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Chapter 4: Program Changes
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“From program challenge to program change”
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he Social
Security Administration (SSA) administers dynamic programs.
Ideally, they change with the needs of those they are designed to
serve. “Program management” is the process of overseeing these
changes. Effective program management requires an agency to
be in touch with its customers, the advocate community, the Congress,
the media and other stakeholders. Besides understanding the
current needs of its customers, an agency adept at program management
engages in effective research and development and strategic planning
to ensure that it both understands the future needs of its customers
and is strategically positioned to address them.
In 1993,
at the beginning of the Clinton Administration, SSA was an agency
under the guidance and leadership of HHS. As a component of
HHS, SSA had little need for great expertise in the area of policy
development or proactive program management, since these were functions
performed for the most part for SSA by HHS. While SSA had
a program policy staff, it was primarily engaged in formulating
implementation plans rather than in defining and developing a public
policy agenda. Similarly, SSA had only a small staff presence
in Washington working with congressional staffs and with customer
advocates. This began to change in 1995 after SSA became an
independent agency and began to develop stronger legislative and
policy expertise.
Under the
leadership of Commissioner Shirley Chater, SSA initiated a process
change effort in the disability program by launching Disability
Redesign. Simultaneously, SSA was challenged with the task
of implementing several problematic aspects of Welfare Reform, affecting
childhood disability and non-citizen recipients of the SSI program.
Commissioner
Kenneth Apfel built upon the work already underway to redesign the
disability program. He focused on improving the management
of the disability program by modernizing the disability decisionmaking
process to improve the consistency of the decisions rendered at
all levels of the process. In addition, he defined as his
first priority as Commissioner the need to carefully review the
way in which SSA had implemented the changes to the SSI childhood
provisions of Welfare Reform.
While the
disability program is SSA’s largest and most complex, it is not
the only program SSA administers and was not the only program management
challenge SSA faced from 1993-2000. Besides the challenges
of the disability program and Welfare Reform, SSA also faced challenges
in other programs, as well as the challenge of preparing itself
for the future.
The Challenge of the Disability Program
SSA administers two programs for
the disabled. To qualify for either program, an individual
must be totally disabled … that is strictly defined as having
a physical or emotional disability that is so severe that it prevents
the person from working for at least a year, or is expected to
result in death. Social Security disability benefits (SSDI)
are paid from worker contributions to the Social Security trust
fund and requires both sufficient work to achieve insured status
and recent work. The Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
program is funded through general revenues rather than worker
contributions, and it pays benefits to those who are disabled
but do not meet the work requirements of SSDI and who are financially
needy.
The
Case for Process Change
Disability
Redesign
SSA and State Disability Determination
Services (DDS) have continually worked to provide high-quality
responsive service to the public. Despite these efforts,
in the early 1990s, the disability insurance (DI) and Supplemental
Security Income (SSI) claims workload became the Agency’s most
challenging problem. SSA was faced with unprecedented workload
increases in both the DI and SSI programs, which severely strained
resources. Despite improvements in productivity by all components,
SSA was having difficulty providing a satisfactory level of service
to claimants for disability benefits. In an era of spending
limitations and competing social-spending priorities, SSA recognized
that placing more and more resources into the current process
was not a viable alternative.
Additionally, demographic changes in
the general population and in the SSA claimant population presented
challenges as well as opportunities for the Agency. More focus
was needed in the area of disability. American society had
changed dramatically since the DI program began in the 1950s.
This was reflected in an increased demand for services, changes
in the characteristics of claimants seeking benefits, and complexities
in claims-related workloads and processes. Additionally, the
enactment of the SSI program in the 1970s added individuals who
had sketchy work histories, increased the number of individuals
filing based on disabilities such as mental impairments, and provided
for eligibility of disabled children. The requirements of
the SSI program added complex and time consuming development of
non-disability eligibility factors such as income, resources, and
living arrangements.
Despite the workload and demographic
changes, however, the procedures for processing disability claims
had not changed since the beginning of the DI program in the 1950s
and many of the Agency’s current practices were based, in large
part, on procedures begun 40 years ago. Disability process
changes that had evolved over time tended to reflect small, incremental
improvements designed to address various pieces of the overall process.
It became increasingly clear that incremental improvements were
no longer sufficient to achieve the level of service that could
make a substantial difference to disability claimants. Thus,
SSA needed a longer-term strategy for addressing service delivery
problems in the disability claim process.
The National Performance Review report,
released in the fall of 1993, called upon agencies to establish
customer service standards equal to the best in the business to
guide their operations. Federal agencies were encouraged to
identify “the customers who are, or should be serviced, by the agency,”
and survey these customers “to determine the kind and quality of
services they want and their level of satisfaction with existing
services.”
Because of the increasing need to focus
on disability issues, SSA looked at their disability customers,
including those filing for Social Security or Supplemental Security
Income disability benefits and potential filers for these benefits.
Focus groups conducted throughout the country, representing a demographically
diverse cross-section of customers indicated that they
- Wait too long for a decision—this
is the most common complaint; the claims process is a struggle
characterized by stress, fear, and the anger associated with running
out of funds;
- Do not understand the program or
process—what happens to the claim after initial contact with SSA
is unclear and do not understand their decision and believe it
was reached arbitrarily;
- Want more information and personal
contact—while they would prefer to deal with one person for all
claim business, their major preference is to receive accurate,
consistent information from all SSA sources;
- View the initial and reconsideration
denials as bureaucratic precursors to final approval at the ALJ
level; and
- Resent the need for attorney assistance
to obtain benefits—the process should not be so complicated that
an attorney is needed and wants more active involvement in pursuit
of their claim—they want to make their case directly to the decisionmaker.
1993
Process
SSA’s current disability claims process
consists of an initial determination and up to three levels of
appeal if an individual is dissatisfied with the decision.
Initial disability claims are generally
taken in 1,300 Social Security offices located throughout the country.
Local field office staff request and evaluate information about
the non-medical aspects of each person’s claim, such as whether
or not the individual has worked enough to be eligible for DI benefits
or whether the individual meets the income and resource limits for
SSI benefits.
Field office staff also obtains information
about claimants’ impairments, including medical sources. Disability
claims are then forwarded to the Federally funded, but State-administered,
Disability Determination Services (DDS) in the State where the person
lives. State DDS staff obtain and review necessary medical
and other evidence and an adjudicative team consisting of a disability
specialist and a program physician make the disability determination
based on Social Security regulations using a multi-step sequential
evaluation process.
An individual who is dissatisfied with
the initial determination made on his or her claim may request a
reconsideration of the determination that is conducted at the State
DDS level. If the reconsideration is unsatisfactory to the
individual, he or she may request a hearing before a Federal administrative
law judge (ALJ), and, if still dissatisfied, the individual may
request an Appeals Council review. Each level of review involves
multi-step procedures for evidence collection, review, and decisionmaking.
If the Appeals Council affirms the denial, the applicant can begin
a civil action in a U.S. district court.
Reengineering
Concept
Because of SSA’s continued desire
to improve service delivery to its most vulnerable customers and
the growing need to improve an overly complex process, the Agency
explored reengineering as a method for addressing service delivery
concerns. This concept was in line with Vice President Gore’s
reinvention initiatives to create a government that works better
and costs less.
Under
the leadership of Commissioner Chater, SSA developed a “redesign”
plan which was released in September 1994 to improve the disability
claims process, from initial contact through final administrative
appeal, in order to improve service delivery to millions of individuals
filing for, or appealing, disability claims every year.
The disability process redesign plan
was a high-level process description that provided a broad vision
of how a new process would work, leaving operational, organizational,
and other details for later development and implementation.
The five primary objectives for the plan were:
- To be user friendly for claimants
and those who assist them;
- To allow cases that should be allowed
as early in the process as possible;
- To ensure that decisions are made
and effectuated quickly;
- The process is efficient; and
- Provide employees with a satisfying
work environment.
Development
and Release of the Plan
SSA began its Agency-wide program
of process reengineering in the summer of 1993. The Process
Reengineering Program essentially asked the question, “If SSA
had the opportunity to design its processes, what would they look
like?” The program was the culmination of an investigation
by SSA of the reengineering efforts conducted by private companies,
public organizations, academic institutions, and consulting firms
with “hands on” experience. The positive findings from that
investigation, combined with concerns about the impact of current
and projected workloads, led SSA to conclude that a disability
claims process reengineering effort was critical to its objectives
of providing world-class service to the public and restoring public
confidence in its disability programs.
Based on analysis
of what has worked best in other organizations, SSA developed a
customized reengineering methodology. This methodology used
a team approach (composed of SSA and DDS employees as well as union
representation) and combined a strong customer focus with classic
management analysis techniques to intensely review a single business
process.
While the reengineering
team was comprised of employees who were knowledgeable about the
current disability process, the methodology focused heavily on obtaining
the views of a broad segment of individuals; groups and organizations
involved both internally and externally to the process.
The parameters
set for the project restricted the team from proposing any changes
to the statutory definition of disability or the amount of benefits
for which individuals are eligible. A team of 18 Federal and
State employees came together in October 1993. After completing
their initial tasks of analyzing the current process, obtaining
process improvement recommendations from over 3,600 individuals
and groups internal and external to the disability claim process,
benchmarking with public and private sector organizations to identify
“best practices,” and modeling theoretical processes via computer,
the team presented an initial proposal on March 31, 1994.
This proposal was published in the Federal Register on April 15,
1994. Within the 60-day comment period, the team received
over 6,000 written responses. Group feedback discussions were
held in over 80 sites across the country to facilitate dialogue
with almost 2,000 employees. In addition, team members conducted
briefings and spoke with more than 3,000 individuals about their
reactions to the proposal. A public forum was also held in
Washington, D.C.
After considering
all comments, the team reviewed the breadth of the initial process
and on June 30, 1994, the team submitted their revised proposal
to the Commissioner of Social Security. Subsequently, the
Commissioner released SSA’s Plan for a New Disability Claim Process
on September 7, 1994. Vice President Gore visited SSA and
presented the team with Hammer Awards in recognition of their efforts
at building a government that works better and costs less.
Key Features of the Proposed Redesign Plan
Process
Streamlining: SSA’s current four-level administrative
process is streamlined to two levels. Applicants who receive
an initial claim denial (level one) have 60 days to request a
hearing before an independent ALJ (level two).
New
position added to the initial level to act as the claimant’s single
point of contact.
A new position, the disability claim manager, was created as the
key contact for claimants at the initial level, eliminating steps
caused by numerous employees handling discrete parts of the claim.
The claim manager would be trained to handle both disability and
non-disability aspects of the claim, using other office expertise
as needed.
Claimants
better understand the program and are more involved in the process.
As part of the plan, claimants are provided a more intensive
explanation of the disability program and process, have additional
opportunities to interact with the decisionmaker, and can more fully
participate in the process itself.
Process
Unification. Adjudicators
at all levels of the process would use the same standards for decisionmaking
to make correct decisions in an easier, faster, and more cost-efficient
manner.
Better
use of the experience and expertise of staff.
Changes in the adjudicative process would free time for the
most highly specialized staff (physicians and ALJs) to work on those
cases and tasks to make the best use of their talents—targeting
expenditures for medical evidence to those areas most useful in
determining disability.
New
position added to support the hearing process.
The plan added a new position, the adjudication officer, to facilitate
the hearing process. The adjudicative officer maintains authority
to issue revised favorable decisions if warranted by the evidence
in file.
Enablers
to Support the Redesign Vision
SSA’s reengineering project was dependent
on a number of key factors that could provide the framework for
the new process design. These included process unification
and technological support.
Process
Unification. Under the Social Security Act,
the Secretary is granted broad authority to promulgate regulations
to govern the disability determination process. In addition
to regulations, SSA publishes Social Security Rulings and Acquiescence
Rulings. ALJs and the Appeals Council relied on the regulations
and rulings in making disability decisions. However, guidance
for decisionmakers at the initial and reconsideration level was
provided in a series of administrative publications, including the
Program Operations Manual System instructions and other administrative
issuances which clarify or elaborate specific policy issues.
The use of different source documents by adjudicators fostered the
perception that different policy standards were being applied at
different levels of decisionmaking in the disability claim process.
To ensure that SSA provides consistent direction to all adjudicators
regarding the standards for decisionmaking, the redesign plan pointed
to the development of a single presentation of substantive policies
used in the determination of eligibility for benefits by all adjudicators.
Information
Technology. Another key enabler of the redesign
was information technology. The process plan looked for the
development of seamless, electronic processing of disability claims
through all levels. Technology enhancements would be made
available to employees as well as to claimants and their representatives.
Testing
Flexibility
Pure reengineering concepts call
for minimal testing and quick implementation. Although it
was committed to moving forward quickly to begin implementing
the new process, SSA embraced an equally strong commitment to
rigorous testing and refinement of process changes before proceeding
with full or permanent implementation. SSA recognized that
full implementation of the new process vision was an iterative
process that required development, testing, additional information
gathering and possible modifications of process changes.
In
selecting sites for initial testing, SSA took advantage of the interest
and capability of different offices, states, and regions to demonstrate
the viability of improvements. And even with extensive testing,
due to the nature of public policy formulation, SSA was flexible
in developing, refining and implementing specific process elements.
Additionally, if results of process testing necessitated modifications,
SSA was prepared to make those modifications. SSA remains
committed to change, not for its own sake, but because it is necessary
to meet present and future challenges as the Agency strives to provide
high-quality, responsive, world-class service to its customers.
1997
Redesign Focus Narrowed to Most Critical Areas
In February 1997, SSA completed a major reassessment of redesign
initiatives to narrow the focus to the activities most critical
to success. The original vision was developed at a “50,000
foot view” and set forth an idea process that required support
from several critical enablers that were not yet developed.
Progress was not as dramatic as initially hoped and some stakeholders,
including GAO, were critical of the broad scope and complexity
of initiatives underway.
SSA generally agreed
with the thrust of GAO’s recommendations and identified redesign
areas in which to concentrate efforts to support critical, long-term
efficiencies. As an outcome of SSA’s assessment, focus was
narrowed to the most significant areas, including the testing of
process changes, implementing process unification initiatives, and
developing long-term support through other enablers.
In the area of
testing process changes, the most significant test of redesign initiatives
was the Full Process Model (FPM) which served as an integrated model
for several features.
The
Full Process Model
The Full Process Model was closest
to the original vision of the disability redesign. The test
included a random selection of over 30,000 initial disability
cases in eight DDSs. Case selection began in April 1997
and ended in January 1998. Participating states included
Colorado, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Utah, and Wisconsin.
SSA evaluated whether, and to what
degree, the FPM improved the disability determination process by
assessing the impact of the FPM on allowance rates, appeal rates,
accuracy administrative costs, processing time, program costs, and
employee and customer satisfaction.
General
conclusions showed that the allowance rate at the initial level
within the FPM was essentially the same as in two levels in the
current process (initial level plus reconsideration). The
claimant conference resulted in initial allowances that would have
been made only after an appeal in the current process—or
that would never have been allowed because not all claimants appeal,
improving customer service. Accuracy on cases denied through
the initial level was substantially better in the FPM than in the
current process. Although the addition of the opportunity
for claimants to talk with the disability decisionmaker added time
to the process for some, those who were ultimately denied at the
initial level and pursued an appeal, reached OHA over two months
sooner. Savings from elimination of the reconsideration step
could be invested at the initial level to improve quality and customer
service. Although some claimants could be served more quickly
with the adjudication officer in the process, the overall time at
the hearing level was significantly higher. There was insufficient
data on the elimination of the request for Appeals Council review
portion of the model upon which to draw conclusions. Positive
results from the Full Process Model test provided the impetus to
move forward with the most positive factors of the process.
Redesign
Decisions Incorporated into the Agency’s Broader Plan
The 1994 redesign plan outlined a
vision for an ideal process that was efficient, unified and highly
automated. Rigorous testing was conducted throughout the
country, realizing varying levels of success. Results did
show the potential for improving customer service by focusing
more attention at the initial level to improve quality, reduce
hurdles and increase customer interaction—all concepts that epitomized
the principles and goals of the National Partnership for Reinventing
Government (NPR). A major strategy of the NPR is to achieve
outcomes that balance business results, customer satisfaction
and employee satisfaction. SSA remains committed to that
strategy.
In March 1999, Commissioner Apfel released
a broader plan to improve management of the disability program,
moving the agency from “proof of concept” testing to the next phase
of development, incorporating decisions on redesign. In announcing
his decision to employees in a “Commissioner’s Broadcast” on March
12, 1999, Commissioner Apfel said, “For many years, SSA has recognized
the need to improve the administration of the disability programs.
It is an enormous challenge to administer these large and complex
programs efficiently, effectively and compassionately. We
must be committed to making our programs both more responsive to
our claimants and beneficiaries and more accountable to the American
people. It is now time to move from ‘proof of concept’ testing
to the next phase of development. Using our current testing
authority, I want to combine the successful elements of our redesign
pilots with enhanced DDS development and explanation of decisions
in up to 10 state prototypes, as well as implement hearings improvements
nationwide. This will allow us to put the complete process
together and make necessary refinements prior to nationwide implementation.”
[1] The Commissioner considered analysis
from redesign test results along with additional factors including
stakeholder comments, input from OMB, GAO, NPR and other Agency
initiatives in making these decisions.
The March plan, Social Security
and Supplemental Security Income Disability Programs: Managing
for Today/Planning for Tomorrow, broadened the Agency’s
focus to reflect priority management objectives in the President’s
FY 2000 Budget. The plan included 4 goals, consistent with
the original redesign concepts:
1.
Improve the disability adjudication process to ensure that
decisions are made as accurately as possible, that those who should
be paid are paid as early as possible, and that the adjudication
process is consistent throughout;
2.
Enhance beneficiaries’ opportunities to work by providing
work incentives and facilitating appropriate support services;
3.
Safeguard the integrity of disability programs by ensuring
that beneficiaries on the rolls continue to be eligible for benefits
and by undertaking initiatives that protect the program from fraud;
and,
4.
Improve the knowledge base for the next century by addressing
the need for broadened understanding of the dynamics of disability,
how decisions are made, and what economic and demographic trends
affect the program.
The
Prototypes
Using current testing authority,
SSA moved to combine the successful elements of the redesign pilots
with enhanced case development in 10 states. These prototypes
put the complete process together and provided an opportunity
to make necessary refinements prior to nationwide implementation.
About 20% of SSA’s national disability claims workload was impacted.
The prototypes were in state-wide operation in AL, NH, PA, LA,
MO, MI, CO, AK, and in portions of NY and CA. The prototypes
included the following five elements:
- Revised
roles for the disability examiner and medical consultant. Providing
greater decisional authority to the disability examiner and more
effective use of the expertise of the medical consultant in the
disability determination process (single decisionmaker concept).
This maximized the effectiveness of Agency resources—focusing
State agency medical and psychological consultants on duties and
responsibilities commensurate with their professional training
and experience, such as review of complex disability claims, as
well as the training and mentoring of disability examiners.
·
Enhanced case development and explanation
of decisions. Improving case documentation and
explanations of key decisional elements—beginning at the initial
level—to help ensure consistency in decisionmaker.
·
Claimant conference.
Providing an opportunity for the claimant to talk with the disability
examiner before a less-than-fully-favorable decision is rendered
at the initial level. This allowed the decisionmaker to review
the findings with the claimant prior to a determination to ensure
that all allegations have been identified and developed, and that
the claimant understood the disability program and process.
·
Elimination of the reconsideration
step. Streamlining the administrative review process
by eliminating the reconsideration step. This provided the
ability to focus more attention and resources at the first administrative
level.
·
Improvements to the hearings
process. A series of improvements are being implemented
in hearing offices including changes in the management structure
and a new team approach.
Early data from the Prototypes had
shown that the prototype process was a major cultural change for
many DDS employees. The degree of change varied from state
to state, but was significant for all states. Of particular
note, the learning curve was longer in the prototypes as compared
to the Full Process Model test, particularly as it related to enhanced
rationales.
Improvements made to the claimant conference
process have paid off in terms of increasing the response rate for
those who were offered the opportunity to talk with a decisionmaker
prior to an initial-level determination. As of August 2000,
the response rate had leveled to about 64%. By comparison,
the response rate in the Full Process Model was 56%. This
meant that claimants were more fully utilizing the opportunity to
interact with their decisionmaker, helping to ensure that all allegations
and sources of evidence had been explored. This interaction
also provided the opportunity for disability examiners to explain
the disability process and program requirements, as well as to respond
to questions.
Prototype
cases, denied at the initial level and requesting appeal, had been
filtering into hearing offices, where a series of improvements had
been implemented to reduce processing time from request for hearing
to final disposition.
Cohort data on
the prototypes were being tracked to assess the impact on customer
service and program costs to determine if data trends were consistent
with outcomes from SSA’s more formalized test, the Full Process
Model. SSA planned a rollout of prototype process changes
in FY 2002.
Although redesign
initiatives were not implemented as quickly or broadly as originally
expected, they had been the impetus for significant movement toward
major cultural shifts. Redesign initiatives increased the
focus at the initial level and placed more emphasis on quality throughout
the process. Tested changes had shown the potential to increase
the volume of appropriate allowances at the initial level, increased
claimant involvement in the process, and streamlined the appeals
process to better serve disability applicants.
Testing
of the Disability Claim Manager (DCM)
An
important initiative in SSA’s disability process redesign effort
had been the Disability Claim Manager (DCM). Under this model,
a single individual had responsibility for all phases of the initial
disability determination process, including development and decisions
on both medical and non-medical components of eligibility.
This represented a significant change from the current process,
where a federal claims representative was responsible for initial
contact with the czlaimant and collecting non-medical eligibility
information, and a State disability examiner and medical consultant
team determined whether the disability criteria meet SSA’s requirements.
The DCM was a single point of contact for claimants located at either
a field or DDS site, and had responsibility for processing the disability
claim, with substantial support form both clerical and medical staff.
The DCM as tested, had been focused on adult disability claims.
