying it right now.
Interviewer: Let me
turn you to a different subject. The roll of the Program Service Centers. You were a Director of two of the large Processing
Centers and you've seen how the role of those Processing Centers has changed
over the years. I wonder how you see the role of the Processing Centers in the
future and do you see it changing significantly?
Lieberman: I have to disagree with you, I don't think the role of Processing
Centers has changed over the years. I think it has primarily the same role with
an added responsibility of answering the
phone more then it used to. The issue with the Processing Centers is
that its workloads have significantly decreased, and they will decrease more,
hopefully. And that was a given, because the Processing
Centers were set up for one thing and one thing only, and that was as a back door office to do the fallout that the
computer could not do. And as we get
more and more computerized, as we have more and more software that can
handle our workload, that's less and less work for the Processing Centers. Now, will we reach the point when the computer
takes over the entire workload of the
Processing
Center
?
And I guess my feeling is no. There will always be some fallout. There
will always be a need for centralized location, that for economy of size, can do the workload better. I mean, you have a few cases with esoteric rules. You can't
farm those out to 1,300 District Offices, people just can't do them, and
they can't keep up with the rules sufficiently do to them correctly. So I think there will
always be room for the Processing Centers, to
do this kind of work they have always done.
Is there other kind of work we
can put in the Processing Centers? Well, maybe.
I don't know. There might be some that lends itself to economy and size.
What I honestly think is you will always need Processing Centers. Now will you need as many as we have now? I think you
would have to answer no.
We already saw that when Western (PSC) got the
"legionnaires" scare. That workload was done every place else. Again,
helped in large extent by the automation
that we have. The workload can be moved any place you want it. And more and more, our work is going to be interchangeable.
Now, you might also say, the
Processing
Center
could take up some of the work
that's now done in the District
Office, and I think that's true. And you might not need the same kind of
configuration in the District Office. When I was leaving I think we were beginning to get into that kind of thing.
And much more has to be done along that avenue.
Now, can you ever get rid of a Processing Center? And the answer in my book is no,
because if we couldn't get rid of two Data Operating Centers, that were legitimately
ones that should been closed down firmly and not continued, I don't know how you would ever get the
Congressional delegation to get rid of a Processing Center. But they
have to continue to shrink. There just will not be the workload there was, and
eventually I think someone has to make a call about whether you need as many as
you have.
Interviewer: Let me take you back to a
question I asked you at the very beginning about your opportunities as a woman
manager and an executive in SSA. Could you comment on that and how that has
played over the years?
Lieberman: I would honestly say that I never once in my entire career, until the very
last years, was even aware that there was any
kind of a question about a woman in top management. I always did my job.
I had a certain personality that people
wanted to use for certain jobs. It just seemed like somebody always asked me to
do something. And it never even dawned on me that there was a question about whether it was because I was a
woman, and I don't think it was because I was a woman. I think it just
so happened that I was at a certain place
at a certain time, there was somebody who needed a job to be done and there was
a feeling on the part of management above me that I could do the job.
They were not selecting me because I was a woman. I'm absolutely certain of
that. And I was there because my personality is such that I don't think that if you were looking for a woman, you know, to take
a job, I don't think you'd pick me.
Interviewer:
How about the opposite. Did you feel any lack of opportunity because you are a
woman, did you feel discriminated against anywhere in SSA?
Lieberman: Never.
Never.
I think
that what you have heard in my voice and the way I've described my jobs is that
I really loved my career at SSA. I really felt I was given tremendous
opportunity. I had wonderful jobs. I had very good managers
above me. And I think they
let me do what I needed to do, regardless of my personality, even though
sometimes maybe they had to do a little extra work because of my personality.
I
can't imagine more capable people, more dedicated people. I was given many, many opportunities to broaden my horizons in
whatever course I wanted to attend, whatever I wanted to do. So I just
feel that the operation as a whole recruited
just top notch people. I always have just wonderful staff, you know to work for me. And I had good staff above me. I
mean, there might have been one or two people that I might rather not have
worked for, but even those people--and I won't name them, I really had some
tremendous conflict with-- were very good managers. I would say that
absolutely each and everyone of them were very good
managers.
I feel
that SSA really, years and years ago, maybe back in the '60s, started building pools of people that needed to move
along. Maybe not as many as they should have, but they had the right
attitude toward education and selection.
And when I look at the Agency in the late sixties as compared to what I saw in '59 and '60 when I was in the DO and
there was no promotion plan--and even when I first came into Baltimore
and worked in the Bureau of Disability Insurance in the Evaluation Section, it
wasn't clear how somebody selected you to go to Policy--just such significant
changes that they did thirty years ago, it just seems to me that they've done
pretty much the right thing. Maybe not as much of the right thing as they
should have done, at all times, but they were on the right path and they have a
really good, solid foundation.
I never felt the least bit of discrimination at any time. And I feel
the Agency for the most part has done a great job, through the years, of
avoiding any kind of discrimination. Now you
know the workforce is primarily women, so they would have been dumb not to. I
mean there should be a huge number of women
coming through the pipeline at any one time that could be selected and pushed
up. I think when I was coming up that was not true, I think it was mostly
men, but nevertheless I never found any discrimination, just exactly the opposite. Now I can't speak for other people.
But, I just, again want to repeat that I think there were many
opportunities in SSA. I'm such a strong personality
and had such a way of doing things my own way, and of being so outspoken, it
seems to me if anybody wanted to kill me at any one time, I mean if
there was that kind of mentality in SSA it would have been so easy. But, I
think just the opposite, that there was a need for whatever talent I had and I
think the managers above me said, something very courageous, to the effect, "it's my job to put up with her, you
know, so I can have the benefit of what
she can do." And so I really do appreciate that. And I think that goes on, I really think it goes on all the time.
Interviewer: You want
to add anything?
Lieberman: Well, I can't
say that I could add anything that I haven't said already. I found SSA a
wonderful place to work, and I think it remains that. I think the program is
outstanding. The tradition that has been established in the program is service,
is all encompassing, and provides the avenue through which anything goes, and I
think gives it a good flavor and a good taste, that it makes it a good place to
work. I think it's unfortunate that it's so buffeted by the whims of politics. It would really be good if it had a really stable leadership, that could at this point take care
of the problems that have to be taken care of. It's much easier to deal with
the problems of financing, where it is much more straightforward, then to deal
with something like disability, which is, you know, not quite so
straightforward. Although financing has its political
problems too, but it really is a shame they can't find leadership to deal
with that issue. And I feel very proud to have been part of everything that's going on, and to have worked with so many
wonderful people.
Thank you for the opportunity Larry.
Interviewer:
Thank you very much.
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