The DCM test, by design, was being
conducted in two phases over a three-year period. Phase I
began November 1997 and ended in June 1999. Phase II testing
started November 1999 and ended in November 2000. SSA used
an independent contractor to help assess the first phase of testing,
which was conducted to determine the viability of the position and
provided recommendations for the configuration of the second phase.
The contractor’s final report concluded that the DCM is a “viable”
approach to processing claims, in the limited sense that certain
key outcomes were within the ballpark of outcomes under the current
process.
Retest
of the Elimination of Request for Review
As an adjunct to the FPM, a test of
the elimination of the Appeals Council request for review (RRE)
was conducted to determine if the claims process could be streamlined
further by removing this adjudicative step in addition to the reconsideration
step. This test was conducted under separate regulatory authority.
The test for the FPM provided a substantial
volume of data from which results could be analyzed to determine
next steps in the redesign process; however, the sample size that
was achieved for data relating to the elimination of the RRE was
insufficient to support policy decisions. With the start-up of the
prototype process in 10 states, SSA identified an opportunity to
retest the RRE process.
The retest of the RRE was conducted
in conjunction with the prototypes in order to obtain the data necessary
for assessing the effects of the elimination of the request for
review.
Data obtained during the test could
also support supplementary efforts to examine the role of the Appeals
Council and determined the most effective use of this valuable resource.
The retest of the RRE was undertaken under the existing testing
authority and a Federal Register notice announcing the test was
published June 7, 2000. The primary objective of the project
was to obtain and analyze valid and reliable data on the effects
of the elimination or retention of the request for review step—including
the impact on agency operation and processes, the federal court
system and quality and timeliness of service to the public.
Prototype
Process Combined With Improvements to the Hearing Process
As part of SSA’s broader management
plan, Commissioner Apfel decided not to pursue the adjudication
officer position, but take what was learned from the pilot to
incorporate into the Agency’s broader hearing process improvement
plan.
The Agency’s broader
plan supported moving forward to improve the disability process
from beginning to end on several fronts. Besides improving
the process in both the DDS and OHA level, the plan supported training
for claims representatives in field offices to improve the disability
product beginning with application, continued to test the Disability
Claim Manager process as an alternative approach to serving the
needs of disability claimants and created Flexible Disability Units
in processing centers to provide processing support as needed to
both the DDS and OHA.
The prototype changes,
coupled with other initiatives, were part of SSA’s broad strategy
to improve the effective and efficient administration of its disability
programs that protect millions of Americans and their families.
The
Hearing Process Improvement Plan
As part of its overall plan for managing
the disability process, Commissioner Apfel directed in 1999 that
the Agency develop a plan for improving the hearings process.
In June 1999, SSA released the Hearings Process Improvement (HPI)
initiative. Designed to enhance customer service by reducing
processing time without expending additional resources, HPI has
been fully implemented in 37 hearing offices and is expected to
be in place in all 140 offices before the end of calendar year 2000.
SSA
began Phase 1 of HPI in January 2000, with full implementation in
the Phase 1 hearing offices completed by the end of April.
Challenges in several areas were met with innovative efforts, and
lessons learned were applied to planning for Phases 2 and 3.
·
Communications: Early establishment of an Intranet
website, frequent HPI newsletters, a PolicyNet collaboration site
for managers, and a hotline were among the tools used to make information
readily available to hearing offices. SSA held two conferences
for Hearing Office Directors, and a summit for Hearing Office Chief
Administrative Law Judges was scheduled for mid-October.
·
Partnership: SSA reached national agreements
with union partners by October 1999, but delays in local agreements
encouraged the combination of national and local issues in the agreements
reached for Phases 2 and 3.
·
Training: SSA formed a national cadre of experienced
trainers to deliver HPI orientation and needed skills training.
Based on feedback received, the training timelines were refined
for Phases 2 and 3.
·
Automation: Changes needed to provide immediate
support for HPI had been made, and longer-term enhancements were
in the planning stages.
The
elements of the early monitoring plan provided information and data
that was being used to make improvements in the implementation efforts
for Phases 2 and 3. Preliminary data collected since May 2000
was encouraging: HPI offices were showing higher disposition
rates and lower processing times than in 1999. Early Phase
1 site visits provided valuable feedback, particularly on training
and automation. SSA’s Office of Workforce Analysis (OWA) also
conducted site visits, and their report of employee interviews gave
a detailed look at staff concerns and suggestions, many of which
were used to provide for a smoother transition in the next phases
of implementation. Plus, the Regional Chief Administrative
Law Judges closely monitored HPI start-up in the regions, and their
reports in late August indicated that Phase 1 implementation was
nearly complete in the critical elements of HPI.
Phase
2 implementation brought HPI to 52 additional hearing offices in
October 2000, and the remaining 49 offices rolled out by November
20, 2000. The implementation monitoring efforts will continue
during Phases 2 and 3 rollout, and OWA has been asked to conduct
a follow-up employee survey in late Spring 2001. Once all
elements of HPI have been implemented in all hearing offices, SSA
will take a thorough look at the process itself and determine whether
refinements are needed.
The
Appeals Council Improvement Plan
The ACPI Action Plan, announced in March 2000, confirmed SSA’s determination
to better serve customers at all levels of the adjudication process.
It completed the series of major process changes begun with the
redesign decisions resulting in the process changes in the DDSs,
followed by the implementation of the Hearings Process Improvement
Plan (HPI). The HPI and ACPI Plans defined the OHA business
process of the future and, therefore, set goals and priorities for
current and future years.
The Appeals Council’s process not only
deals with dramatic increases in the volume of work in recent years;
it also copes with workloads that are varied and inherently complex.
Claimant requests for review of hearing decisions and dismissals
represent the largest portion of the Appeals Council’s workloads.
FY
1999 Workloads |
Receipts
|
%
Total
|
Dispositions
|
%
Total
|
Requests
for Review |
115,150
|
80.3 %
|
91,173
|
78.0 %
|
Quality
Assurance |
7,984
|
5.6 %
|
7,214
|
6.2 %
|
New
Court Cases |
13,157
|
9.2 %
|
13,022
|
11.1 %
|
Court
Remands |
7,072
|
4.9 %
|
5,496
|
4.7 %
|
Total |
143,363
|
100.0 %
|
116,905
|
100.0 %
|
However, the Appeals Council is responsible
for other workloads including, but not limited to, quality assurance
reviews and court case processing.
Like HPI, the ACPI long-term strategy
was to institute changes to streamline and simplify case movement,
reduce case hand-offs, provide better oversight, and use systems
improvement to more effectively capture and use data to improve
service and management.
A key process change within the overall
strategy was Differential Case Management. Appeals Council
staff individually examine all requests for review shortly after
receipt to identify the appropriate case processing track and to
process to completion cases identified for expedited action.
This provides speedier service for different types of claims and
ensures that the Appeals Council identifies and acts on cases that
deserve immediate processing. The Appeals Council also places
a heightened emphasis on processing aged requests for review and
using legally sufficient streamlined formats for issuing decisions
and remands.
SSA anticipates that the ACPI initiatives,
when fully implemented, will result in dramatic service improvements
in request for review processing over the next five years.
The
ACPI initiatives will also ensure that the Appeals Council’s other
workloads are managed timely and effectively. ACPI showed
an impressive rollout performance, with a record 64,000 actions
in the first six months of ACPI in FY 2000, and as of October 2000,
was on target to meet the anticipated level of dispositions for
the fiscal year.
The
Case for Disability Program Change
Ticket
to Work/Work Incentives
While the primary purpose of Social Security disability
insurance (SSDI) is to replace a portion of income lost to disability,
the program also includes provisions designed to encourage beneficiaries
to return to work. Similarly, the Supplemental Security Income
(SSI) disability program includes return-to-work provisions.
Research and experience have shown that even when individuals have
significant disabilities, with appropriate support and vocational
rehabilitation (VR), they may be able to work again. The primary
mechanism that is used by SSA to help people to return to work is
the referral of beneficiaries to State vocational rehabilitation
services. However, despite these longstanding provisions of
the law, historically only a very limited number of the approximately
10 million SSDI beneficiaries and SSI recipients leave the disability
rolls each year because of successful rehabilitation. The
passage on December 17, 1999 of The Ticket to Work and Work Incentive
Improvement Act (TWWIIA) represents, “…not just a new law, but
a new mission for SSA.” [2] This law represents
both a significant addition to the mission of SSA and an important
public policy commitment to promoting employment for those citizens
who are most disabled.
The Ticket to Work and Work Incentive
Improvement Act was the last piece of legislation President Clinton
signed into law in the 20th Century. The signing
of this law, on December 17, 1999, represented the culmination of
6 years of work by Social Security Administration, Clinton appointees
and staff, scholarly think tanks, people with disabilities, disability
organizations and the Congress.
Articulating
the Problems and the Solutions: Developing Consensus
WITHIN
THE SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION
Commissioner Apfel and executives at
SSA had long been listening to customers and other stakeholders
to determine what improvements could be promoted in the disability
programs to improve opportunities for those with significant disabilities.
The goal for this dialogue from the beginning was to ensure maximum
employment opportunities for people with disabilities while ensuring
that the safety net represented by the disability programs and the
medical benefits provided by them remained intact.
SSA sponsored a series of roundtable
discussions with people with disabilities throughout the country
and gathered together a staff to assist the Commissioner in understanding
their concerns and needs. SSA supported a conference sponsored
by the World Institute on Disability in 1992 that gathered together
consumers and experts from around the country to explore the SSI
and SSDI programs and their relationship to the employment of people
with disabilities. SSA also funded conferences at the National
Press Club in 1996, 1997 and 1998, bringing together hundreds of
stakeholders to examine the issues. Executives from SSA, in
particular Susan Daniels, Ph.D., herself an appointee of President
Clinton with a severe disability, met with scholars and experts
who had dedicated their lives to studying Social Security.
SSA pulled together internal working groups within the agency to
examine the history and trends of the disability programs.
Social Security actuaries, researchers, budget staff, operations
staff and field staff examined the programs in light of their impact
on return to work.
These
research and educational efforts determined that SSA’s disability
programs had been growing steadily for over 10 years, and unless
major policy changes were made, the growth was projected to continue.
Young people with disabilities were coming on to the rolls in increasing
numbers and were staying there for several decades. And the
research showed that long term reliance on government income maintenance
is undesirable because of the severe limits it places on the beneficiary’s
financial and social independence. Receipt of monthly benefits
generally promotes a lifestyle of dependence and marginalized poverty.
Despite the existence of Social Security work incentives and rehabilitation
reimbursement programs, few beneficiaries return to work, although
many beneficiaries with disabilities say they want to work and can
work, despite their impairments, if they receive the supports they
need. It is primarily fear of losing health benefits that
deters efforts by beneficiaries with disabilities from attempting
to work. The conclusion reached is that creating dependence
on benefits is not good public policy. It is inconsistent
with the Americans with Disabilities Act and all progressive disability
policy.
With these findings in hand, SSA, under
the leadership of Commissioner Chater and Dr. Daniels, developed
an employment strategy in 1995. The strategy was anchored
by four pillars: more options in securing return-to-work services;
better access to health care; improving service delivery and work
incentives; a special focus on youth.
Other
Studies and Reports
Several key studies and reports were undertaken during this period
that articulated questions about the disability programs.
Three General Accounting Office (GAO) reports raised concerns about
the disability programs [3]
In March 1995, Jane Ross, of GAO, testified before the Senate Special
Committee on Aging. She said:
“DI and SSI programs
present an all-or-nothing decision to those who apply. Applicants
who meet the disability criteria receive cash benefits, and applicants
found able-bodied receive no benefits. But this conflicts
with prevailing views that disabled persons are an extraordinarily
heterogeneous group. In addition, technological and medial
advances have created more opportunities than ever for persons with
disabilities to engage in meaningful and productive work.
These new views, coupled with advances, suggest that the premise
for DI and SSI may need to be modified. As a result, we may
be underutilizing the productive capacity of many persons with disability.”
The April 1996 GAO report called for
the Commissioner of SSA to take immediate action to place greater
priority on return to work and to develop legislation so the agency
could emphasize return to work for beneficiaries.
In response to a request from Congress,
the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) convened a Disability
Policy Panel of national experts to conduct a comprehensive review
of Social Security’s disability programs and employment outcomes.
In 1996, the Panel released a four volume report entitled Balancing
Security and Opportunity – The Challenge of Disability Income Policy.
This impressive work from a distinguished panel of experts noted
in its report that its findings and recommendations derive from
its fundamental belief that the primary goal of national disability
policy should be the integration of people with disabilities into
American society. The panel’s return to work proposal built
on the principles of consumer choice and empowerment. It encouraged
competition and innovation among service providers, rewarding service
providers for their results rather than for the cost of their inputs,
and encouraging providers to have a continuing interest in their
clients’ long-term success in remaining employed. In addition,
the Panel stressed the importance of health care coverage to Americans
with disabilities.
In July 1996, the National Council
on Disability released a report entitled Achieving Independence:
The Challenge for the 21st Century. The report
noted that many features of the SSI and SSDI programs serve as obstacles
to independence for people with disabilities. Lack of access
to health insurance and lack of flexibility supporting maximal employment
often promote lifetimes of dependence for people with disabilities.
“The current set of policies and programs too often functions
more as a spider web than a safety net, capturing people in poverty
rather than supporting them to maximize their potential and their
employment,” the report concluded.
Reaching
Consensus
The outcome of these multiple activities was the development of
consensus, both in terms of the problem and a solution. Stakeholders
as wide-ranging as people with disabilities, rehabilitation service
providers, scholarly experts, and disability organizations came
to agreement. The Social Security Disability programs presented
too many obstacles to people in terms of employment, predominately
due to lack of effective support in seeking to return to work and
lack of access to adequate health care when seeking to return to
work. The solution needed to be legislative. New statutory
authority was required to effectively address these problems.
The center of activity moved to the legislative arena.
The
Legislative Process
Formulating
the Clinton Administration’s Bill
Early in 1996, under the direction of Chris Jennings of the White
House’s Domestic Policy Council, discussions began about developing
legislation to send to Capitol Hill. Representatives from
the Office of Management and Budget, the Health Care Financing Administration,
the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and
the Social Security Administration participated. After extensive
discussion, a determination was made that the Administration would
develop a bill that included the Ticket to Independence – the voucher-like
ticket that was recommended by the NASI panel (see above).
They decided that the health care initiatives, amendments to Medicaid
and Medicare, would be pursued separately by the Department of Health
and Human Services.
In February 1997, the President’s 1998
Budget was released. It included the ticket to work and the
two health care provisions. The Medicaid provision enabled
states to offer Medicaid to families with an income that was 250
percent over the poverty level. (This provision was eventually
enacted as part of the Balanced Budget Amendment of 1997).
The Medicare provision enabled a person leaving the roles to extend
Medicare coverage for 2 years beyond the 4-year limit.
In March 1997, the Social Security
Administration sent the Clinton bill to the Congress. It addressed
the ticket to work initiative. This bill was never introduced
per se, as Members of Congress had already begun to address the
issues with their own bills that contained very similar provisions.
Action
in the House and Senate
In September 1996, Rep. Bunning introduced a bill in the House that
included a return-to-work ticket, a Medicare extension provision
and a tax credit provision for employers. Rep. Kennelly worked
with Rep. Bunning on this first piece of legislation. There
was no legislative activity on this bill during the 10th
Session of Congress.
In March 1998, at the beginning of
the 105th Session of Congress, Rep. Bunning introduced
his bill again in the House. The bill was approved by the
Subcommittee on Social Security and the full Committee on Ways and
Means and passed by the House on June 4, 1998 with a vote of 410-1.
The bill was referred to the Senate where it was never considered
in the legislative process during the 105th Congress.
However, the Senate was quite active
behind the scenes in developing a companion bill. Senators
Jeffords and Kennedy took the lead on the bill. During 1997,
1998 and 1999, their staffs met regularly with stakeholders, particularly
consumers, to develop a bill that would have massive support.
They circulated numerous drafts of bills broadly in the disability
community for input and feedback. The Social Security Administration
provided technical assistance for the drafting of the bill.
In addition, the Administration included this bill in the President’s
2000 budget, thus indicating the President’s commitment to this
bill.
On January 28, 1999, Sen. Jeffords
and Sen. Kennedy introduced the bill, S. 331 that would eventually
become law. In February 1999, the Committee on Finance held
hearings on the bill. In March 1999, the Committee reported
out a substitute bill favorably. On June 16, 1999, Sen. Roth,
Chairman of the Finance Committee, amended S. 331 with a substitute
bill. On that same day, the Senate passed the bill with a
vote of 99-0.
The House was aware that the Administration
and the Senate had made an agreement on a bill. In the 106th
Congress, Rep. Rick Lazio took the lead on the bill in the House.
On March 18, 1999 he introduced HR 1180, a bill similar to S. 331.
This bill included Medicaid amendments so it was referred to the
Commerce Committee in addition to the Ways and Means Committee.
In the Commerce Committee, the bill was referred to the Subcommittee
on Health and the Environment where hearings were held and the bill
was marked up. The Subcommittee forwarded the bill to the
full committee where the bill was reported out on July 1, 1999.
On October 19, 1999, with the support of the Ways and Means chairman
and the House leadership, the House passed, under suspension of
the rules, HR 1180 and sent it to the Senate. On November
18, 1999, the House agreed to the conference report; on November
19, 1999, the Senate agreed to the conference report. On December
6, 1999, the HR 1180 was presented to the President for signature.
Provisions
in the Final Bill
The key provisions of HR 1180, which became PL 106-70 when
signed into law, are:
·
The Ticket to Work and Self Sufficiency
Under this “ticket” program, SSDI and SSI beneficiaries with
disabilities will receive tickets that they can take to an approved
service provider of their choice, called an “employment network.”
The employment network can be a private organization or public agency
that agrees to work with SSA to provide vocational rehabilitation,
employment and other support services to assist beneficiaries to
go to work and to remain on the job. When the employment network
agrees to provide these services, it will decide whether it wishes
to receive outcome payments for months in which a beneficiary does
not receive benefits due to work activity (up to 60 months), or
reduced outcome payments in addition to payments for assisting the
beneficiary to achieve milestones connected with employment.
If a State vocational rehabilitation agency agrees to serve as an
employment network, it can also decide on a case-by-case basis if
it would prefer to receive reimbursement under the current system
for reasonable and necessary services they provide to the beneficiary,
or to receive outcome or milestone and outcome payments.
The Ticket program will be phased in nationally over a three-year
period beginning on January 1, 2001. During the first year
of operation, the Ticket program will be available to beneficiaries
in some States (to be determined). SSA will then expand the
Ticket program to other parts of the country over the next three
years. By January 1, 2004, SSA expects the Ticket program
to be operational nationally.
·
Expanded Availability of Health Care Services
The new law also includes several improvements to Medicare and
Medicaid coverage that will be effective on October1, 2000.
These improvements will eliminate some of the barriers that require
people with disabilities to choose between health care coverage
and going to work:
1.
The new law extends Part A Medicare coverage for an additional
4½ years for working Social Security disability beneficiaries.
This is in addition to the current law provision of free Part A
Medicare coverage for 4 years after a Social Security beneficiary
with a disability goes to work.
2.
The new law allows workers with disabilities who are covered
under Medicare to suspend Medicare supplemental policies while they
are covered by group health insurance plans that are provided by
their employers, and to regain coverage under their Medicare supplemental
policies if they lose coverage under these group health plans.
3.
The new law expands state options and funding for Medicaid.
These options will permit states to liberalize the limits on resources
and income for Medicaid eligibility for people with disabilities.
They will also allow the states to permit an employed individual
with a disability to buy into Medicaid, even though the individual
is no longer eligible for Social Security or SSI benefits because
his or her medical condition has improved.
4.
The new law requires the Secretary of the Department of Health
and Human Services (DHHS) to award grants to states to develop and
operate programs which will support working individuals with disabilities
and to let persons know about these new programs. These grants
will begin in FY 2001, and $150 million is available to fund the
grants over the first five years with additional funding for another
six years.
The Secretary
of DHHS will also approve applications from states to conduct demonstration
projects to provide Medicaid type coverage for working individuals
with potentially severe disabilities. The demonstration projects
will cover persons whose medical conditions are expected to meet
the SSI definition of disability if the workers did not receive
Medicaid services. The new law authorizes $250 million to
fund these demonstration projects over a five-year period.
·
Work Incentive Enhancements
The new law
contains improvements to work incentives to help people with disabilities
go to work and continue to work. These improvements include:
1.
Expedited reinstatement of benefits – Effective January 1,
2001, a former Social Security or SSI disability beneficiary will
be able to request reinstatement of his or her benefits if the benefits
were terminated because the beneficiary went to work. To have
the benefits reinstated, the former beneficiary will have to be
unable to continue working because of his or her medical condition
and will have to file a request for reinstatement within 60 months
from the month in which the previous benefits were terminated.
The beneficiary will be able to receive provisional payments for
up to six months while SSA is making a decision on whether he or
she is still disabled under the rules. These provisional payments
will not have to be paid back if SSA decides that the beneficiary’s
medical condition no longer meets the definition of disability.
2.
Changes to the Continuing Disability Review (CDR) process
– Once the Ticket program begins on January 1, 2001, SSA will not
conduct a CDR of an SSDI or SSI beneficiary’s medical condition
while the beneficiary is using a Ticket.
Beginning January1, 2001, SSA will not conduct a CDR of a beneficiary’s
medical condition because the beneficiary is working if the beneficiary
has received SSDI for at least 24 months. SSA must still conduct
regularly scheduled medical reviews, unless the beneficiary is using
a Ticket.
In either
case, the existing rules for suspending benefits because of earnings
amounts will apply. Thus, for SSI, earned income rules for
reducing benefits would apply, and for SSDI, rules for determining
SGA would apply.
·
New Work Incentive Programs
The new law also creates a number of other programs to assist
people with disabilities go to work. These include:
1.
Establishment of a work incentives specialist corps within
SSA to provide accurate information regarding SSDI and SSI work
incentives. SSA has established a new Employment Support representative
(ESR) position that will be tested soon in a number of locations.
The new position will continue to be expanded nationally after the
current testing phase is complete.
2.
Establishment of a community-based work incentive planning
and assistance program. This will be accomplished through
a program of grants, cooperative agreements, or contracts with private
and/or public organizations in each state to provide benefits planning
and assistance to beneficiaries to assist them to go to work.
3.
Providing grants to the protection and advocacy systems in
each of the states to provide information, advice, advocacy and
other services to beneficiaries with disabilities.
4.
Establishing a Work Incentives Advisory Panel within SSA
to provide advice to the commissioner of SSA and Congress on work
incentives, including the implementation of the Ticket program.
The panel will consist of 12 members appointed by the President
and Congress. At least half of the Panel members must be individuals
with disabilities, or representatives of such individuals, with
consideration given to current or former disability beneficiaries.
This panel will convene in 2000 with a life span of eight years.
·
Demonstration Projects and Studies
The new law also gives SSA the authority for five years to conduct
demonstration projects to improve SSDI work incentives. In
particular, the new law requires SSA to conduct a demonstration
to evaluate the effects of withholding $1 of every $2 a beneficiary
earns over a specified level. SSA is also authorized to conduct
other demonstrations or studies of work incentives for beneficiaries.
The new law requires SSA to submit periodic reports to congress
regarding the progress and effectiveness of these demonstration
projects.
Signing
the Bill into Law
On December 17, 1999, President Clinton
held a signing ceremony for HR 1130 at the Franklin D. Roosevelt
Memorial in front of a depiction of the former president.
The setting was fitting, as it called forth the memory of one of
the nation’s great Presidents, who led the country from his wheelchair.
Hundreds of people were present for the signing, including many
members of the disability community from across the country.
In addition to President Clinton, remarks
were made by Sen. Kennedy, Sen. Jeffords and Jim Sullivan, a person
with a disability from New Hampshire who introduced the President.
Justin Dart, Donna McNamee, Paul Marshall and Wesley Vinner joined
the speakers on the stage. At the end of the program, SSA
Commissioner Kenneth Apfel, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, Labor Secretary
Alexis Herman and Treasury Secretary Summers joined the President
on the podium for the bill signing. On stage after the signing,
Justin Dart presented President Clinton with a leather bound book
with letters from people all across the country thanking the President
and Congress for their leadership in making the Ticket to Work and
Work Incentives Improvement Act law.
President Clinton began his remarks
by noting that “This landmark legislation will remove barriers
that have placed many individuals with disabilities in the untenable
position of choosing between health care coverage and work.”
He concluded as follows:
“Many individuals
with disabilities want to work and become independent, and many
can work if they receive the critical support they need. For
too long, the fear of losing health and cash benefits and the inability
to obtain rehabilitation and employment services has prevented such
individuals’ work efforts. As a Nation, we are best served
when all our citizens have the opportunity to contribute their talents,
energy, and ideas to the workplace. I am pleased to sign into
law today this important step to empower more Americans with disabilities
to take their rightful place in our Nation’s workforce.”
The
Legacy of the Law
Implementation of TWWIIA represents both a cultural and a mission
shift for the Social Security Administration. The cultural
shift involves an increased partnership between SSA and the disability
community. SSA will have grants in the community and be interacting
with disability organizations throughout the country on a regular
basis. TWIIA established an Advisory Panel that will advise
the agency on implementation of the law for 8 years. The panel
is comprised of experts from the disability community. This
interaction between Social Security and the Advisory Panel is a
part of the cultural shift. Many Social Security Regional
Offices have established their own Work Incentive Advisory Panels
comprised of stakeholders. All in all, this cultural shift
is characterized by an institutionalized expansion of partnership
with the disability community and an increased acknowledgement on
the part of Social Security that it is accountable to stakeholders
in the disability community.
The enactment of TWWIIA also signifies
a significant mission shift for SSA. Prior to TWWIIA, benefits
were, for the most part, considered the endpoint of SSA’s activities.
With TWIIA, good service is redefined as promoting employment as
an end point, when it is appropriate for the beneficiary.
SSA is now clearly in the family of federal agencies that share
the mission of promoting employment of people with disabilities.
This mission shift brings with it operational shifts which include
improving the level of service related to employment and being a
catalyst and funder for employment support services.
Social Security’s commitment to this
mission shift is visible in its organizational and staff restructuring.
In January 1999, Commissioner Apfel created a new office with primary
responsibility for implementing TWWIIA. The Office of Employment
Support Programs is headed by a newly created Associate Commissioner
position. Eighty staff have been assigned to this office which
administers a $70 million TWIIA budget and a $10 million research
budget. In addition, this office administers the $125 million
dollar rehabilitation reimbursement program.
The long-term legacy of TWIIA will
be determined over time. However, it is clear that the Clinton
Administration has left the Social Security Administration changed
in both culture and mission. The clear addition of employment
support as a goal of the agency represents a significant contribution
to public policy for people with disabilities.
Increase
in the Substantial Gainful Activity Level
Substantial gainful activity (SGA) is part of the definition of
disability in the Social Security Act. In essence, SGA is
a measure to indicate whether an individual is able to perform a
significant level of work. Generally, one of the measures
SSA uses in determining whether an applicant or beneficiary is engaging
in SGA is the amount of pay that the individual has actually earned.
For initial eligibility to SSDI and SSI program benefits, an individual
must be unable to engage in any SGA. Once a person is on the
rolls, the SGA amount is used as a measure in determining ongoing
entitlement to SSDI benefits, although not for SSI payments.
In
1999, SSA instituted a regulatory change to increase the SGA level
for non-blind individuals from $500 to $700 per month. The
Administration increased the SGA level as part of its efforts to
encourage individuals with disabilities to attempt work and to provide
an updated indicator of when earnings demonstrate the ability to
engage in SGA. The SGA level had been increased only once
since 1980, and that increase occurred in 1990. The increase
to $700 reflects the amount that roughly corresponds to wage growth
since the last increase in 1990. In 1999, Vice President Gore
announced the SGA increase at a disability event in Albany, New
York.
In 2000, SSA published a rule that
will automatically adjust the SGA level annually based on the national
average wage index effective in January 2001. As part of the
celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Americans
with Disabilities Act, President Clinton announced the proposed
rule change.
Raising
the SGA level to $700 provides a more realistic threshold to determine
earnings capacity at the time of initial disability determination
and provides a more realistic test of a beneficiary’s earnings capacity
before losing SSDI benefits due to work activity. SSA expects
that the higher SGA level will encourage more beneficiaries to attempt
to work and ultimately become more independent.
Other
Regulatory Changes to Encourage
Beneficiaries to Work
SSA has issued several other rules as part of its strategy to provide
beneficiaries with incentives to attempt work or to increase their
work effort. SSA increased the minimum amount of monthly earnings
that indicates a person is performing services for purposes of counting
as a month in the 9-month trial work period. The amount was
increased from $200 to $530 and will be automatically adjusted each
year based on the national average wage index. In the SSI
program, SSI increased the maximum monthly (from $400 to $1,290)
and yearly (from $1,620 to $5,200) student earned income exclusion
amount used in determining SSI eligibility and payment amounts.
These amounts will be automatically indexed on an annual basis.
Both
of these regulatory changes will help in eliminating the obstacles
that individuals with disabilities face in entering the workforce
and leading independent lives.
Ongoing
Research & Development in the Disability Program
SSA has undertaken a number of research projects that will provide
information necessary to strengthen the Agency’s disability program:
Treatment
of People with Affective Disorder Disabilities
Affective disorders are mental disorders that affect a person’s
mood. Untreated affective disorders can be costly to individuals
and society. SSA will implement a demonstration project beginning
in FY 2001 that will test the effectiveness of providing better
access to quality treatment for affective disorders of DI beneficiaries
(including DI only and DI/SSI concurrent beneficiaries) who have
affective disorders as their primary impairment. This demonstration
project was announced during the White House Conference on Mental
Health held at Howard University on June 7, 1999. The evaluation
is based on a classical randomized field experiment design.
The intervention is expected to lead to better health outcomes,
increase labor force participation, and enhance self-sufficiency.
A longitudinal survey will measure health and employment outcomes.
The analysis will also rely on administrative records and a process
study. This project will provide a comprehensive assessment
of the implementation and outcomes of the Affective Disorders Treatment
Demonstration and assesses the general applicability of the results.
This project will be conducted through
three research contracts. The first contract, to prepare a
draft research protocol was completed in May 2000. The second
contract to conduct the research will begin in February 2001 and
run for 4 years. A third contract will evaluate the demonstration.
Evaluation of Ticket to Work and Self Sufficiency Provisions
The Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act of 1999 (TWWIIA)
established a program to provide SSA beneficiaries with opportunities
to obtain vocational rehabilitation services, employment services,
and other support services from approved providers of their choice.
TWWIIA mandates specific evaluation goals, including the total and
net costs of the program and the impact of the program on beneficiary
work outcomes and reliance on SSA benefits. The evaluation
has two components. A contract for the first phase was awarded
in fall 2000 that will provide data development from existing sources,
design of a supplemental data survey, and design of the specific
evaluation components to meet the legislative requirement.
The second phase in fall 2001 will utilize a multiyear contract
to carry out the supplemental data survey and evaluation design,
and will provide the congressional evaluation reports mandated in
the law.
Evaluation
of State Partnerships in Employing Individuals with Severe Disabilities
This project evaluates the effects of demonstration projects to
assist States in developing integrated service delivery systems.
This project also evaluates the impact such systems have on the
DI and SSI rolls, including benefit reductions due to earnings and
termination of benefits due to substantial gainful activity.
The evaluation has been divided into two activities. In the
first, a contractor assists the States in developing their State-level
evaluation plans and data collection mechanisms. The contractor
monitors the State data collection and cleans and compiles the data
for SSA. This data collection and monitoring contract continues
for the life of the cooperative agreements and is renewed annually
for up to 5 years. A task order contract utilizes these data,
combined with SSA administrative data, to design and test a net
impact evaluation for the State Partnerships across all States.
The contract will produce an automated evaluation design that can
be routinely updated throughout the State Partnerships. The
task order contract was awarded in fall 1999. The duration
of the project is 30 months.
A draft report was received from the
contractor in May 2000; a final report on data development is expected
by the end of 2000.
Demonstration
Projects Required Under the
Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act
Sections 301 and 302 of the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement
Act of 1999 require SSA to conduct demonstration projects to evaluate
alternative methods of treating earnings under the DI program and
to improve program work incentives for disability beneficiaries.
Section 302 specifically requires SSA to test a benefit offset that
reduces benefits by $1 for every $2 of earnings above a specified
earnings level. The projects are intended to identify reductions
in Federal expenditures that may result from the permanent implementation
of such a program. The projects must also fulfill six additional
objectives identified in Section 302 of the legislation.
Preliminary work began in FY 2000 on
developing the research design for the benefit offset project.
In FY 2001, an SSA inter-component workgroup will complete a detailed
protocol that describes the resources and methods that will be required
to implement the demonstration projects, subject to the availability
of appropriations.
In addition, SSA is in the early stages
of planning the development of an early intervention demonstration
in which applicants are provided services and the support needed
to return to work at the earliest point feasible.
International
Study of Work Incapacity and Reintegration
The U.S. and five other countries (Germany,
Denmark, Sweden, Israel and the Netherlands) have participated in
a cross-national study of work incapacity under the auspices of
the International Social Security Association (ISSA). The
study was designed to identify those medical and non-medical interventions
that are most successful in helping persons who are out of work
due to a back condition to re-enter the labor force. Samples
for the U.S. national study were drawn from four cohorts:
Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries, Supplemental
Security Income (SSI) recipients, and recipients of Temporary Disability
Insurance (TDI) benefits from the States of California and New Jersey.
An evaluation of the U.S. experience
has been performed and a paper discussing the findings of the study
was presented at ISSA’s “Year 2000 International Research Conference
on Social Security” in Helsinki in September 2000. The article
will appear in the Social Security Bulletin later this year. The
U.S. experience of the sample of recipients of Temporary Disability
Insurance (TDI) benefits from the States of California and New Jersey
has also been incorporated into the ISSA cross-national study on
work incapacity. The book reporting the results of the cross-national
study has been completed and will be published by December 2000.
National Study on Health and Activity (NSHA)
NSHA is the most ambitious survey SSA has conducted in many years
and it will serve as a cornerstone for research on disability programs
and policies. The NSHA is designed to provide a better understanding
of the needs of working-age Americans (18-69) with disabilities.
It will be used to estimate and project the size of the potential
pool of people eligible for disability benefits under SSA’s programs,
provide a better sense of why some people with disabilities work
while others do not, examine the effects of the retirement age on
disability, and understand who may be induced to stop work and apply
for benefits if changes are made in the program.
To ensure that
NSHA implementation is effective and efficient and achieves satisfactory
results in data collection and project participation, the study
has begun with a 4-site, 5,000 participant pilot project, conducted
during calendar year 2000. During the pilot, the full range
of planned NSHA procedures at a limited number of sites is being
conducted to provide a test of the adequacy of the instruments,
to assess rates of response, and to fine tune operational procedures.
The database developed through NSHA
will be a major asset for researchers within SSA, in the Disability
Research Institute, as well as other interested researchers.
Disability
Research Institute
In January 1999, Vice President Gore announced at a Social Security
event in Sioux City, Iowa, that the Agency would establish a Disability
Research Institute (DRI). The mission of the Institute was
to plan and conduct a broad range of research that will develop
disability policy information. Fifteen months later in May
2000, SSA awarded a five-year cooperative research grant to the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to initiate DRI.
One major area of emphasis will be to assess successful return-to-work
and self-sufficiency strategies for disabled beneficiaries.
This will assist policymakers and the public in understanding disability
issues as they relate to programs under the Social Security Act
and people with disabilities. In addition to conducting research
in disability areas, the Institute will disseminate information
to the public and policymakers. The Institute will also train
and educate scholars in order to encourage promising researchers
to focus their efforts on disability issues and keep current practitioners
abreast of the most recent research available.
UIUC and their collaborating scholars
have begun a set of projects based on their first-year plans.
Specifically, they are assisting with important pre-design research
for the early intervention return-to-work project discussed above
and are studying labor force successes of disabled beneficiaries.
The
Challenge of the SSI Program
Drug
Addiction & Alcoholism (DA&A)
The original legislation passed by Congress in 1972 to create the
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program required that disabled
individuals, whose drug addiction and/or alcoholism (DAA) condition
was material to their disability, accept treatment if available
and have their benefits paid to a representative payee. These
two special requirements did not apply to SSI recipients who were
determined to be disabled independently of their substance addictions.
Nor did they apply to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI)
beneficiaries. All SSI cases in which alcohol and/or drug
addiction was material to the finding of disability were flagged
within SSA’s records with special DAA codes.
The Social Security Independence and
Program Improvements Act of 1994 (P.L. 103-296), enacted August
15, 1994, placed additional stringent requirements on individuals
disabled due to DAA. It required that any individual who is
receiving benefits based on a disability where drug addiction or
alcoholism is material to the finding of disability must accept
and comply with appropriate treatment, if available. Instances
of non-compliance with treatment requirements resulted in progressively
longer benefit suspensions. To monitor compliance, P.L. 103-296
required establishment of one or more referral and monitoring agencies
in each State.
In addition, this law limited SSI disability
benefits based on DAA to a total of 36 months regardless of compliance
with treatment requirements. Institutions were to be given
preference as representative payees and were allowed to receive
a portion of the beneficiaries’ benefits for these services.
Establishing referral and monitoring
agencies in all States, establishing a process for paying institutional
payees and identifying SSDI beneficiaries affected by the legislation
required a major administrative effort by SSA which it undertook
from 1994 to 1996.
The Contract with America Advancement
Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-121), enacted March 29, 1996, held that
an individual is not considered disabled if drug addiction or alcoholism
is a contributing factor material to a finding of disability.
In effect, this law eliminated all benefits for individuals disabled
solely due to DAA. It required that SSA notify 209,000 beneficiaries
that their benefits were to be terminated effective January 1997,
because their disability was based on their drug addiction or alcoholism.
About 141,000 beneficiaries appealed this notification and requested
a new medical determination. Benefits were terminated effective
January 1997 to the 68,000 beneficiaries who did not respond to
this notification.
After the new medical determinations,
another 55,000 beneficiaries lost eligibility to benefits.
About 86,000 beneficiaries were continued benefits based on another
disability. As many as 25,000 of those who lost eligibility
have since reapplied based on another disability. This does
not mean, however, that they have necessarily returned to the rolls.
After
implementation of P.L. 104-121, SSA’s Office of the Inspector General
(OIG) questioned whether SSA had accurately identified all beneficiaries
affected by the legislation in a report released in May 2000.
SSA immediately conducted a combination of continuing disability
reviews and other folder reviews of about 20,000 individuals and
terminated benefits to a few hundred additional beneficiaries because
drug addiction or alcoholism was found to be material to their disability.
Overall, SSA implemented the DAA legislation timely and terminated
benefits to more than 123,000 of the over 209,000 individuals originally
coded as DAA.
Welfare
Reform
For
SSA, “welfare reform” meant a change in the definition of childhood
disability and a limitation of eligibility to SSI for most
alien non-citizens. Both changes were problematic and required
many years of SSA working closely with customers and the advocate
community to reach agreement on implementing regulations and program
instructions. Although The
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
of 1996 (PRWORA)
is commonly known as the “welfare reform bill,” welfare reform for
SSA was actually achieved through a series of bills.
Even before he signed the 1996 bill,
President Clinton acknowledged the shortcomings in PRWORA and pledged
to rectify them. Commissioner Apfel has said, “Perhaps
the biggest imperfection of welfare reform was the fact that the
legislation barred support to legal immigrants. … The
American public understood … and Congress responded, making good
on the Presidential pledge to change what needed to be changed in
that legislation.” [4] The shortcomings
that the Administration saw in PRWORA were addressed in provisions
enacted in 1997 and 1998. These subsequent laws softened the
effects of PRWORA on the non-citizen community. A provision
of The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 added a new category to
the definition of “qualified alien” that had been established in
PRWORA. The Noncitizen Benefit Clarification and Other
Technical Amendment Act of 1998 extended the categories of non-citizens
who may be eligible for SSI, and extended eligibility to all non-citizens
who were receiving SSI benefits when PRWORA was passed in August
1996.
The years between the passage of PRWORA
in 1996 and the passage in 1998 of the technical corrections to
the bill were difficult ones for SSA, most especially for the frontline
employees working in field offices. They saw on a daily basis
the heart-wrenching personal tragedies resulting from the flaws
in PRWORA, but were powerless to help until Congress acted.
Childhood
Disability
The childhood disability provisions of PRWORA were enacted in part
as a response to an increase in the number of children receiving
SSI disability benefits beginning in the late 1980s and continuing
through the first half of the 1990s. These increases resulted
from theZebley decision in 1990, revisions to the childhood
mental listings, also in 1990, and a great increase in the number
of childhood applications due in part to SSA’s outreach efforts,
mandated by Congress in 1989.
In
October 1972, the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program was
created by the passage of Public Law 92-603, which defined childhood
disability as a “medically determinable physical or mental impairment
of comparable severity” to that which would disable an adult (i.e.,
prevent an adult from engaging in substantial gainful activity).
SSA’s final regulations implementing the law were based only on
medical listings in SSA’s regulations, without the further vocational
steps that were applicable in adult cases.
In 1990, the Supreme Court held, in
Sullivan v. Zebley, that childhood disability regulations
were inconsistent with the statutory standard of “comparable severity.”
The decision held that children were entitled to an individualized
functional analysis like that afforded adults.
In February 1991, SSA published interim
final rules, with a request for public comments, that addressed
the Supreme Court’s findings by introducing:
- A new step to determine if a child’s
impairment had more than a minimal effect on his/her ability to
function (the “severe” step found in the adult rules).
- A new approach to satisfying the
medical listings for children, called “functional equivalence.”
- An Individualized Functional Assessment
(IFA) for evaluating a child’s impairment(s) beyond the
medical listings to parallel the vocational steps applied in adult
cases and to satisfy the “comparable severity” criterion.
In 1993, SSA published revised final
rules for determining disability in children that responded to the
public’s comments. The revised rules included the “severe”
step, functional equivalence and the IFA.
As a result of these new rules, the
number of children receiving SSI benefits increased significantly.
Between 1990 and 1996, the number of children eligible for SSI benefits
increased from approximately 350,000 to more than 965,000.
At the same time, there were other factors contributing to the increase
in the size of the SSI childhood disability program. Besides
the increasing numbers of children living in poverty, SSI outreach
programs mandated by Congress and the issuance by SSA of new and
better rules for assessing mental disorders contributed to the increase
in the number of children on the beneficiary rolls.
Following the rising numbers of recipients
came reports of significant abuses of the programs. National
news reports featured stories of “crazy checks” and allegations
of children being “coached” by parents along with reports of some
children with only moderate impairments on the rolls.
In
August 1994, the Social Security Independence and Program Improvement
Act of 1994 (Public Law 103-296) established the National Commission
on Childhood Disability (NCCD) to review the SSI definition of childhood
disability and address related questions. The Commission was
headed by former Congressman James Slattery of Kansas. The
NCCD published its final report in November 1995 with several recommendations
for strengthening the SSI childhood disability program, but with
no unanimity on whether the definition of disability should be changed.
During the same period, GAO issued two reports on the post-Zebley
childhood rules, and the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI)
published its Report of the Committee on Childhood Disability, Restructuring
the SSI Disability Program for Children and Adolescents in January
1996.
All of this activity sparked a vigorous
debate about which children should receive SSI disability benefits,
whether those benefits should be cash or services, and whether the
funds for the program should be block-granted to the States.
Early legislation under consideration in Congress would have drastically
reduced the number of children receiving cash benefits.
It was estimated that H.R. 4, the Personal Responsibility
Act of 1995, passed by the House of Representatives on March 24, 1995,
would, over the course of five years, have adversely affected over
700,000 children by such changes. While there was general
agreement that the program needed to be refined, the scope of that
change was the subject of considerable debate. Many believed
that more moderate changes were appropriate to fine-tune the program.
In August 1996, Public Law 104-193 (PRWORA) included major
provisions changing the SSI childhood disability program.
PRWORA changed the definition of childhood
disability. It would no longer be based on “comparable severity”
to an adult standard. Instead, the revised standard provides
that a child is considered disabled only if he or she “has a medically
determinable physical or mental impairment which results in marked
and severe functional limitations.”
The legislation also eliminated the
IFA that SSA performed under the prior law and required SSA to re-evaluate
the eligibility of the cases of children who might be affected by
the law. The legislation did not eliminate the basic concept
of functional analysis for children and both the “not severe” step
and functional equivalence were retained.
Implementing this legislation was a
major undertaking for SSA. SSA had to identify, and then notify,
families potentially affected by the legislation. The legislation
required SSA to review (redetermine) the cases of approximately
288,000 children on the rolls and to complete those reviews
within one year of the bill’s enactment, August 26, 1996.
The PRWORA also required SSA to redetermine, under the adult rules,
each child’s eligibility within one year of attainment of age 18
and to conduct by age 1 a continuing disability review (CDR) for
each low birth-weight infant.
- Age-18 redeterminations are to be
done within one year of attainment of age 18 or in lieu of a CDR
when SSA concludes that the individual’s case is subject to a
redetermination.
- CDRs for low birth weight infants
are to be done by age 1 or later if SSA determines, at the time
of their initial determination, that the child’s impairment is
not expected to improve by age
In addition, other provisions of P.L.
105-33 proposed by President Clinton were included to protect the
Medicaid eligibility of children who lost SSI benefits through the
PRWORA redetermination process.
As
he promised in his Senate confirmation hearings in 1997, Commissioner
Kenneth Apfel’s first action upon becoming Commissioner was to order
a comprehensive review of SSA’s implementation of the PRWORA childhood
provisions. His primary concern was to see if the provisions
of the PRWORA affecting the childhood disability rules had been
implemented fairly and to tell the public, Congress, and the President
of his findings. The report, which was issued in December
1997, concluded that SSA and the State agencies had generally done
a good job, but also that there were certain areas of concern.
Among the actions SSA took to address those concerns, SSA:
- Issued
new notices to children who lost eligibility, providing an additional
chance to appeal and to request continued benefits while appealing;
and
- Re-reviewed
a significant portion of the cases redetermined pursuant to the
PRWORA.
When the new law
was passed, some analysts believed that about 185,000 children –
about 1 in 5 – would lose their eligibility for SSI. At the
time the regulations were originally issued, SSA had estimated that
about 135,000 children would lose eligibility after all appeals.
However, as a result of agency efforts to ensure fair and accurate
decisions, SSA now estimates less than 100,000 will actually be
found no longer eligible after all appeals. Besides having
defined a better, more valid standard for childhood disability,
SSA has initiated a dialogue that has reached out and involved as
many of those interested in these issues within the community as
possible. SSA has promised that this dialogue will continue
as this program and all of SSA’s programs continue to evolve.
In
response to public comments and case experience under the interim
final rules, SSA published revised final SSI childhood rules on
September 11, 2000. The effective date of the final regulations
is January 2, 2001. The final rules included a number of revisions
that address the public’s comments on the interim rules and that
were based on SSA’s experience deciding cases under those rules.
Among the key revisions, the final rules:
- Clarified and expanded factors that
must be considered in evaluating childhood disability; and
- Simplified and revised the functional
equivalence rules.
SSI
Eligibility For Noncitizens
Prior to August 22,1996, to be eligible for Supplemental Security
Income (SSI) benefits, an individual had to be a U.S. citizen or
national, an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or
an alien who was a permanent resident under color of law (PRUCOL).
Unlike lawful permanent resident status, PRUCOL was not a specific
immigration status, but a court-defined collection of 17 immigration
status and a general category that included any noncitizen in the
United States with the knowledge and permission of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service (INS) whom INS was not taking action
to deport. Thus, except for temporary visitors such as students
and undocumented noncitzens, most low-income, aged, blind, and disabled
noncitizens could become eligible for SSI before enactment of PRWORA.
The current SSI-eligible noncitizen
categories generally can be characterized as covering individuals
who were lawfully in the United States as of August 22, 1996, individuals
who are refugees or in refugee-like situations, and individuals
who have contributed to the country either by service in the military
or through extended periods of work.. These noncitizen SSI-eligible
categories are significantly more restrictive than previous law
and came about after years of protracted and often controversial
congressional debate. The restrictions were based on the concerns
that too many noncitizens were becoming eligible for SSI.
In
1995, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) found that:
“The
numbers of legal immigrants in the SSI aged program and the SSI
disabled program have increased dramatically. In 1982, 6 percent
of all SSI aged recipients were immigrants; by 1993, 28 percent
were immigrants. Immigrants constitute a much smaller percentage
of SSI disabled recipients—about 6 percent in 1993, having increased
from less than 2 percent in 1982. If the historical growth
rate in the number of legal immigrants on SSI continues, the number
could reach nearly 2 million by the year 2000.”
Provisions in PRWORA, enacted August
22, 1996, made significant changes in public assistance eligibility
for noncitizens. In order to be eligible for many forms of
public assistance, a noncitizen has to be a “qualified alien.”[5] However, the requirements on nonctizen
eligibility for SSI were even more restrictive. Not only would
a noncitizen have to be a “qualified alien” (e.g., lawful permanent
resident), he or she would have to meet additional eligibility requirements
(e.g. lawful permanent resident with 40 quarters of coverage).
Under PRWORA, SSI eligibility for “qualified
aliens” was limited to certain specific categories. In general,
these categories included noncitizens who have contributed to U.S.
society. For example, a noncitizen who is a “qualified alien”
may be potentially eligible for SSI if he/she is an active duty
member or an honorably discharged veteran of the U.S. armed forces.
This exception may also apply to a qualified alien who is the spouse,
unremarried widow(er), or dependent child of U.S. military personnel
as defined in this provision.
Another condition established by the
1996 legislation provided for SSI eligibility for LAPRs who have
40 qualifying quarters (i.e., 10 years) of earnings. Earnings
from the LAPR’s spouse or parent (while the LAPR is under age 18)
may be counted toward the 40-quarter requirement. There are
two restrictions that limit the applicability of this condition.
First, a quarter of work earned after December 31, 1996 may not
be counted towards the 40-quarter total if the LAPR or the individual
who earned the qualifying quarter received certain Federal means-tested
benefits during the period in question. In addition to these
eligibility conditions, the PRWORA established time-limited SSI
eligibility for 5 years for noncitizens who filed for SSI within
five years of being granted refugee status or refugee-like classifications,
such as asylee and deportation or removal withheld.
The
extent of the noncitizen restrictions in PROWRA can be best described
by Congress’ own estimates. According to Congressional Budget
Office estimates, nearly 500,000 of the approximately 750,000 noncitizens
on the SSI rolls would lose their eligibility in August 1997.
This mass suspension of aged, blind, and disabled individuals receiving
SSI had never happened before, and actions to prepare for these
unprecedented suspensions required significant effort by SSA.
More importantly, however, noncitizen SSI beneficiaries were faced
with severe economic hardship.
SSA
sent out nearly 800,000 notices to noncitizens warning that their
SSI benefits may end unless they met the new laws’ eligibility requirements
or if they had become U.S. citizens. The notices included
a fact sheet on citizenship that INS had provided SSA. In
addition, SSA and INS worked to match computer records to double-check
individuals’ immigration statuses so that individuals would not
be inadvertently suspended. SSA also set up six “mega-sites”
in areas of large noncitizen populations to provide noncitizens
with information and to help them obtain proof of their immigration
statuses.
SSA
field offices were inundated with distraught noncitizens and SSA
employees had to tell many noncitizens that their benefits likely
would end before the end of the year. Field office employees
heard many heartbreaking stories about individuals who had been
in the United States for many years who had no relatives or other
means of support if their SSI benefits were to end.
SSA’s
Acting Commissioner, John B. Callahan, traveled around the United
States visiting SSA field offices, community centers, and other
gatherings of noncitizens listening to their stories and assuring
them that the Administration was doing everything possible to make
sure that individuals would not lose their SSI eligibility.
SSA also worked closely with immigration advocacy groups, States,
and local government agencies to assist these very vulnerable noncitizens.
The
President reiterated his concern about the noncitizens provisions
in the 1996 welfare reform bill during his 1997 State of the Union
address:
“And
we must join together to do something else, too, something both
Republican and Democratic governors have asked us to do: to
restore basic health and disability benefits when misfortune strikes
immigrants who came to this country legally, who work hard, pay
taxes, and obey the law. To do otherwise is simply unworthy
of a great nation of immigrants.”
Throughout
the spring of 1997, the Administration and congressional leadership
engaged in extensive negotiations that culminated on May 2, 1997,
with the announcement that they had reached an agreement for a balanced
budget. This historic bipartisan balanced budget agreement
included the restoration of SSI and Medicaid eligibility for all
disabled legal immigrants who are or become disabled and who enter
the United States prior to August 23, 1996. The provision
was included in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997.
Another provision in The Balanced
Budget Act extended the period of time-limited eligibility for
refugees, asylees, and individuals in refugee-like status from five
to seven years in order to give such individuals more time to file
for U.S. citizenship before their benefits ended. In addition,
two more categories of time-limited noncitizens who could be eligible
for SSI for seven years: Cuban and Haitian entrants and Amerasian
Immigrants.
Finally, the Balanced Budget Act included
a grandfathering clause to mitigate the effects of welfare reform
on noncitizens who were SSI recipients at the time of enactment
of PRWORA. Under this provision, qualified aliens who are
lawfully residing in the U.S. and who were receiving SSI on August
22, 1996 may receive SSI benefits after that date.
In
summary, the Balanced Budget Act restored SSI eligibility for an
estimated 75,000 individuals who were lawfully residing in the United
States on August 21, 1996, but who had not filed for SSI before
then and continued SSI eligibility for nearly 300,000 noncitizens
who were receiving SSI as of that date.
However,
even after enactment of the Balanced Budget Act, there was still
one group of noncitizen SSI beneficiaries who were at risk of losing
their benefits because they were not “qualified.” The welfare
reform legislation temporarily continued the SSI eligibility of
these so-called “nonqualified” noncitizens on the SSI rolls until
August 22, 1997, and the date was further extended until September
30, 1998 by the Balanced Budget Act.
As
the date that nonqualified noncitizens would lose their SSI benefits
approached, a concern arose that SSA’s records might not have accurately
reflected the current immigration status of some of the individuals
shown as nonqualified and many may actually have been citizens or
qualified noncitizens. Although SSA had notified all noncitizens
on the SSI rolls several times about the changes in the law, informing
them of the new eligibility criteria and urging them to contact
their local SSA offices to update the SSI record concerning their
immigration status, some did not do so.
As
a result of these concerns, SSA conducted a statistically valid
sample survey in 1998 to determine the extent that SSI records of
the “nonqualified” noncitizens accurately reflected their current
citizenship or immigration status. The study found that a
large percentage of the “nonqualified” noncitizens actually were
in an immigration category that would have made them “qualified,”
but for a number of reasons, they had not contacted SSA.
The
study results were sent to congressional staff and convinced the
appropriate members of Congress to also “grandfather” nonqualified
noncitizens who had received SSI prior to the enactment of PRWORA.
The
Ways and Means Committee report explained the reason for its supporting
the provision:
“This
[grandfathering] will protect those who are in fact citizens or
qualified aliens as well as those who could, perhaps only with great
difficulty, adjust their immigration status in order to maintain
benefits. Most importantly, however, this measure will protect
those who, due to age or infirmity, are incapable of documenting
their true immigration status and, thus, would have no opportunity
to verify their eligibility for continued benefits.”
Commissioner
Apfel provided the Administration’s views on the grandfathering
provision.
“The Clinton Administration
supports the effort to preserve SSI and Medicaid eligibility for
these hardship cases. Chairman Shaw and Representative Levin
have shown a great deal of compassion for these vulnerable individuals,
and I applaud them and thank them for their efforts.”
The
provision was enacted on October 28, 1998, in the Noncitizen
Benefit Clarification and Other Technical Amendments Act of 1998 and protected the
SSI benefits of approximately 3,400 noncitizens.
Even
though none of the noncitizens who received SSI benefits prior to
the enactment of welfare reform lost their SSI eligibility, many
aged, blind, and disabled noncitizens, including most lawful permanent
residents who entered the United States after August 1996, will
never be eligible for SSI under current law unless they become U.S.
citizens. The Administration successfully restored SSI eligibility
for 380,000 aged, blind, and disabled noncitizens. However,
the President’s proposal to restore benefits to new lawful permanent
residents who enter the United States after August 1996 has failed
to pass the Congress.
Commissioner Apfel sent to Congress,
on August 9, 1999 and June 2, 2000, draft proposals that provide
SSI to certain immigrants who lawfully enter the United States after
August 22, 1996. The bills would provide SSI benefits to needy
immigrants who become blind or disabled after they enter the country
and to children who enter with a disability. The 106th
Congress did not take any action on these proposals.
Sponsor-to-Alien Deeming-SSI Eligibility
PRWORA (along with the Immigration Reform Act of 1996, Public Law
104-208) addressed concerns that the SSI program was being abused
by noncitizens who gained entry into the country with the intention
of receiving public assistance, despite pledges made by relatives
or friends agreeing to provide financial support. Unenforceable
financial support agreements had proven ineffective. To ensure
that noncitizens be self-reliant, in accordance with national immigration
policy, the Clinton Administration favored the approach of making
the sponsors’ commitment of support a legally binding contract.
Under
PRWORA, a noncitizen otherwise eligible for SSI who has an immigration
sponsor and who recently entered the country with a legally enforceable
affidavit of support (as now required by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service), generally is not eligible for SSI. This is because
all of the sponsor’s income and resources are now considered to
be the noncitizen’s for purposes of the SSI means test. Accordingly,
the noncitizen generally would not meet the income and resource
requirements of the SSI program. This attribution of the sponsor’s
income and resources to the noncitizen is referred to as “deeming.”
Deeming continues until the noncitizen becomes a naturalized citizen
of the United States or can be credited with 40 qualifying quarters
from a spouse’s or parent’s work. If a sponsored noncitizen
receives any means-tested public benefits during the deeming period,
the sponsor is liable for repayment of the benefits and subject
to legal action if benefits are not repaid.
The
new deeming provisions are significantly more restrictive than under
previous law because they serve to:
- Lengthen the deeming period (previously
3 years); and,
- Hold sponsors more responsible.
Under
the Immigration Reform Act of 1996, exceptions to deeming are made
in cases in which the sponsored non-citizen is indigent, or when
a sponsored non-citizen or his or her child or parent has been battered
or subject to extreme cruelty.
Social
Security Benefits For Noncitizens
The 1996 welfare reform legislation also affected payment of benefits
under title II of the Social Security Act. Title II benefits
include retirement, survivors and disability insurance benefits,
as well as benefits for auxiliaries of disabled or retired workers.
For applications filed on or after December 1, 1996, a claimant
had to be a U.S. citizen, national or a lawfully present alien in
order to receive payment of monthly title II benefits. This
provision, unlike the SSI provisions of welfare reform, affects
payment of the title II monthly benefit but does not affect eligibility
(entitlement) to that benefit. Thus, a noncitizen who is not
lawfully present may beentitled to a monthly Social
Security benefit, but the benefit payment will not be disbursed
for any month he/she is not lawfully present in the United States.
SSI
Outreach
The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program was established to
provideassistance to individuals who
have limited income and resources and who are age 65 or older, blind,
or disabled, including children. The Social Security Administration
(SSA), which administers the SSI program, has always sought to ensure
the fullest possible participation among those eligible to receive
benefits.
Between
fiscal year (FY) 1990 and FY 1996, Congress provided funds to SSA
for the SSI Outreach Demonstration Program. The purpose of
the SSI Outreach Demonstration Program was to develop and test innovative
ways to involve outside organizations, in cooperation with SSA,
in reaching potentially eligible individuals and assisting them
in fulfilling the requirements of the SSI application process.
Congress discontinued providing grants for SSI outreach in FY 1997.
SSA
funded 82 organizations between FY 1990 and FY 1992 to conduct outreach
through cooperative agreements with SSA. Outreach activities
for these projects served two main purposes: to identify those
who might be eligible and refer them to SSA and to provide post-referral
assistance in the completion of the application requirements.
In
FY 1994, the final group of 52 projects was awarded multi-year funding
by SSA. These projects shifted their focus primarily to application
assistance rather than identification and referral. The outreach
methodologies for these projects identified potentially eligible
individuals and approaches to facilitate the process of applying
for benefits and ensuring that benefits continued through other
programs and services (e.g., the provision of representative payee
services). In addition, the methodologies provided for activities
that would include referrals to social services or other benefit
programs (e.g., Qualified Medicare Beneficiary and Specified Low-Income
Medicare Beneficiary (QMB/SLMB)) where appropriate.
SSA believed that a large number of
individuals were potentially eligible for SSI benefits but had not
become eligible for them due to specific barriers that existed and
prevented application. Some of the anticipated barriers included,
but were not
limited to:
- Lack of correct information about
the SSI program;
- Inability to handle one’s own affairs,
which may require the assistance of another individual in making
application and when the applicant became eligible to receive
the benefits as a representative payee;
- Difficulty with reading and/or speaking
English;
- Disabilities which limited mobility
and connection with social service organizations;
- Fear/stigma associated with disability
such as AIDS, mental illness, mental retardation, and substance
abuse;
- Homelessness, often associated with
mental illness or drug addiction/alcoholism;
- Distrust or fear of government bureaucracy;
and,
- The perceived welfare stigma of
receiving SSI benefits.
The goal of the projects was to demonstrate
effective, ongoing, and transferable approaches to assisting potential
SSI eligibles through the SSI application process. The approaches
tested included targeted mailings, aged network collaborations,
and intake modifications one-stop service strike teams, outreach
workers technical assistance with discharge planning, and other
innovative methodologies designed to address other specific barriers
to eligibility.
SSA gave special
emphasis to targeting potentially eligible individuals among the
following populations:
- Those living in areas of the United
States with a high incidence of incomes at or below the Federal
poverty level;
- The elderly (age 65 or over);
- Members of minority or ethnic groups;
- Blind or disabled persons, including
those living with HIV/AIDS, mental illness, mental retardation,
or substance abuse problems; and,
- Disabled persons, including high
school special education students, who may be working or who were
interested in working and might still qualify for some benefits.
The
outreach projects focused on different approaches to reach the target
populations. For example, some projects tested a public information
approach using door-to-door canvassing, as well as newspapers, magazines,
radio and television mass media. Others identified potentially
eligible individuals and provided services such as transportation
to a local SSA field office (FO), translation services, or serving
as a representative payee where needed.
Some projects took a case management
approach by assisting individuals through the SSI application process.
In addition to identifying those who might be eligible, they also
helped in the collection of information in order to establish a
potential applicant’s eligibility, obtained supporting medical documentation,
or provided transportation to medical examinations.
Other
projects used a coalition-building approach where they networked
with other agencies that assisted them in performing public information,
case management, or other services, primarily through referral.
Most projects used some combination of approaches.
SSA prepared monthly reports that were
shared with both SSA and grantee project staff. The following
figures report the total number of individuals screened for eligibility
and the numbers of SSI applications and awards that resulted for
all projects.
CATEGORY
|
TOTAL
NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS REACHED
|
Clients
interviewed (intake screenings) |
123,209
|
SSI
applications |
55,704
|
SSI
awards |
21,967
|
Because of some technical and administrative
problems on the part of several projects, SSA believes that the
above totals under-report the actual number of clients contacted
and provided assistance by the SSI Outreach Demonstration Program
projects.
The SSI Outreach Demonstration Program
found that many outside agencies and organizations are willing and
capable of helping SSA reach and assist needy individuals in securing
benefits. In addition, SSA found that some organizations were
very committed to continuing at least some aspects of their outreach
activities after SSA funding ended. While providing application
forms, public informational materials and training by SSA staff
are valuable assets; however, many organizations must have some
outside funding available in order to provide outreach services
to their clients.
Other Program Challenges
Changes
in Coverage Thresholds For Domestic Employees: “The Nanny Tax”
Early in the Clinton Administration, a few high profile cases regarding
compliance with the “nanny tax” led Congress to simplify the requirements
for reporting wages paid to nannies, maids, and other domestic employees
for the purposes of paying the employer’s share of Social Security,
Medicare, and Federal unemployment taxes. The President signed
the Social Security Domestic Employment Reform Act (P.L. 103-387)
in October 1994. The goal of the new law was to reduce the
administrative burden on individuals who hire household workers,
to eliminate tax liability when employment is occasional or of short
duration, and to help insure that household workers receive the
Social Security coverage to which they are entitled.
When domestic workers
were first covered by the Social Security Amendments of 1950, lawmakers
wanted to help insure these workers for Social Security benefits
while minimizing administrative burdens on individuals who hire
occasional household help. The Social Security Amendments
of 1950 provided coverage for domestic workers if they earned at
least $50 in a quarter and were “regularly” employed, which was
defined as working for an employer in at least 24 days in a quarter.
At the time, the Committee on Finance noted that employees in domestic
service, “whose need for the protection of social insurance is very
great,” would generally be covered if they were “regular” workers,
while casual or intermittent workers would be excluded. The
$50 limit equaled the amount workers needed to earn a quarter of
coverage at the time.
In 1954, the Congress
removed the 24-day rule, leaving just the $50-per-quarter coverage
threshold. The Social Security Amendments of 1977 increased
the amount of earnings needed to achieve a quarter of coverage,
but did not increase the $50-per-quarter coverage threshold for
domestic workers. In 1994, a worker needed wages of $620 to
earn one quarter of coverage. Between 1950 and 1994, the declining
real value of the coverage threshold caused employers of occasional
household help to incur Social Security tax liability.
In addition to
the increasing number of domestic employees falling below the relatively
low threshold, the administrative requirements associated with compliance
were extensive, including both quarterly and annual reports that
were separate from the employer’s income tax reports. Both
of these factors contributed to taxpayer non-compliance. Prior
to enactment of P.L. 103-387, estimates indicated that less than
25 percent of employers of domestic workers reported wages paid
to these employees.
The Internal Revenue
Service first recommended “nanny tax” reforms to simplify payment
of employment taxes on domestic employees in 1991. Congress
approved these recommendations on two separate occasions during
the 102nd Congress. President Bush vetoed the omnibus
tax bills in which they were included.
The law signed
by President Clinton provided a balance between administrative simplicity
and insuring domestic workers could become covered under Social
Security. Mr. Robert J. Myers, former Chief Actuary of the
Social Security Administration, provided testimony on the Senate
version of the legislation (which had a coverage threshold equal
to a quarter of coverage) and said it would “provide reasonable
Social Security protection for this category of workers, while at
the same time greatly reducing the administrative burden on the
employer involved.” He also said, “coverage compliance would
be greatly improved.”
P.L. 103-387 reduced
both paperwork and the number of domestic employees for whom employers
would need to pay payroll taxes. Instead of filing separate
reports, employers would include information on payroll taxes paid
for domestic employees in their own income tax returns. The
new law also raised the coverage threshold from $50 per calendar
quarter to $1,000 per calendar year. The coverage threshold,
currently $1,200 per calendar year, is indexed in $100 increments
based on wage growth.
The Social Security
Administration (SSA) has made special efforts since the law’s enactment
to inform the public about the need to pay FICA taxes for domestic
employees. The Agency’s Office of Communication provided a
fact sheet on domestic employees, news releases and a radio announcement
for use by SSA field offices and local media, and articles and reminders
in various publications.
Although the Agency
has worked to encourage compliance with the “nanny tax,” the Agency
has also expressed concern that the coverage threshold is now too
high and domestic employees, especially those with multiple employers,
may not be covered under Social Security. For example, a maid
who cleans three different houses in 2000 and receives annual wages
of $1,000 from each employer would receive no credit under
Social Security. SSA has proposed setting the coverage threshold
for domestic workers equal to the amount needed for a quarter of
coverage. This would require some additional wage reporting
by employers. However, the reporting simplifications enacted
in 1994 should minimize the burden on employers. This change
would allow more domestic workers to become insured for Social Security
benefits.
Title
VIII
The “Foster Care Independence Act of 1999” (P.L.
106-169), was signed by President Clinton on December 14, 1999.
Section 251 of this law introduced a new cash benefit program, “Special
Benefits for Certain World War II (WWII) Veterans,” to be administered
under a new title VIII of the Social Security Act. This program
permits certain WWII veterans who are eligible for Supplemental
Security Income (SSI) in December 1999 and in the month they apply
under the new program to receive special veterans benefits abroad
(equal to 75 percent of the SSI federal benefit rate) should they
decide to relinquish their U.S. residence (and rights to SSI) by
living outside the United States.
Qualifying
For Special Veterans Benefits (SVB)
To qualify for SVB payments, veterans
must have served in the active U.S. military, naval or air service
during WWII. (This includes the service of Filipino veterans
in the organized military forces of the Philippines while those
forces were in the service of the U.S. Armed Forces or in organized
guerrilla forces under the auspices of the U.S. military.)
In addition, veterans must have been at least age 65 on December
14, 1999 (when P.L. 106-169 was enacted) and must have been eligible
for SSI payments in both the month of enactment and the month they
apply for SVB payments.
Despite meeting the military service
age and SSI requirements, veterans may not qualify if their monthly
income from other benefits (such as annuities, pensions, retirement
or disability benefits) equals or exceeds 75 percent of the current
SSI federal benefit rate. (For example, based on the January
2000 federal benefit rate of $512, the veteran’s total other monthly
benefit income must be less than $384.)
As mentioned above, qualified veterans
can receive an SVB payment for each month they reside outside the
United States, equal to 75 percent of the current SSI federal benefit
rate less the amount of their monthly benefit income. (For
purposes of this benefit, “outside the United States” means outside
the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and the Northern Mariana
Islands.)
SVB
Beneficiaries
While the SVB program extends broadly
to U.S. veterans with active WWII service, those applying for and
receiving SVB payments are, for the most part, Filipino veterans
of WWII. Generally, their eligibility for SVB is based on
service in the organized military forces of the Philippines while
those forces were in the service of the U.S. armed forces or service
in organized guerrilla forces in the Philippines under the auspices
of the U.S. military. Unlike other U.S. veterans of WWII,
veterans of those Filipino forces have never been granted the right
to a U.S. veteran’s benefit on the basis of this type of service
alone. In fact, legislators intentionally included SVB provisions
in P.L. 106-169 in an effort to address this situation and other
concerns raised by advocates for Filipino WWII veterans regarding
compensation believed due them, but never received. As a result,
the law enables elderly Filipino veterans to depart the United States
and return to family and homeland without entirely sacrificing the
monetary support they received in the form of SSI payments while
living in the United States. Estimates of veterans that may
benefit from the program in the long term have ranged from approximately
1,400 to 2,500.
As a counterbalance to the proposed
benefit program, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that
SVB provisions would also lead to a reduction of SSI outlays and
spending in the Medicaid and food stamp programs by an overall $43
million over the 2000-2004 period. This effect arises from
the established policy that SSI and other types of U.S. benefits
are stopped once the veteran leaves the United States and begins
to receive SVB payments. (Generally, veterans must leave the
United States within four months of qualifying for SVB payments
in order to receive payments.)
SVB
Payment Initiation
P.L. 106-169 mandated that SVB payments
be initiated for months after September 2000 or sooner, if administratively
feasible. Realizing that potential beneficiaries under the
new program were aged and eager to return to the Philippines as
soon as possible, SSA accelerated the start of the SVB claims-taking
process to April 3, 2000. Payment to the first SVB beneficiary,
Mrs. Lolita Soberano, was made on May 1, 2000.
Mrs. Soberano, a former nurse and SSI
recipient while residing in New Jersey, was age 73 at the time of
her entitlement to SVB. She had served in the Philippine guerrilla
forces during WWII. The SSA Division of the VARO staff in
Manila handled Mrs. Soberano’s claim and conducted a “ceremonial”
interview with her, at which time they photographed her. (Her
photograph is attached.) During her interview, Mrs. Soberano
expressed joy as an elderly individual at the opportunity afforded
her under P.L. 106-169 to return to the Philippines and be reunited
with her husband (who had been unable to accompany her to the United
States) while maintaining a decent standard of living as a result
of her SVB payments.
Between April and September 2000, SSA
took over 2300 SVB claims from Filipino veterans and awarded payments
in approximately 560 of those claims.
The
Challenge Of The Future
Strategic
Management
SSA has a long history of looking toward
the future. Strategic planning at SSA has been the overarching
tool that has allowed SSA, over the years, to address issues created
by increasing workloads, changing customer expectations, limited
resources and technological innovation. Strategic planning
has helped marshal SSA’s forces to accomplish its mission and attain
its vision. Strategic planning has undergone an evolution
at SSA during the years of the Clinton Administration, and every
plan produced improves upon the prior one in important ways.
The earliest document considered to
be a strategic plan was the Master Plan for the Development of the
Future SSA Process, published in 1975. The Master Plan was
produced in response to the legislation enacting the SSI program.
The assignment of program administration to SSA occasioned a mass
hiring of employees into SSA, and it also highlighted the critical
role that automated systems played—and would be required to play
in the future—in SSA’s ability to accomplish its mission work.
One independent analysis published in 1993 asserted that “virtually
all the key systems and work process goals of the Master Plan have
been achieved through the continuity of plans and design that followed
[the Master Plan’s] demise.” [6]
Numerous
planning documents that provided direction to staff and/or responded
to external requirements were produced by SSA in the years to follow.
The utility of many of these plans was limited due to their relatively
narrow scope and the lack of integration among them. The first
Agency Strategic Plan (ASP), SSA 2000, published in 1988, improved
SSA’s overall planning posture by providing a single vision of the
future, capsulated in the Agency’s first mission statement.
SSA 2000 was ahead of its time in government in terms of taking
a comprehensive, business-wide look at the future of the organization.
The plan drove action: SSA’s national 800 number is a direct
result of this plan.
Unfortunately,
SSA 2000 also had some weaknesses. The delivery of anticipated
enabling technology fell far behind a too-ambitious schedule.
Some program changes required congressional action. And, while
the plan drove action, the action it drove was isolated and project-specific.
The ultimate vision of the plan was lost amidst the attention paid
to a handful of special projects whose overall value to the Agency
might not have been the highest of the lot. Further, the Agency’s
limitations in facilitating implementation reduced the plan’s utility
as a guide to the future.
In
order to address the weaknesses in the planning process, SSA created
a Unified Planning System (UPS) in 1992 to benefit the Agency in
both internal management processes and in relationships with external
stakeholders, including the public, advocacy groups, the Congress,
and other “higher monitoring authorities.”
The
UPS incorporates SSA’s strategic planning process, under which the
Agency Strategic Plan (ASP) is developed and maintained, with the
tactical-level action-oriented Planning and Budgeting System (PBS).
It provides direction to all supplemental resource and subordinate
component-level operational planning activities.
The
two principle planning components of the UPS are the ASP and the
PBS. The ASP presents the strategic direction that SSA has
set for itself. The ASP articulates the mission of the Agency,
surveys the operating environment, sets forth the Agency’s service
delivery goals and objectives, provides appropriate strategic guidance,
creates a vision of the future and identifies the critical areas
that will receive initial priority attention. In short, the
ASP points the way; it is the guiding light for all other planning
activities in the Agency.
Within the PBS, the direction set forth
in the ASP is translated into a wide variety of Agency-level, shorter-term,
tactical-level plans. By providing the bridge between long-range
planning at the strategic level and shorter term planning at the
tactical level, the PBS provides the vehicle through which SSA’s
programmatic and administrative budgets can be crafted to reflect
the resources needed. The PBS, in short, helps to ensure that
SSA will fully realize the vision set forth in the ASP and ultimately
attain its service delivery goals and objectives.
The
Social Security Strategic Plan: A Framework
For The Future
Mission of the
Agency
"To administer national
Social Security legislation in an equitable, effective, efficient
and caring manner"
Excerpt from "The Social Security Strategic Plan: Framework
for the Future" (1991)
|
SSA’s
last ASP prior to the inauguration of President Clinton was The
Social Security Strategic Plan: A Framework for the Future
(1991). While the major operational elements of the new vision—which
stretched out to 2005—remained the same as in the SSA 2000 plan,
there were major differences. The plan addressed the Agency’s
values in terms of its commitments to the public, to employees,
and to effective management. Second, a slate of service-delivery
objectives presented, for the first time in a public document, a
coherent set of service standards. Third, the analysis of
service-delivery performance led the Agency to identify five priority
areas that were used as the foundation of all implementation planning
for the next several years.
The Framework ASP received high marks
from many stakeholders, and some criticism. The major complaint
has been the Agency’s failure to determine, using explicit information-gathering
processes, what the public wanted in terms of service in setting
service-delivery objectives.
The bridge activity between the strategic
plan and tactical planning was the development of transition guidance;
that is, a document identifying all of the major activities that
would have to be pursued between 1991 (the plan date) and the year
2005. In 1992, an intercomponent group developed an Agency
Transition Guidance Document that served as the basis for 7-year
tactical plans covering the five priorities in the strategic plan.
The development of an ongoing process
for planning and decisionmaking made this plan, much like the SMP
before it, a document that has supported an integrated consideration
of the activities being pursued at SSA and helped to make better
use of limited resources. Unlike the SMP, however, the Framework
was focused on the business of the Agency. The choice of Agency
priorities clearly resulted from an overall look at performance
in all aspects of SSA’s mission work; and the plan clearly requires
not just the application of technology to improve business processes,
but also the creation of improvements to the processes themselves.
1993: The Watershed Year
Without doubt, 1993 marked the watershed in SSA’s strategic planning
efforts. First, the Government Performance and Results Act
(GPRA), signed into law by President Clinton on August 12, 1993,
mandated federal agencies to submit long-range (at least five years)
strategic plans focusing on results, quality and customer service—outcomes
rather than outputs, effectiveness rather than efficiency.
GPRA required a quantum leap forward in federal strategic planning
and performance measurement, even for SSA.
On September 11, 1993, President Clinton
issued Executive Order 12862, (Setting Customer Performance Standards)
directing public officials to “embark upon a revolution within
the Federal Government … to provide service to the public that matches
or exceeds the best service available in the private sector.”
EO 12862 supported GPRA by requiring each federal agency to publish
a customer service plan that included customer service standards.
Because GPRA required
drastic changes in the way government conducted business, the Congress
provided for pilot projects to allow agencies time to “practice”
this new approach to measurement. SSA’s history in planning
and performance measurement provided the wealth of experience and
solid foundation that encouraged the Agency to volunteer for inclusion
in the first GPRA piloting activities in 1994. The Office
of Management and Budget selected SSA as one of the first agencies
to pilot performance management projects. SSA and other designated
agencies were tasked with undertaking the preparation of annual
performance plans and program performance reports for one or more
of the major functions and/or operations of the agency.
The appointment
of Shirley S. Chater as Commissioner of Social Security in October
1993 provided the second major impetus to new and more complex strategic
planning at SSA. Commissioner Chater’s strong support of the
concept of strategic decisionmaking helped evolve the thinking of
SSA’s strategic team about the value of planning. SSA’s promotion
of the idea of strategic thinking is based largely on her insights
that “strategic” does not only mean “long-range” and that good strategic
direction can result from any Agency interaction, not just from
formal executive activity focused on providing it.
1994: Piloting Performance Measurement
In January 1994, SSA revised its three Agency-level strategic goals
as follows:
- Rebuild the Public Confidence in
Social Security – “Public belief in the fundamental philosophy
that underlies the system, trust that Social Security will be
there for them when they need it, and confidence in the Agency’s
role in administering Social Security Insurance and Supplemental
Security Income programs are critical to the continued well-being
of the system. As a consequence, SSA will take the steps
necessary to make its customers more aware of the individual and
collective value of the programs administered by the Agency and
demonstrate the fiscal soundness of the system now and into the
foreseeable future.” [7]
- Provide World-Class Service – “SSA
has a responsibility to provide its customers with service that
is of the highest quality possible – not just “good” service,
but “world class” service. Quite simply, this means that
SSA will provide service equal or superior to that provided anywhere
in the comparable public or private sector. Moreover, SSA
intends to provide uniformly high quality service to its customers
regardless of whether they choose to conduct their business with
SSA in person, by the phone, through the mail or by any electronic
means that is or may become available.”
- Create a Nurturing Environment for
SSA Employees – “To provide the public with the service they need
and expect requires knowledgeable, sensitive and dedicated employees.
Therefore, SSA must establish and maintain an organizational environment
that attracts employees possessing these attributes, encourages
their retention and facilitates their personal and professional
growth within the system. Such an environment provides not
only the tools and physical resources necessary for effective
and efficient job performance, but also the proper degree of trust
and personal empowerment that leads to peak performance both individually
and organizationally.”
SSA’s Fiscal Year 1994 Abbreviated
Annual Performance Plan (APP) was forwarded to the Department of
Health and Human Services for submission to the Office of Management
and Budget on March 31, 1994. Performance targets were selected
to cover the key disability workloads and production rates normally
used by SSA in its annual budget requests, including DDS initial
claims and total cases and the OHA hearings. These workloads
were and remain the most visible indicators of SSA’s performance
in applying its resources to the disability case and appeals processing
backlogs then existing. The targets were expressed in terms
of volumes of cases to be processed in FY 1994, including the increase
in caseloads processed over FY 1993.
In preparation for the issuance of
the FY 1995 plan, SSA conducted an extensive effort to meet the
requirements of Executive Order (EO) 12862 (Setting Customer Performance
Standards). On September 30, 1994, the Agency issued its Annual
Performance Plan for FY 1995. This plan, like the abbreviated
pilot project plan for FY 1994, focused on the disability program
and the appeals process—still SSA’s major programmatic priorities
as set forth in the 1991 ASP. Unlike the FY 1994 plan, however,
the new plan provided a broader range of measures for disability
and appeals-related performance outputs and outcomes. A total
of 27 performance measures were adopted, of which only 13 were strictly
related to the disability and hearings workloads.
Each of the
performance measures in SSA’s FY 1995 Pilot Project Annual Performance
Plan was supported by SSA’s basic administrative account, the “Limitation
on Administrative Expenses” (LAE) account. Two key components
of the FY 1995 LAE appropriation were the Disability Investment
Funding and the Automation Investment Funding. The first was
vital to the processing of the numbers of disability cases and hearings
projected by the 1995 plan; the second was vital to all of SSA’s
performance goals, since it provided funding for individual employee
workstations. This second initiative, known as the IWS/LAN
initiative, included hardware, software, capital resources and skills
training.
Over the years, SSA had, in many respects,
anticipated the requirements of GPRA in terms of strategic planning
and management and in terms of performance management and reporting.
The prevalence in the FY 1995 APP of Input and Output measures and
the lack of already measured Outcomes demonstrated that SSA still
had a distance to travel. The Agency understood what was needed
and anticipated that, for FY 1997, a performance plan and budget
submission could be developed that not only met GPRA requirements,
OMB expectations and Congressional needs, but would also reflect
the important new directions to be taken by an independent SSA.
1995: Planning in an Independent Agency
On August 15, 1994, President Clinton signed legislation passed
unanimously in both houses of Congress to make SSA an independent
agency. On March 31, 1995, the change took effect. Underscoring
the importance of strategic planning in an independent agency, Commissioner
Chater reorganized and consolidated various planning elements into
a single component responsible for strategic planning activities.
The Strategic Planning Staff in the Office of the Commissioner was
combined with the Office of Information Resource Management and
Disability Reengineering planning staff to form the new Office of
Strategic Management (OSM) within the Office of the Commissioner.
The responsibilities of OSM include agency strategic and business
planning and business process reengineering activities.
Up to this point, Agency plans had
never been compiled into any document (other than the budget) that
could be used to relate what SSA planned to spend with what SSA
planned to accomplish in terms of service objectives or business
process improvement.
SSA’s
General Business Plan: Fiscal Years 1996-1999
Under the Commissioner’s guidance,
SSA crafted the General Business Plan: Fiscal Years 1996-1999
(GBP), a document that presented the near-term vision of SSA’s future
and produced the “story around the budget.”
In short, SSA’s first General Business
Plan presented how the Agency would pursue its goals, improve its
stewardship of the programs administered, and provide employees
with the tools and training that would empower them to improve performance.
Rather than detail the many ways in
which SSA successfully delivered its services, the GBP focused on
those activities undertaken to improve service. The overall
business approach to addressing service improvement incorporated
three related approaches. When taken as a whole, the business
approach was designed to allow SSA to keep up with workload growth,
overcome resource constraints, and improve service in the following
targeted areas: streamlining of the organization (i.e., reducing
management and staff positions), reengineering of the disability
process, and automation/continuous improvement.
In this first General Business Plan,
published in February 1995, SSA declared that its goal for each
of the core business processes and service delivery interfaces was
“nothing short of world-class service.” [8]
The FY 1996-99 GBP did not identify any of the areas as fully attaining
world-class levels by FY 1999, since the paths from then current
service levels to world-class levels were not yet fully detailed.
The GBP indicated that additional work
was required in every aspect of SSA’s core business processes and
service delivery interfaces in order to produce full world-class
service. SSA projected that it would maintain or improve service
in all aspects of its business through streamlining, reengineering
and automation/continuous improvement.
The format of the General Business
Plan, as expected, satisfied the information needs of the Congress
and a number of other stakeholders. It also provided essential
information to SSA employees by reminding them of the key change
initiatives in which they and their colleagues were engaged and
why they were important to success as an Agency. It helped
SSA managers think strategically about the relationship between
the decisions they were making day to day and the ultimate aims
of the organization. And the very process of putting the document
together served as an integrating mechanism to help SSA’s leaders
understand how the activities of their respective components were
working together to move SSA forward. In fact, the utility
of the plan to SSA led the Agency to install it as a regular feature
of the PBS. Because the components of the Business Plan in
conjunction with the components of the ASP satisfied most of the
requirements of the strategic plan and annual performance plan required
by GPRA, SSA determined to continue publishing the BP annually.
SSA continued to
participate as a “total agency pilot” under the performance measurement
and reporting pilot project provisions of GPRA. On May 18,
1995, the Agency submitted to OMB its FY 1996 Annual Performance
Plan. This pilot APP was based on the 1991 Agency Strategic
Plan and was marked by a particular focus on disability/hearings
workloads and 800 telephone number service—SSA’s major programmatic
and service priorities as set forth in the General Business Plan.
Recognition of the growing diversity of the American people and
the need for employees who reflected our diverse populations manifested
in the addition or revision of three performance measures related
to these concerns.
A second reorganization
move within the Office of the Commissioner was the creation of the
Office of Customer Service Integration (OCSI) in 1995. A major
criticism of the 1991 strategic plan, Framework for the Future,
had been the failure to determine what service the public actually
wanted. Employees of SSA, both those who deal directly with
the public and the rest who support the direct service employees,
have always exhibited a real desire to understand the needs of the
customer and fill them. At the Agency level, SSA had held
group discussions with beneficiaries and taxpayers; conducted phone
surveys; mailed “comment cards” to thousands of customers; and contacted
advocacy groups, medical associations and other interested organizations.
This activity was supplemented by local efforts. However,
there had been no single Agency focal point for this information,
customer information activities had often been ad hoc, and no systematic
use was made of the data for strategic purposes. To improve
responsiveness to customer needs and expectations, in 1995, SSA
established OCSI as the agency focal point. OCSI put into
place a comprehensive program for obtaining direct customer input.
1996:
Moving Toward GPRA Implementation
The submission
of the pilot project performance plan for FY 1996 completed SSA’s
formal participation in the GPRA pre-implementation pilot.
In all, 71 pilot projects were undertaken throughout the federal
government. For SSA, the shift in focus to outcomes rather
than outputs (or inputs) was initially slow. The FY 1995 pilot
APP had included just 12 performance measures out of 27 based on
outcomes. One year later, the number had risen to just 15.
However, SSA’s long history of strategic management and its traditional
focus on measuring work, coupled with the correct decision to participate
in the GPRA performance measurement pilot, paid dividends in 1996,
one year ahead of full GPRA implementation.
With these transitional measurements
in place, SSA began focusing its energies on developing a comprehensive
set of Agency-level measures to reflect the basic mission of SSA
and to guide planning and budgeting for FY 1998 and beyond.
SSA’s
Business Plan: Fiscal Years 1997-2001
In April 1996, the Agency published
its second business plan. Again, this document served as a
comprehensive articulation of service goals, assessments of its
performance in core business processes and service delivery interfaces,
strategies for narrowing the gap between actual and desired performance,
and descriptions of key initiatives designed to provide or progress
toward World-Class Service. Again, the business plan acknowledged
customer expectations, and the challenge of resources and workloads
as primary factors in determining the Agency’s activities.
The Business Plan (BP) served as a reference for organizations and
authorities outside the Agency and as a blueprint for action within
the Agency.
The BP took
note of two important variables that would have a particular influence
on the eventual outcome of the Plan. First, the protracted
debate around the Federal budget taking place that fiscal year,
and the fact that SSA had been operating under a continuing resolution
deep into the year, made it difficult for the Agency to assume the
level of resources needed to invest in the initiatives fundamental
to carrying out the BP. SSA was particularly concerned about
the Automation Investment Fund. (AIF), established to provide $1.05
billion for fiscal years 1994-1998 to support the national implementation
of the IWS/LAN initiative. Receiving the requested funding
on time was seen as critical to plans to implement IWS/LAN rollout
on time and to avoid a sharp deterioration in service as available
terminals wore out and customer demands increased. Without
timely IWS/LAN rollout, SSA would be hamstrung in making and carrying
out plans to process growing workloads, plans highly dependent on
resource savings to be obtained from the economies and service improvement
made possible by rapidly advancing information technology.
The second
critical variable in planning for FY 1997 was the “unknown” of pending
welfare reform legislation, which carried the potential to divert
Agency focus from business plan initiatives and to further strain
resources. SSA estimated that even the most conservative version
of similar bills working their way through the House and Senate
would require the application of resources equivalent to thousands
of employee work years if and when passed into law. For planning
purposes, SSA assumed that any major welfare reform legislation
enacted would include the President’s proposed statutory language
adjusting the discretionary spending caps to permit the allocation
of additional resources to SSA.
The Mission
of SSA, as articulated in the Business Plan for FY 1997-2001, remained
unchanged from the 1991 Strategic Plan: “To administer national
Social Security programs as prescribed by legislation in an equitable,
effective, efficient and caring manner.” To achieve this mission,
SSA continued to organize its major initiatives around three major
goals and identified 22 specific initiatives to be the Agencies
highest priorities. During this period of especially tightly
constrained resources, due to the protracted budget debate, most
discretionary SSA resources were to be applied to these initiatives
because of their promise for the greatest payback—in terms of achievement
of SSA goals—for the resources invested. Table 4 lists these
initiatives and relates them to the Agency goals and service.
SSA’s decision in 1995 to reorient
its commitment toward excellence in service as defined by the customer
rather than as defined by the Agency, had a major impact on agency
planning, as reflected in the new Business Plan. A number
of general themes, which customers identified repeatedly as important,
emerged from the extensive customer survey activities conducted
by SSA.
As in
the previous Business Plan, SSA listed “Key Enablers” as critical
elements of SSA’s strategic planning. Three Key Enablers,
the SSA/DDS Workforce, Technology, and the newest enabler, “A Changed
Managerial Environment,” were identified as factors of such fundamental
importance that SSA’s business approach cannot succeed without them.
Employees in both
SSA and the DDSs were identified as the most valuable and enabling
resource of the Agency. Recognizing this salient fact, SSA
revised its employee focused Agency level goal from “Providing a
Nurturing Environment for Employees” to the more comprehensive “To
Create a Supportive Environment for Employees.” Increasingly,
employees operated in an environment marked by swelling disability
and legislatively-mandated workloads, by diminished resources, and
by the growing need to deliver direct public service in fundamentally
altered ways. More than ever, training and technology were
critical to employee support.
- SSA continued to identify Technology
as indispensable to the success of the SSA business approach.
The Business Plan for FY 1996-2001 identified several major technology
development themes on which SSA’s Information Technology (IT)
resources would focus over the next five years.
- The streamlining of management,
necessitated by ever-tighter Agency resources, created a very
different environment for SSA’s managers, staff support, and direct
service employees. SSA recognized that fundamental changes
in SSA’s organizational and internal business processes were needed
to free employees from hierarchical and paper-bound procedures
and reduce the resources expended in overhead. These changes
included reducing layers of management, eliminating handoffs,
eliminating reports and supervisory reviews, improved policy analysis
and development, a redesigned policy process, a restructuring
of the Office of Hearings and Appeals, working in teams, reducing
managerial work, redelegations of authority, moving work to employees,
and streamlining of the procurement process.
SSA also projected
that aspects of service would achieve world-class levels in the
remaining five core business processes and in two other service
delivery interfaces (face-to-face service in field offices and mail
received by customers from SSA). In two service delivery interfaces
(service provided by third parties and automated self-service),
SSA’s service level expectations declined from the previous Business
Plan. This reduction resulted from a better assessment of
the state of technology and renewed concern over both the security/privacy/legal
aspects of direct automated and third-party service and the projected
timing of general public ability to take advantage of such service.
1997:
“Keeping the Promise”
1997 was another watershed year for strategic
management at SSA, as the Agency issued its first Agency Strategic
Plan in six years, the first ASP developed and issued in response
to the mandates of the Government Performance and Results Act. Titled
"Keeping the Promise," this ASP was developed with broad
input from internal and external stakeholders, and has served as
the focal point for a major effort to communicate the relevance
of the ASP, with its goals and objectives, to employees throughout
the Agency.
Business
Plan: Fiscal Years 1998-2002
[9]
As SSA worked toward
completion of its first GPRA-mandated ASP, it issued the third and
final pre-GPRA implementation Business Plan. The strategy
drivers, business approach, and key enablers described in the prior
two editions of the BP formed the foundation for the new document.
In response to the mandates of GPRA, SSA had continued to work to
create a framework of performance measures that placed a greater
emphasis on performance outcomes rather than outputs and better
defined service from the customers’ perspective.
SSA’s first GPRA-mandated
Agency Strategic Plan represented the culmination of SSA’s long
tradition of strategic planning, the experienced gained in GAO’s
performance measurement pilot project, the expanded solicitation
of customer input, and the lessons learned in the development of
three Business Plans. But Keeping the Promise: Strategic
Plan 1997-2002 [10] was more than a step forward.
It represented an evolutionary leap in SSA’s strategic planning.
Keeping the Promise was marked by a new Mission statement, a first-time
statement of SSA’s values, improved and more encompassing Agency-level
goals, and the results of SSA’s continuing effort to measure results
that make a real difference to Agency customers. These features,
and others, followed an intensive strategic discussion among SSA’s
various internal and external stakeholders.
The GPRA legislation
mandated that agencies submit their GPRA-compliant ASPs to Congress
and to OMB no later than September 30, 1997. SSA began coordinating
its strategic plan development efforts as early as July 1996.
The
Mission of SSA
To promote the economic security of the nation's people through
compassionate and vigilant leadership in shaping and managing
America's social security programs.
-from "Keeping the Promise: Strategic Plan 1997-2002"
(1997) |
A critical first
step in the development of the new ASP was the formulation of the
Agency’s first new mission statement since 1991. The new Mission
was debated at length and underwent several versions before reaching
its final wording. Ultimately, the new Mission reflected both
SSA’s traditional role in American life and its expanded role as
an independent Agency. The Agency had always taken pride in
paying “the right check to the right person at the right time,”
[11] and in treating each customer with care and
compassion. The new Mission signaled that these ideas retained
their importance.
Second, SSA’s stewardship
of Trust Funds and general revenues had also been the focus of great
Agency attention. The new Mission statement elevated this
traditional stewardship role to one of “vigilant leadership in …
managing” funds entrusted to the Agency. Third, as an independent
Agency, SSA’s mission included for the first time, leadership in
the shaping of Social Security programs through active policy development,
research, and program evaluation.
Finally, where
the prior Mission was directed towards an output (“[To] administer
national Social Security programs as prescribed by legislation…”),
the new Mission was clearly directed toward producing an outcome
(“To promote the economic security of the nation’s people…”).
This new Mission supported GPRA’s mandate for a government focused
on producing outcomes. And in order to achieve an outcome-oriented
Mission, the Agency goals, objectives and strategies of the new
ASP, in turn, looked to achieving outcomes supporting the Mission.
In many instances,
SSA set improvement objectives, intended to stretch the agency to
higher levels of performance over the next 3-5 years. In other
cases, objectives were set to maintain current levels of performance
to ensure that performance did not slip unintentionally while other
priorities were given focus. In some instances, targets could
not be set until measurement systems were in place. However,
the importance of such objectives was such that initiatives expected
to have a positive impact on performance would be pursued.
The customer-orientation
of the ASP was supportive of the President’s and Vice President’s
National Performance Review initiatives to provide high quality
service to the American people.
The new ASP received
the widest communication of any SSA plan to date. Over 21,600
copies were printed and distributed to all SSA components, to Congressional
committees, and to other interested stakeholders. The plan
was immediately placed on both SSA’s Internet and Intranet home
pages. A Commissioner’s Broadcast message to all employees,
as well as an SSA NewsBYTE electronic newsletter item, an article
in the OASIS, SSA’s monthly magazine, and in the Central Office
Bulletin, were all released hard on the heals of ASP publication.
An extensive round of ASP presentations and dialogues with employees
began in the Chicago Regional Office in December 1997 and moved
into high gear in the following year.
1998:
Institutionalizing the ASP
Simple
release of the ASP and notification of its existence to stakeholders
did not guarantee the plan's viability. If the ASP was to successfully
drive SSA forward toward outcomes demanded by GPRA and pledged in
the plan, more was needed. Successful implementation would take
Agency-wide institutionalization. Many of SSA's activities during
1998 were devoted to a broadening and deepening of the Agency's
understanding of what the ASP meant for the future of SSA and an
intensification of the dialogue for translating the strategic plan
into strategic and tactical action.
SSA Planning Guide
In January 1998, in time for the FY
2000 planning and budgeting cycle, [12] SSA issued
the first edition of the SSA Planning Guide. [13]
This document served as an overview of the Agency planning
framework and provided SSA executives and planning officials specific
guidance for the development and management of Agency plans.
A major feature of the Planning Guide was the discussion of some
new aspects of the SSA planning process. These included the
Program for Objective Achievement (POA), SSA’s plan for executive
accountability through strategic objective sponsorship at the executive
level, and a defined role for the component planning representative.
SSA
Planning Guidance—Process Revised
SSA issued a revised Planning Guide
[14] in November 1998 that reflected the Agency’s
shift in focus from developing a baseline of POAs to plan management.
The new Guide described SSA’s evolving approach to accountability,
discussed the approved method for managing key initiatives, and
organized the 60 Key Initiatives into three groups by priority.
The Planning Guide [15]
described several mechanisms designed to collectively keep the Agency
on track toward meeting its strategic goals and objectives: quarterly
performance reviews, and additional performance reviews as needed,
to focus on progress in accomplishing agency performance goals.
In addition, 5-year systems plans were initiated, along with the
executive and management information system (EMIS) and an integrated
evaluation plan to ensure that each strategic goal, objective and
Agency business process was appropriately evaluated to assess performance.
1999
Annual Performance Plan (APP)
GPRA requires that
the Agency submit an Annual Performance Plan (APP) to OMB and Congress
each year along with the budget submittal. The APP links the
budget submittal with the ASP by identifying the Agency’s strategic
goals (i.e., the incremental progress made each year in achieving
the Agency’s strategic goals and objectives). The APP lists
each performance indicator with its related performance targets
for that budget year.
Initial
Performance Plan – Fiscal Year 2000
In 1998, SSA drafted the first fully
realized Annual Performance Plan, prepared in accordance with the
mandates of GPRA. Where the ASP paints a broad picture of
where SSA is headed over a five-year span, the APP provides the
details of what the Agency will do over two years. The ASP
outlines the strategic goals and objectives over the course of five
years, while the APP, as a bridge between the ASP and the budget,
describes the specific levels of performance and key activities
the Agency is committed to achieve in that near-term two years.
SSA sent the Initial Performance Plan
Fiscal Year 2000 [16] to the Office of Management
and Budget in September 1998 for review and comment. OMB comments
were returned before the end of the calendar year, for necessary
Agency action to align the APP with the President’s budget.
The final APP was released to Congress with the President’s FY 2000
budget request in February 1999. The APP is discussed at length
in the narrative for 1999.
1999: Performance Management Evolves to a New Level/First
Steps to a New Vision
In 1999, SSA released the final version
of its first Annual Performance Plan to Congress, and the initial
version of its second, as required by GPRA. But even as SSA
acquired experience in near-term strategic management, Commissioner
Apfel made the decision to significantly extend the Agency’s planning
horizon in response to exploding workload demands predicted for
the coming decade.
Annual
Performance Plan Fiscal Year 2000
The “final” Annual Performance Plan
(APP) for FY 2000 was released to Congress in February 2000.
Several features that distinguish the APP from the ASP, other than
the shorter time frame (i.e., two years instead of the ASP’s five),
are described below.
As the “bridge”
between the ASP and the budget, the APP discusses the Agency “Budget
Account Structure,” its relation to the President’s budget and Congressional
appropriations, and its relation to operational planning.
SSA’s program budget covers payments to individuals, and the greatest
part of it is a “permanent expense,” not subject to the ordinary
Congressional appropriation process. SSA’s administrative
budget, on the other hand, covers the cost of accomplishing SSA’s
mission. This administrative budget, called the “Limitation
on Administrative Expenses (LAE),” is considered discretionary spending
which must compete for scarce resources with the budgets of other
Federal agencies within an overall spending cap.
SSA aligns the strategic goals in the
ASP and the performance goals in the APP by its major functional
responsibilities rather than by program or budget account.
This is because SSA’s programs share many customers in common and
rely on a common set of business processes and delivery systems
that do not specialize by program.
The APP included a chart [17]
that linked funding amounts within the administrative budget to
four functional strategic goals.
FY 2000 ADMINISTRATIVE
BUDGET BY STRATEGIC GOAL
(DOLLARS
IN MILLIONS)
|
Budget Accounts
|
Responsive
Programs
|
World-Class
Service
|
Program Management
|
Public Understanding
|
|
$21
|
$5,098
|
$1,583
|
$104
|
|
$17
|
--
|
--
|
--
|
OIG |
--
|
--
|
$66
|
--
|
Total |
$38
|
$5,098
|
$1,649
|
$104
|
The heart and largest section of the
FY 2000 APP addressed SSA’s performance goals and the means and
strategies for achieving them. SSA’s annual Accountability
Report reports on SSA’s key goals and performance measures, as well
as the Agency’s progress in meeting its GPRA goals.
As GAO had designated the SSI program
as one of the Federal Government’s “high risk” programs, the APP
briefly highlighted objectives designed to strengthen the integrity
of the SSI program.
SSA’s
first GPRA-era Annual Performance Plan was rated a success, both
by Congress and in an independent survey. The U.S. House Ways
and Means Committee charged the General Accounting Office (GAO)
with reviewing the performance plans of all federal agencies to
determine compliance with the provisions of the Government Performance
and Results Act. In a letter to Commissioner Apfel, Chairman
E. Clay Shaw, Jr. and Ranking Member Robert T. Matsui (Ranking Member)
of the Social Security Subcommittee, Ways and Means Committee, wrote:
“SSA’s
fiscal year 2000 plan is much improved over last year’s plan.
Your attention to strategies and resources for achieving intended
performance, relating budgetary resources to performance goals,
and recognizing crosscutting agencies and organizations, have culminated
in a strong, stand alone presentation of the agency’s intended performance
for the year. Because of these improvements, your fiscal year
2000 plan has received a score of 84.5, out of a possible 100….
Due to your progress, your performance plan now ranks among the
highest scoring agencies.” [18]
Three
months earlier, Syracuse University’s prestigious Maxwell School
of Citizenship and Public Affairs released its assessment of 15
federal agencies, ranking them in five areas. The Social Security
Administration received an overall grade of “A,” as well as a “B”
in the area of “Managing for results,” which focused on strategic
planning and self-evaluation, measurement of outputs and outcomes,
and the use of performance measures. [19]
In October 1999,
SSA sent to OMB its initial FY 2001 Performance Plan and a revised
FY 2000 Performance Plan. [20] OMB Circular
A-11 also permits an agency to modify its FY 2000 performance goals
based on its review of collected and reported program performance
information for FY 1999. SSA revised its FY 2000 performance
targets after reviewing the FY 1999 data. SSA noted that further
modifications to performance commitments for FY 2000 in response
to Congressional action, unanticipated exigencies and review of
data may be reflected in the revised FY 2000 APP. The revised
performance indicators included those dealing with the posting of
Social Security covered wages, disability claims processing time,
hearings accuracy rates, customer access to the 800 Number, public
knowledge of Social Security programs, and SSI recipients participating
in “1619 (a) status.”
2000:
A New Strategic Driver: SSA’s 2010 Vision
The
development and publication of SSA's 2010 Vision in the final year
of the Clinton Administration marked a new phase in the Agency's
strategic planning. Though not itself a strategic plan, the 2010
Vision was a substantive document designed to drive Agency strategic
and tactical planning activities at all levels in order to meet
the unprecedented challenges that faced SSA in the coming decade.
Correspondingly, all Agency plans would from this time forward be
aligned with the principles and specific strategic initiatives found
in the 2010 Vision. Even before its publication, SSA began taking
the first steps necessary to achieve the 2010 Vision. The first
Vision-era product was the draft Agency Strategic Plan for FY 2000-2005.
The newest ASP was crafted to meet GPRA standards and to articulate,
at the strategic level, the actions SSA would take over the next
five years to achieve the Vision.
The
final version of the FY 2001 APP was submitted to Congress in February
2000. It contained substantially the same information as the
draft sent to OMB the previous October.
SSA’s
2010 Vision [21]
SSA issued its 2010 Vision on August
25, 2000, after thirteen months of research, analysis, discussion
and intense effort, with wide participation by internal and external
stakeholders of the Agency. The Vision’s ten-year horizon
made it a different sort of planning document, detailed enough to
shape planning decisions and drive specific initiatives, broad enough
to allow for a future that would certainly evolve in ways unimaginable
in 2000. To create the Vision, SSA initiated a development
process that mixed the familiar with the unique.
Business
Case for the 2010 Vision
SSA’s
ability to continue providing quality service to its customers as
the first decade of the new millennium progressed was at serious
risk:
- By 2010, workloads would swell to
unprecedented volumes (3 million new disability beneficiaries
and auxiliaries, 6.5 million new retirement and survivor beneficiaries,
7 million new SSI recipients). The most significant contributing
factor would be the aging of the baby-boom generation (those born
between 1946 and 1964).
- Along with the workload increase,
the incredible pace of technological change would have a profound
impact on both customer expectations and SSA’s ability to meet
those expectations.
- More than one-half of the current
Federal workforce was expected to be gone by 2010, over 28,000
SSA employees would be eligible to retire, and another 10,000
were expected to leave the Agency for other reasons. This
retirement wave would result in a significant loss of institutional
knowledge. SSA’s DDS partners would also experience a retirement
wave.
If SSA continued business as usual,
the gap between workloads and the resources available to meet them,
would rise by 2010 to 20,000 workyears, or 20% of what would be
needed.
SSA’s traditional incremental
productivity improvements would not be enough to manage the exploding
workloads with constrained resources and record staff turnovers.
The challenges required SSA instead to rethink the way it did business
and to develop innovative ways of business. This rethinking
began with the view taken by the Vision. As Commissioner Apfel stated
in his Commissioner’s Broadcast of January 18, 2000, the
Vision, “ is not just an extension of our Agency Strategic
Plan, which starts from the vantage point of how we now provide
service. The 2010 Vision will start from a different perspective—how
we should provide service in 2010 and beyond.”
That “View from 2010,” as it came to
be called, would be from the customers’ perspective and would serve
as the basis for planning and action to achieve the Vision.
Shaping
the 2010 Vision
While stakeholders
were providing input to the “View from 2010,” SSA’s leadership continued
its discussions of how the 2010 Vision should be developed
and designed. Among the most difficult of the issues that
required resolution was the question of what the Vision document
should specifically say about the “resource gap,” and whether it
should be expressed as a range or as a hard figure.
Agency experts
in budgeting, human resources, systems and operations were tasked
with arriving at an answer. Determining resources needed based
on current work processes was one thing. Determining expected
workyear savings based on future technological changes were more
problematic. Any figures used could be open to question, and
yet fuzziness on the issue would open the Vision to attacks on its
credibility. In the end, Commissioner Apfel decided that a credible
Vision document must contain as much detail as possible on workyear
estimates and assumptions, expressed in anticipated ranges.
Additional Stakeholder Dialogues
On June 6, 2000,
representatives from about 50 external stakeholder organizations,
most of them advocacy groups with national constituencies, met in
Washington to react to the major themes of the Vision as it was
developing. They provided SSA with clear expressions of concern
for improved service to disabled, non-English speaking and other
hard-to-reach segments of the population.
On July 13, 2000, the Agency brought
back together roughly 100 Agency leaders who had participated in
the strategic discussions extending back to June 1999. Participants
had the opportunity to share their reactions to the Vision and to
discuss their ideas for implementation. The conference also
provided the Commissioner and Executive Staff with an opportunity
to hear the stakeholders’ reaction and ideas.
SSA’s 2010 Vision
Released
The nationwide “rollout,” marked by
training of all employees, began on September 7. The key elements
of this unique planning document included:
- THE COMPELLING NEED FOR A VISION
– Here the Agency spelled out the service delivery, workforce,
and technology challenges of 2010 and made it clear that “without
adequate human resource and technology investments, SSA will be
unable to sustain current levels of service, let alone begin to
address future workload increases.” [22]
- PRINCIPLES AND ENABLERS OF THE
VISION [23] – The focus of
the Vision is on customers. That focus is seen in the service
principles that characterize and drive the Vision. Equally
important are the service enablers. These key activities
provide the efficiencies that enable SSA to meet the challenges
ahead:
Service
Principles
Customer
Choice |
Customers
have expanded options for service that are broad in terms of
the time, place, mode of access, and language. |
First
Point of Contact |
Customers
complete their transactions at the first point of contact. |
Privacy |
Customers
have the confidence that SSA collects personal information only
as needed for the Government’s business and discloses personal
information only as allowed by law. |
One-Stop
Government Service |
SSA
works with other government agencies to move toward providing
a wide variety of government services in a single contact. |
Proactive
Service |
SSA
ensures contact with hard-to-reach segments of the population,
provides an automated application process and is proactive in
researching issues and trends that impact its programs. |
Stewardship |
SSA
safeguards trust fund contributions and tax dollars through
effective management and aggressive preventative, investigative,
and prosecutorial efforts.
Service Enablers |
|
Technology
Enhancements |
SSA
maximizes use of technology to automate workload and administrative
processes to enhance service and to support the fully electronic,
paperless processing of its work. |
Access
to Electronic Records |
Customers
and employees have access to electronic records, with the necessary
security, privacy, and authentication. |
Operational
Flexibility |
SSA’s
resources are integrated and restructured to provide maximum
flexibility in meeting workload and service demands. |
External
Alliances |
SSA
develops strong alliances with government agencies, community-based
organizations, tribal governments, and the private sector in
areas that benefit SSA and its customers. |
Public
Communication |
SSA’s
communications activities include using innovative means to
ensure that the public has up-to-date knowledge about SSA’s
programs and services. |
Internal
Working Relationships
|
SSA
has strong working relationships across component lines, with
its unions and employee associations. |
Employer
of Choice |
SSA
develops, attracts, and retains a highly qualified and motivated
workforce through enhanced benefits, improved facilities, flexible
work arrangements, and increased career opportunities. |
Leadership |
SSA’s
executives and managers provide proactive, entrepreneurial,
and customer-centered leadership. |
- A VIEW FROM 2010 – In all
of SSA’s major planning documents, the “View from 2010” is unique.
This section, perhaps the heart of the 2010 Vision, illustrates
how the Agency will serve its customers, how it will perform its
work, and how it will support its employees at the end of a ten-year
horizon. It does not start from the Agency is now, but from
where it must be ten years from now. It describes an agency
of the future, one that fulfills the “Service Principles” and
“Service Enablers” previously described. It recognizes constraints
on Agency action, yet definitely calls for SSA to stretch.
- HOW SSA WILL MANAGE RESOURCES
TO ACHIEVE THE VISION – This section was the result
of the serious resource discussions at the Agency’s highest levels
and the intensive analytical work at the staff level. The
Vision acknowledges that:
Estimating
resource needs is precarious when focusing on short-term changes.
It is even more difficult when we attempt to make projections ten
years out, given the host of variables and interdependencies that
will surely occur. Therefore, the projections presented in
this section are gross estimates based on relevant environmental
assumptions and the Agency’s best judgments about workloads and
resource needs. The assumptions used in these projections
will continue to evolve as SSA’s planning and budgeting activities
take place. We will regularly reevaluate, and adjust as necessary,
these assumptions and projections as SSA moves toward 2010. [24]
Having stated this caveat, the Vision
then offered gross estimates of the magnitude of process and technological
change needed to reduce the projected resource shortfall (15,000
to 20,000 workyears). SSA stated that the resource gap could
be narrowed and customer service improved only if (1) SSA
received an annual funding increase of $300 to $400 million, (2)
additional resources needed to support the workforce and technology
were funded, and (3) the business changes described in the Vision
achieved the projected levels of change.
Among the business changes required
to realize the Vision included:
- Online service, providing customers
the convenience of doing a full range of business at any time
and from anywhere.
- Electronic access to records held
by SSA and by other record holders
- Electronic notices
- Electronic verification of benefits
and Social Security Numbers
- Electronic reporting of wages
- Improved toll free number service
- Improved quality of work
Next
Steps
The Vision described in some detail
nearly 40 strategic initiatives based on the Service Principles
and Service Enablers and deemed necessary to achieve the Vision.
Equally important was the Vision’s discussion of the “Next Steps,”
the actions necessary to begin realizing the Vision.
The Agency-wide “rollout” of the Vision on September 7, 2000 included
the announcement of several concrete actions based on strategic
initiatives found in the Vision, including the rapid delivery of
35,000 new, upgraded computer workstations, the establishment of
a new, upgraded field office position, which would serve as the
focal point for quality and technical mentoring, and the doubling
of telecommunication line capacity, providing Internet access to
all employees.
Implementation also required longer-term
actions. As the Vision was being drafted, work had already
begun on aligning the Agency’s strategic planning and budget processes
with the Vision. A critical first step was the reshaping of
the next Agency Strategic Plan. As described below, existing
strategic objectives were redirected and new ones developed to mark
five-year progress toward realizing the Vision. In addition,
SSA began formulating options for the transition planning that must
take place in the areas of Process Change, Human Resource, and Information
Technology, in order to begin realizing the world that the 2010
Vision imagines.
The Vision is not static. While
the Agency’s initial focus is on 2010, the Vision will be an evolving
one that carries SSA beyond 2010. SSA will refresh the Vision
at least a year before each new ASP to reinforce its role as the
driving force for the ASP and subsequent decisions and plans.
Though the 2010 Vision document is complete, it is important to
understand that the process of visioning and strategic planning
never ends. SSA will continue to look ahead, anticipate, and plan
for changes in our world that will impact the service we deliver.
[25]
“Mastering
the Challenge:” Strategic Plan FY 2000-2005
Mastering the Challenge,” SSA’s second
GPRA-era ASP, and the first to bear the marks of the 2010 Vision,
was released to Congress and OMB at the end of September 2000.
Built upon the foundation of the highly praised ASP released in
FY 1997, it also reflected experience in GPRA-mandated outcome-based
performance management acquired in the previous three years.
The new ASP briefly reiterated the
compelling need for the 2010 Vision and explained it implications
for the Agency’s strategic planning and its operations. The
ASP noted that the key to attaining the Vision lies in rethinking
the way SSA does business and developing innovative ways to accomplish
it. The principle enablers of this strategy would be critical
infrastructure investments in Information Technology and Human Resources.
“[This] strategic plan depend[s] heavily on the premise that
HR and IT will work together to deliver human services on the one
hand, and design information systems around human talents on the
other.” [26]
Another new feature of the ASP was
Barometer Measures. While it could not set goals, SSA committed
itself to defining certain quantitative indicators to assess the
outcomes of its programs. These indicators (called “barometer
measures”) are used to analyze program effects and to guide research
and policy.
The first step in the Vision was the
reshaping of the ASP through redirected and new strategic objectives.
Work continued with a range of specific immediate actions, such
as the creation of an upgraded field position. To begin realizing
the Vision on a broad front, the Agency would need to undertake
more detailed service delivery planning required to define the sequence,
timing, cost and approach for each aspect of the Vision.
Strategic
Planning 1993-2000: from GPRA to the 2010 Vision
During the Clinton Administration,
SSA responded to the challenge of the Government Performance and
Results Act of 1993, with its call for more responsive, customer-oriented
government through quantified outcome-based performance measures.
With its long tradition of strategic planning and its great experience
in measuring work, SSA readily accepted the new law’s mandates.
This tradition and experience constituted a good foundation, but
moving from an output-measuring organization to an outcome-oriented
Agency proved no easy task. Correct measurements had to be
identified. SSA’s greater attention to customer thinking and
expectations is a direct response to GPRA and has benefited its
strategic planning. New systems to capture outcome-based performance
measures were needed too. This was not always an easy accomplishment
when management information to capture service delivery competed
for scarce resources with direct service itself. In some cases,
the process of identifying and capturing the right indicators still
continues, yet advances have been made.
By 1997 and 1998, SSA was regularly
receiving praise for the quality of its strategic and performance
plans. All challenges had not been fully met, but the quality
of planning from all components within the Agency enabled SSA to
take the next step. Faced with unprecedented challenges of
the next decade, SSA created a long-range vision of service in 2010.
The 2010 Vision would drive Agency planning at all levels, and all
Agency plans would align themselves with the Vision. Before
the year 2000 was over, the 2000 ASP was reshaped, the 2002 Performance
Plan was revised, and work began on Process Change planning and
realigned IT and HR planning.
In an agency devoted to direct service,
SSA’s planning efforts are a support function. But in an era
of growing workloads, constrained resources, rapid technological
change, and rising customer expectations, SSA’s strategic management
has positioned the Agency to meet its responsibilities to the American
people who depend upon it.
Research
& Development: The Improved Policy Process
The general story of research and policy
analysis at SSA during the Clinton Presidency is one of great expansion.
In the early 1990s, it was widely recognized that SSA’s capacity
to perform timely policy analysis had eroded. SSA’s problems
in this area were highlighted in the 1994-1996 Social Security Advisory
Council Report, a report by the General Accounting Office, and in
the first report of the Social Security Advisory Board.
At the
same time, SSA recognized these shortcomings and Commissioner Chater
in the Spring of 1995, took several steps to improve its policy
analysis capabilities. These steps included establishing lead
policy development responsibilities under one Deputy Commissioner,
creation of a new policy analysis office, and the addition of program
evaluation capabilities to its long-established research and statistics
office. Also, SSA conducted an internal review that resulted
in recommendations designed to revitalize and strengthen the agency’s
research and evaluation programs.
SSA’s
efforts to strengthen its policy analysis capacity started to take
concrete form when Commissioner Apfel, in one of his first acts
as Commissioner, established the new Office of Policy (OP) early
in 1998. This new organizational structure included the long-established
Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics and two new offices:
the Office of Retirement Policy (ORP) and the Office of Disability
and Income Assistance Policy (ODIAP). The Office of Policy
was able to work collaboratively to produce the timely analysis
that was heretofore lacking. For example, OP analysis was
influential in shaping the legislative and regulatory changes connected
to partial repeal of the retirement earnings test, and increases
in and indexation of the Substantial Gainful Activity amount.
Further
evidence of SSA’s new commitment to improving its policy analysis
capabilities included a greatly expanded research budget that has,
among other things, led to the sponsorship of two outside University-based
research consortiums focusing on retirement and disability issues.
OP is also reaching out to the outside policy community by creating
data linkages that make it easier for researchers to access SSA’s
administrative data and at the same time protect the privacy of
the records. Many of SSA’s publications and statistical tabulations
are now accessible via the Internet. Internally, a growing
number of resources were devoted to developing modeling capabilities
so that distributional effects of proposed changes to the programs
can be studied.
The theme,
then, for the Office of Policy in SSA during the Clinton Presidency
was clearly one of expansion and improvement. SSA accepted
the criticisms that had been made of its policy analysis capabilities
in the early years and moved aggressively to address every concern.
Early
Clinton Years
In early 1993, SSA’s policy and research
functions were largely housed in the Office of Policy and External
Affairs (OPEA). Within OPEA, these functions were shared primarily
between the Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs (OLCA),
the office responsible for legislative planning, and the Office
of Research and Statistics (ORS), the office responsible for most
of the Agency’s research.
At the start of the Clinton administration,
SSA was a part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Therefore, the Office of the Secretary held general policy responsibility
for health and income security programs including Social Security
programs. Within SSA, policy analysis and the development
of policy options at SSA had suffered some neglect in the previous
decade.
As noted, SSA’s Office of Research
and Statistics (ORS) had long been responsible for most of the Agency’s
research program. It conducted research on the economic status
of current and potential beneficiaries, on the operation of Social
Security programs, and on interactions between Social Security programs
and the rest of the economy. The office also developed a wealth
of statistics about the Social Security system and had a long-standing
program of publications. By the early 1990s, however, ORS
had undergone roughly 2 decades of staff declines and, hence, an
erosion in its capacity. [27] Still, an
outside review team found that the office “consistently produces
good quality research and sound statistics. It is the scope
and the timeliness, not the quality of the research that is of concern”
(Estes, 1997:10).
In April 1994, a small staff with responsibility
for international studies of Social Security retirement and disability
programs was returned to ORS from SSA’s Office of International
Programs. One of the major products of that staff was the
biennial publication Social Security Programs Around the World.
(A small disability staff and parts of the SSI research staff had
been returned to ORS from other parts of the Agency in 1992.)
Legislation passed on August 15, 1994
established the Social Security Administration as an independent
agency in the Executive Branch effective March 31, 1995. Highlights
of SSA’s research and policy programs in the Clinton years prior
to SSA’s attainment of independent agency status are described below.
Policy
Research
Monitoring the economic well-being
of Social Security populations is a continuing SSA activity.
Social Security benefits alone are rarely adequate for maintaining
one’s preretirement standard of living, and many beneficiaries also
rely on income from employer-provided pensions, from private savings,
and from continued employment. Several major research initiatives
and projects in the early Clinton years are summarized below.
Poverty
As part of its mission to monitor the
economic status of the aged, SSA had developed poverty estimates
for aged persons and for subgroups. Indeed, the basis of the
poverty measure used since the Johnson Administration was developed
in the 1960s. Early in the Clinton Administration, SSA considered
how the public’s views of financial needs could be used to determine
poverty thresholds and changes in such thresholds over time (Vaughan,
1993). The work was considered in deliberations of the National
Academy Panel on Poverty and Family Assistance in its in-depth,
independent review of poverty measurement (Citro and Michael, 1995:
134-40).
Developments
in Pensions
SSA developed the first national statistics
on pension coverage in the 1950s, and since 1972, periodically co-sponsored
nationwide surveys on pension coverage.[28] In April 1993, shortly after President Clinton assumed office,
another in that series of pension coverage surveys was conducted.
In an interagency effort, SSA participated in developing early findings
that were published by the Department of Labor in May of 1994.
In the Fall of 1994, SSA released an analysis of coverage among
the baby boomers, which generally suggested that their coverage
rates were about the same as their parents rates at similar ages.
However, the analysis also found a narrowing in the gender gap in
coverage and an increasing shift from defined benefit plans to coverage
solely by 401(k)-type plans (Woods, 1994).
Cohort-Specific
Measures of Lifetime Net Social Security Transfers
Another major study in the early Clinton
years developed estimates of lifetime net transfers under the Old-Age
and Survivors Insurance program (Leimer, 1994). Estimates
were developed to indicate the extent to which each cohort has (will)
received its money’s worth from the program and to indicate the
extent of redistribution across cohorts.
Short-Term
Microsimulation Modeling
At the start of the Clinton administration,
SSA’s microsimulation modeling capability was limited to the Simulated
Tax and Transfer System (STATS) Model (Wixon, Bridges, Jr.,
and Pattison, 1987). The model was based on the Current Population
Survey and used to estimate the short-term effects on population
subgroups of changes in income taxes, payroll taxes, and some benefit
changes. In the early 1990s, it was used in studies estimating
the poverty effects of freezing Social Security COLAs, and the distributional
effects of changes in the income taxation of benefits that occurred
with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 (Pattison, 1994).
It was also used to estimate the proportion of people who paid more
in Social Security taxes than they did in income taxes. The
STATS model was not used with the longer range solvency issues of
the late 1990s.
Women,
Work, and Social Security
SSA’s research program on women developed
as a set of projects based on the observation that the pattern of
women’s work behavior over the life cycle had been changing, and
that these changes had important consequences for the economic well-being
of women in their retirement years. The groundwork for these
efforts was laid during the early Clinton years, and two survey
papers were published on women, work, and Social Security. [29]
Considerable progress was also made in developing the linked
data files for the project that relied on the National Longitudinal
Survey of Mature Women (NLSMW) as the main survey data source.
The NLSMW provides socioeconomic data on a representative sample
of 5,000 women who had been surveyed over a 25-year period.
The survey database provides one of the richest available descriptions
of life experiences like work and family history. With survey
data linked to administrative data, the transitions of women from
early middle age into their retirement years could be studied.
For example, in a NLSMW-based study of the relationship between
women’s economic status earlier in their lives and their poverty
status in old age found that the large majority who were poor in
1991-1992 had been poor earlier in their adult lives (Choudhury
and Leonesio, 1997).
While SSA was able to utilize these
NLSMW data internally, it was not able to release the linked files
for outside use. However, by the mid to late 1990s, SSA did
provide financial support to insure continued interviews with the
NLSMW sample. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics was the historical
sponsor of the survey.) The support gave SSA the opportunity
to participate in designing the survey as the sample population
moved into their retirement years.
Disability
Studies
From the late 1980s and continuing
into the early 1990s, the Social Security disability program had
seen dramatic program growth. The Board of Trustees for the
Social Security Trust Funds in their 1992 Report to Congress discussed
the impending financial crisis facing the disability program.
The Board recommended study of whether the dramatic growth in program
applications represented a temporary phenomenon or a longer-term
trend.
One part of the agency effort to better
understand program growth was an SSA-HHS joint contract with Lewin-VHI
to study and quantify the reasons for disability program growth.
While most of the Lewin-VHI research efforts were conducted during
the years before SSA became an independent agency, final results
were not presented publicly until after independence.
Only a small number of disabled worker
beneficiaries make successful work attempts and leave the rolls.
As part of the effort to better understand why some work attempts
are successful in the long term and some are not, SSA began Project
NetWork in 1991. It was a demonstration to test case management
as a way to promote employment among Social Security Disability
Insurance (DI) beneficiaries and SSI disability applicants and beneficiaries.
Although the project was initiated prior to the Clinton Administration,
evaluation of the intensive outreach, work-incentive waivers, and
case management/referral services was undertaken during the Clinton
years. [30] Key findings suggested a temporary,
but not permanent, increase in earnings and “modest net benefits
to persons with disabilities and net costs to taxpayers” (Kornfeld
and Rupp, 2000). The project also resulted in a comprehensive
administrative records database containing detailed information
on 8,248 Project NetWork participants randomly assigned to receive
case management services or to a control group, and 138,613 eligible
nonparticipants living in the demonstration areas.
Data
Linkages
SSA had a long history of working with
administrative data linked to surveys sponsored by the Agency.
Such linkages allow a greatly expanded set of policy research questions
to be answered. But SSA also continued to work to expand access
by outside researchers to these linked data sets while protecting
data confidentiality and individual privacy.
Two major linked data releases occurred
during the early years of the Clinton Presidency. The first
involved linkage of SSA administrative data with survey data collected
from persons who first took retirement or disability benefits in
1980-1981. Initial interviews were conducted about a year
after they first took benefits and was called the New Beneficiary
Survey. The New Beneficiary Followup (NBF) survey
was conducted about a decade later with the same respondents to
see how they were faring. A series of statistical notes from
the NBF introducing the data and early findings began in the Social
Security Bulletin in the Fall of 1993.
The NBF data were released for public
use in 1994 as part of the New Beneficiary Data System (NBDS).
[31] The files could be linked to others
that had previously been made available for outside research; namely,
administrative files containing Social Security and SSI benefit
data, data on earnings histories and Medicare expenditures, and
the earlier 1982 New Beneficiary Survey files (Public Use Files,
1994; Ycas, 1992). In FY 1995, NBDS data and supporting documents
became the first SSA research file to be made available to the public
on the Internet.
Survey data in the NBDS contains extensive
information about the 1981-1982 new beneficiary population, first
describing their situation roughly a year after benefit receipt,
and then tracking their changing circumstances through the early
1990s. Information includes demographic characteristics; employment,
marital, and child-bearing histories; household composition; health;
income and assets; program knowledge; and information about the
spouses of married respondents. In the follow-up, disabled
workers were also asked about their efforts to return to work, experiences
with rehabilitation services and knowledge of SSA work incentive
provisions.
The second major data release involved
the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a then-new longitudinal
survey primarily sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and
conducted by the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University
of Michigan (Juster and Suzman, 1995). Men and women approaching
retirement age comprised the initial HRS study population.
In the early 1990s, the HRS study director approached SSA with the
request to link earnings data maintained by SSA with data from the
new survey. After three-way discussions that included the
Internal Revenue Service, an SSA-ISR agreement was signed in November
1993 that described the data that SSA would provide for the project
and the conditions under which the ISR could release those data.
The project represented SSA’s first
use of respondent permission forms to allow the release of identified
data for research outside the agency (Olson, 1996). With the
HRS, also came SSA’s first release of detailed earnings data, including
earnings in jobs not covered by Social Security (Olson, 1999).
As the decade passed, SSA developed agreements with ISR to provide
data for consenting respondents in two additional longitudinal HRS
surveys—the Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old that started
in 1993 and the two New Cohorts surveys that started in 1998.
Linked
Data For Internal Research
In the early years of the Clinton Presidency
and continuing through most of the decade, the internal SSA research
program benefited greatly from access to linked files, including
the NBDS and, later, the HRS. Indeed, the SSA research program
of the 1990s probably made more intensive use of linked data than
it had been able to do in any previous decade. In addition
to work with the NLSMW, NBDS, and HRS files described above, agreements
with the Bureau of the Census allowed several panels of the Survey
of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the Current Population
Survey (CPS) to be linked to SSA administrative record data.
SSA research staff, who had been designated as sworn agents of the
Census Bureau, [32] had access to those data for
internal research and policy analysis.
March
31, 1995 (Independent Agency) to Spring 1998 (the New OP)
With Agency independence on March 31,
1995, responsibility for policy evaluation and policy development
for health and income security programs become that of SSA.
A new evaluation component, the Division
of Policy Evaluation, was established and SSA’s long-standing Office
of Research and Statistics became the Office of Research, Evaluation
and Statistics (ORES). In June 1996, the SSI research staff
which also held responsibility for the development of SSI extract
files for research was returned to ORES.
Under Commissioner Shirley S. Chater,
a small Policy Staff called the Office of Policy Analysis and Evaluation
was established in early Spring 1995. A major study on disability
program growth and followup conference on the issue, as well as
a conference on demographic changes facing the SSI program, were
among the major efforts sponsored or started by this staff.
They also participated in
a high-level intercomponent team to analyze issues related to long-term
program solvency and to help ensure that the Commissioner was well
versed on the implications of various proposals being put forth
on this growing issue.
In May 1996, SSA sought to strengthen
and reorganize its policy analysis functions in an Office of Policy
and Planning (OPol). The new OPol staff again was small (about
10-15 analysts).
In 1996 and 1997, several outside reviews
raised serious concerns about SSA’s research and policy capability
in light of the Agency’s new independence and in light of the intensifying
national debate on Social Security financing issues. Among
the critical outside voices was that of the 1994-1996 Social Security
Advisory Council. [33] Their final report, for example, included
the recommendation that SSA “should enhance its research and analysis
capabilities” because the current resources were not sufficient
(Advisory Council, Volume I, 1997:22).
The Advisory Council’s Technical Panel
on Assumptions and Methods similarly recommended “a substantial
expansion of SSA’s research capabilities” because both ORES and
the Office of the Actuary operated without adequate resources (1997:179).
The Panel also noted that its concerns went beyond usual calls for
additional research given by past panels. Rather, the Panel
was concerned that policy makers’ ability to make informed choices
for future reforms “is seriously compromised by the lack of research
on issues that have an important bearing on those choices” (1997:
181).
In the Fall of 1996, Commissioner Chater
asked Carroll L. Estes, Director of the Institute for Health and
Aging at the University of California, San Francisco, to conduct
a review of the mission, resources, and capabilities in ORES.
The December 1997 report of the Estes team contained 47 recommendations
for revitalizing and strengthening ORES and its research, statistical,
and evaluation programs (Estes, 1997).
In a February 1997 report, the General
Accounting Office (1997) reviewed SSA’s first 18 months as an independent
agency and described the challenges facing SSA’s new commissioner.
The report acknowledged that SSA, by creating OPol in May 1996,
had taken steps toward taking a leadership role in critical policy
and research issues. The report was positive about these steps
“to reorganize and strengthen its policy analysis, research, and
evaluation offices.” By November 1996, the report noted the
new links that ORES had established with outside experts, and that
it “had created an office to coordinate all policy planning activities.”
(GAO, 1997:9) However, the report was critical about SSA’s
continued shortcomings in terms of its active participation in debates
on Social Security financing. (1997:7).
The need for a stronger policy role
was also articulated in the first report of the recently created
Social Security Advisory Board, [34] Developing
Social Security Policy: How the Social Security Administration
Can Provide Greater Policy Leadership, released in March 1997.
In the report’s opening message, the Board called attention to the
fact that policy development was the first issue that they addressed
because of the primary importance they placed on it. One of
the report’s key findings was that Agency leadership had given insufficient
attention since the mid-1970s to policy issues, especially larger
policy issues. The report noted that frequent organizational
changes plagued the policy area and that policy responsibility within
the Agency was fragmented and lacked continuity.
The Board’s
key recommendations were that SSA provide greater policy leadership
and strengthen policy research. In particular, they recommended
that the Commissioner place a high priority on policy and research
with the head of the policy development organization reporting directly
to the Commissioner. In addition, the Board recommended that
SSA should: (1) address the larger policy issues and undertake
analyses of the effectiveness of its programs; (2) strengthen SSA’s
policy, research, and evaluation capability through new staff and
greater interaction and coordination with research and policy people
outside SSA; (3) attend to the organizational structure, and (4)
encourage additional research by developing surveys and administrative
data for research, evaluation, and policy purposes both inside and
outside the Agency.
New
Commissioner
On September 29, 1997, Kenneth S. Apfel
was sworn in as the first confirmed Commissioner of the independent
SSA. In October, he released SSA’s new strategic plan.
The agency had developed other strategic plans, but this was the
first to give a prominent role to policy. In particular, the
first strategic goal of the plan was “To promote valued, strong,
and responsive Social Security programs and conduct effective policy
development, research, and program evaluation.”
Disability
Studies
The Lewin-VHI results of their studies
on disability program growth and other papers were presented at
a conference co-sponsored by SSA and the Office of the Assistant
Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), DHHS. Called
“The Social Security Administration’s Disability Programs:
Explanations of Recent Growth and Implications for Disability Policy,”
it was held July 20-21, 1998 in Washington, D.C. [35]
Lewin-VHI’s study results also formed
the basis for SSA’s report to Congress that had been mandated as
part of the Social Security Domestic Employment Reform Act of 1994
(P.L. 103-387). Written in OPol, the report was officially
titled Report to Congress on Rising Cost of Social Security Disability
Insurance Benefits. Some of the principal findings of
the report were: (1) the rate of growth in disability applications
peaked in1991 and had leveled off since then; (2) DI program growth
is a product of the complex interaction of economic, demographic,
social, programmatic, and other factors; (3) longer-term growth
is driven partly by an increase in the number of persons insured
for benefits and partly by an increase in the disability incidence
rate; (4) growth in the incidence rate is due in part to a long-term
increase in rates of appeals and a continuing increase in award
rates at the hearings level; (5) persons being awarded are younger
than before, more likely to suffer from mental impairments, more
likely to be female, and poorer than new beneficiaries used to be;
(6) the program is sensitive to poor economic conditions and to
changes in public awareness about the availability of benefits;
and (7) the rate of growth in the program has varied in the past,
and can be expected to vary in the future as a result of short-term
influences.
The
New Office of Policy (Spring 1998 to Present)
By early Spring 1998, Commissioner
Apfel determined that to develop a stronger policy capability, a
new organizational structure and additional resources were needed.
In April 1998, he created a new Office of Policy (OP).
The new OP directs the formulation
of overall policy for SSA and ensures the consistency of policy
development and implementation activities across programs administered
by SSA. The Deputy Commissioner for Policy is the principal
advisor to the Commissioner of Social Security on major policy issues
and is responsible for activities in the areas of overall policy
development and analysis, policy research and evaluation, and statistical
programs.
The new office includes the Office
of Research, Evaluation and Statistics (ORES) and two new offices—the
Office of Retirement Policy (ORP) and the Office of Disability and
Income Assistance Policy (ODIAP).
Both new policy offices keep abreast
of external factors affecting their programs, develop broad analyses
of major social and economic trends and their impact on SSA programs,
and help develop Agency policy regarding issues related to SSA programs.
Coordination with other parts of SSA and with other agencies is
part of that work.
In the new organization, ORES continued
its responsibilities for research and evaluation studies on the
effects of Social Security and income assistance programs—and proposed
changes in those programs—on individuals, the economy, and program
solvency.
OP was created at a time of great national
discussion of Social Security policy issues. As a result,
there was a major focus on research, modeling, and policy analysis
aimed at addressing the current program and the effects of proposals
to change the current program. In 1998, at the end of OP’s
first year, a Policy and Research Agenda was developed to document
for the larger Social Security policy community OP’s areas of focus
and the work underway or planned in each of those areas. In
developing the Agenda, OP reviewed several reports on SSA research
and policy issues, including those from the Social Security Advisory
Board, the General Accounting Office, and the Institute for Health
and Aging’s research team at the University of California. [36]
Potential topics and areas of coverage were also discussed
with many researchers and policy experts inside and outside SSA.
Expanded
Research and Policy Budget
To meet the research and policy evaluation
needs of the new independent agency, OP added staff and greatly
expanded its external program. The research budget, for example,
increased from $10.9 million in total obligations for SSA-wide research
in fiscal year (FY) 1993 to $27 million in estimated total obligations
in FY 2000. In FY 2001, that extramural amount is expected
to rise to $60 million. Through grants, contracts, cooperative
agreements, and task orders, OP was able to extend its research
and evaluation capabilities and obtain special skills that enhance
its internal capabilities. By the end of the decade, working
partnerships with outside experts were firmly in place.
In FY 1998, a Retirement Research
Consortium (RRC) was established to bring together the academic
and policy communities to increase objective, policy-relevant research
and inform the public and policymakers about policy alternatives
and their consequences. In October 1998, following an April
16, 1998 Federal Register announcement, two, university-based, multi-disciplinary
centers were chosen for the RRC. One was centered at Boston
College and the other at the University of Michigan Retirement Research
Center. Both centers formed collaborative partnerships with
other academic institutions and policy experts, and each center
received $1.25 million in funding in its initial year. Funding
was expected to allow up to $1 million annually for related projects
in the 5-year program.
The mission of the Consortium is to
plan and conduct a broad research program that will develop retirement
policy information to assist policymakers, the public, and the media
in understanding Social Security issues. As part of that effort,
dissertation and postdoctoral fellowships, research assistantships,
and courses on methodology and social insurance provides training
and education in retirement policy area. Five small grants
to junior scholars had been funded as of this writing. The
RRC also disseminates information and research results to the public,
policymakers, and the media through papers and conferences.
Both centers established websites containing research papers, brief
policy papers, and other information aimed to aid that effort.
In May 1999, the new RRC sponsored
its first annual conference. Called “New Developments in Retirement
Research,” conference papers and discussions covered a wide range
of topics, including early retirement trends, the earnings test,
investing the Trust Fund in equities, Social Security money’s worth,
changing patterns of lifetime earnings, and Social Security policy
issues related to disability and the coming retirement of the baby
boomers. SSA’s major new microsimulation model, called “MINT”
for Modeling Income in the Near Term, was introduced and some findings
from the model were given. (See below for more on MINT and
other microsimulation initiatives.) More than 250 people attended
the conference that was held in Washington D.C.
A second RRC conference focused on
“The Outlook for Retirement Income,” a topic at the heart of the
SSA research program. Sessions in the May 2000 conference
included those on joint retirement decisions in married couples,
assessments of how women fared in retirement, responses to Social
Security and pension retirement incentives, the progressivity of
the Social Security system, retirement behavior and income of younger
retirees, and the future of pension systems. The third annual
RRC conference is planned for May 2001. [37]
A parallel Disability Research Institute
(DRI) centered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
was started in May 2000. The general mission of the DRI is
to plan and conduct a comprehensive research program in areas important
to disability policy. The DRI will help the agency stay abreast
of the ways in which changes in technology have altered the work
place and the ways in which advancements in medicine, technology,
rehabilitation and supportive services have enhanced the ability
of impaired individuals to work. The Institute is also charged
with disseminating information to the public and policymakers, encouraging
young promising researchers to focus their efforts on disability
issues through training and education programs, and keeping current
practitioners abreast of the most current research available.
The annual DRI budget consists of $1.25 million for the first year
and an anticipated $1 million annually for the next 4 years.
Policy
Development
One of the purposes in creating OP
was to provide a focal point within the Agency for policy development.
To accomplish that purpose, OP instituted a process that begins
with the identification of policy problems and new policy ideas.
From those, a list of possible policy development topics are presented
to the Commissioner, and, based on his guidance, the list is revised
and finalized. Each topic is then the subject of an analytical
paper that provides the Commissioner with policy options as well
as a recommendation. Knowledge gained from ORES research and
evaluations is an important component of each paper. The papers
are then presented to the Commissioner for decisions about possible
inclusion in the budget and legislative program or for advancement
through regulations.
OP/ORES’s
Publishing and Statistical Program
ORES research findings and statistical
data have long been disseminated through a series of publications.
At the outset of the Clinton presidency, ORES publications were
available as printed volumes. At the close of the Clinton
presidency, all were available electronically as well. Starting
in 1994, with selected tables and the report on Social Security
Programs Throughout the World (see below), publications first
became available to the public on the World Wide Web and Gopher
Service. [38] During the 1990s, new titles
were added to those already available on the Web (www.ssa.gov/policy).
In addition, table updates were put online as soon as the new data
were available and checked. ORES publications during the Clinton
presidency are described below. [39]
The Social Security Bulletin
is SSA’s “journal of record” and has been published since 1938.
It includes articles written by SSA staff reflecting all aspects
of SSA’s research and statistics program as well as the latest available
data on OASDI and SSI benefits and beneficiaries. It also
includes articles on policy issues relating to SSA’s programs.
Starting with the first issue in 2000, the Bulletin announced
a major change. [40] It was aimed at “enhance[ing]
the Bulletin as one of the premier journals in its field,
one in which the most significant and influential research on Social
Security and SSI policy regularly appear.” The change involved
the Bulletin’s editorial policy. For most of its 60
years, the Bulletin published only research done by SSA staff
or funded by the SSA. Under the new policy, manuscripts would
be accepted from anyone in the research community “interested in
furthering the discussion on how we as a nation can provide the
best system of economic security for the aged, the disabled, and
survivors of deceased workers, and how we can protect our vulnerable
poor.” Papers would be evaluated by some of the top experts
in the field of interest. The initial Social Security Bulletin
in 2000 marked the first appearance of the new section, called “Perspectives.”
As noted in that issue, “Perspectives offers a forum for the analysis
of diverse topics in social insurance and public policy, particularly
research that improves the understanding of the Social Security
Administration’s programs and related issues.”
The Annual Statistical Supplement
to the Social Security Bulletin includes more
than 250 statistical tables on beneficiaries, covered workers, and
the trust funds. Data on related social insurance and welfare
programs are also presented. Major narrative sections describe
and chronicle the legislative history of the program.
Two publications describe the income
of the aged. The first, Income of the Population 55 or
Older, contains detailed information in more than 70 statistical
tables. The tables focus on the major sources and amounts
of income and include proportions below the poverty line.
Several tables describe the economic situation of the aged with
varying levels of Social Security benefits and total money income.
Data are shown for persons aged 55 or older and by more detailed
age, sex, marital status, race, and Hispanic origin groups.
The second, Income of the Aged Chartbook, highlights selected
data from the tabular report using easy to understand graphics.
Both publications are updated biennially.
SSA administrative data are also published
by geographic area. Titles in this series include OASDI
Beneficiaries by State and County; SSI Recipients by State and County;
Earnings and Employment Data for Workers Covered under Social Security,
by State and County. One-page factsheets called State
Statistics are also available for each state, the District of
Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. An annual publication,
State Assistance Programs for SSI Recipients, provides
selected characteristics of the optional state supplementation of
federal SSI payments.
Social Security Programs in the
United States gives a descriptive picture of programs under
the Social Security Act and was updated biennially in the Clinton
years. Programs are grouped into four major areas: social
insurance, health insurance and health services, assistance programs,
and programs for specific groups (e.g., veterans, government employees,
and railroad workers). The text includes a brief look at the
history and current legislative provisions of each program.
A similar volume, Social Security
Programs Throughout the World, gives a cross-national
comparison of the Social Security systems in more than 150 countries.
For each, five program areas are summarized: old age, disability,
and survivors; sickness and maternity; work injury; unemployment;
and family allowances. The report was published biennially.
The annual Fast Facts and Figures
About Social Security chartbook presents answers to frequently
asked questions. The booklet highlights the economic status
of the older population and the role of Social Security and SSI
in helping to reduce poverty. It also describes program characteristics.
Another long-standing ORES publication
is the ORES Working Paper series. Preliminary research
papers are circulated for review and comment in this series.
Some two dozen were released during the Clinton Administration.
ORES
Statistical Data
SSA administrative data are very valuable
sources of information, useful for policy analysis, program evaluation,
actuarial projections, estimates of legislative impact, economic
research, and ongoing statistics. The following paragraphs
very briefly summarize SSA’s major administrative data files and
the Continuous Work History Sample file. For most of the master
files, 1 percent and 10 percent sample extract files are developed
monthly. A 100 percent extract file is generally drawn semiannually.
Other, specialized sample extract files are developed as needed.
The Master Beneficiary Record (MBR)
is the main file that SSA uses to administer the OASDI program.
The MBR contains more than 160 million person records, one for every
Social Security number under which a current or former benefit was
paid. Since October 1977, a record for each person who applied
for Social Security benefits have also been included in the MBR.
The Supplemental Security Records
(SSR) is the main file that SSA uses to administer the SSI program.
The SSR, which can have more than one record for each recipient,
has information for more than 65 million persons. The file
contains eligibility and payment information and some information
about ineligible spouses or parents because their income and resources
are considered in eligibility determinations.
The Master Earnings File (MEF)
contains records for each of the more than 400 million Social Security
number (SSN) holders (living or dead). It includes information
on annual covered earnings since 1951, quarters of coverage, and
additional related information. Since 1977, data for the MEF
are primarily derived from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form W-2.
As a result, information about earnings in jobs not covered by Social
Security is also available.
The Number Identification (Numident)
file contains about 620 million records of applications for original
and replacement Social Security cards, including name, SSN, date
and place of birth, and other information. That information
is later augmented with information on date and place of death.
The “831” Disability File is
a research file extracted from the National Disability Determination
Services System maintained by SSA’s Office of Disability.
It contains information on medical determinations made when a person
applies for disability benefits either from the Social Security
DI or SSI program.
The Continuous Work History Sample
(CWHS) is probably the largest, continuously maintained longitudinal
data file in the country. It is a 1 percent sample file that
evolved from SSA’s original recordkeeping system, which collected
quarterly wage and salary amounts for workers covered under the
original Social Security Act. Today it is a system of files
that is processed on an annual cycle and includes basic demographics,
wages, and information from employer and benefit data bases.
CWHS data are used in making revenue estimates, evaluating legislative
proposals, and responding to informational inquiries.
In summary, SSA’s ability to perform
useful research and policy analysis improved dramatically throughout
the years of the Clinton Presidency. The big picture is one
of a growing and continuing commitment to establishing a strong,
stable, and useful policy component within SSA that would produce
quality research and policy analysis, support the work of outside
researchers, and actively participate and contribute to the policy
debates on the futures of the OASDI and SSI programs.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Commissioner’s
Broadcast to SSA employees, March 12, 1999.
[2] Commissioner
Kenneth Apfel on the signing of the Ticket to Work and Work
Incentive Improvements Act.
[3] In February 1994,
the GAO issued Social Security – Disability Rolls Keep Growing,
While Explanations Remain Elusive; in April 1996, the GAO
issued SSA Disability – Program Redesign Necessary to Encourage
Return to Work; in September 1996, the GAO issued People
with Disabilities – Federal Programs Could Work Together More
Efficiently to Promote Employment.
[4] Commissioner
Kenneth Apfel, Council of Jewish Federations, Washington, D.C.,
March 3, 1998.
[5] Section 431 of
PRWORA established six categories of “qualified aliens:”
(1) individuals who are lawfully admitted for permanent residence
(LAPR), (2) conditional entrants, (3) certain individuals who
were paroled into the U.S. for a period of at least one year,
(4) refugees, (5) asylees, and (6) individuals whose deportation
or removal has been withheld. Section 501 of the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, enacted
September 28, 1996, provided that certain noncitizens who have
been battered or subjected to extreme cruelty or whose children
or parents have been abused are considered to be “qualified aliens.”
Finally, Section 5302 of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, enacted
August 5, 1997, expanded the categories of qualified aliens to
include Cuban and Haitian entrants as defined under section 501(e)
of the Refugee Education Assistance Act of 1980.
[6] Harris, Wester,
and Finger, Innovations for Federal Service [Reference
Point Foundation for the Office of Technology Assessment (Contract
#13-4805.0)], February 1993, p.50.
[7] Text explaining
the revised goals located in Social Security Administration
Government Performance and Results Act Pilot Project Performance
Plan for Fiscal Year 1995, page 3.
[8] General Business
Plan: Fiscal Years 1996-1999, SSA Publication No. 01-008,
February 1995.
[9] Social Security
Administration Business Plan Fiscal Years 1998-2002, SSA Pub.
No. 01-008 (no date).
[10] Keeping
the Promise: SSA Strategic Plan 1997-2002, Social Security
Administration, Office of Strategic Management, SSA Pub. No. 01-001,
September 1997.
[11] Though never
official, this catch-phrase has, for many employees and many years,
been viewed as SSA’s traditional mission The 1997 BP stated
that, “Throughout its 60-year history, SSA has held to its basic
mission to pay the right amount to the right person at the right
time.”
[12] See Chart 8
for the “General Schedule for FY 2000 Planning and Budgeting Cycle,”
the first under the new ASP.
[13] SSA Planning
Guide, Office of Strategic Management, SSA Pub. No. 01-014, January
1998.
[14] SSA Planning
Guidance, Office of Strategic Management, SSA Pub. No. 01-014,
November 1998.
[16] Initial
Performance Plan Fiscal Year 2000, Social Security Administration,
Office of Strategic Management. This was a draft, working
document printed and released in August 1998 to the Office of
Management for their use. The final APP was released in
February 1999.
[17] The chart shown
here is taken from Annual Performance Plan Fiscal Year 2000,
Social Security Administration, Office of Strategic Management,
SSA Pub. No. 22-001, February 1999. This “final” APP included
dollar amounts which, in some cases, were lower than the initial
APP submission to OMB in August 1998. The reductions reflected
alignment with the President’s overall budget submission to Congress.
[18] E. Clay Shaw
and Robert T. Matsui, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House
of Representatives, Subcommittee on Social Security to Kenneth
S. Apfel, Commissioner of Social Security, May 11, 1999.
[19] The Maxwell
School’s Government Performance Project Federal Report appeared
in the February issue of Government Executive and, on February
1, 1999, on www.govexec.com.
[20] Initial
Performance Plan Fiscal Year 2001 and Revised Fiscal Year 2000
Performance Plan, Social Security Administration, Office
of Strategic Management (no date or publication number).
[21] Social Security
2010 Vision, Social Security Administration, Office
of the Commissioner, SSA Pub. No. 01-017, August 2000.
[22] Social Security
2010 Vision, p. 7.
[27] Those declines
have been documented in the Estes, 1997. See bibliography
in Part II.
[28] These surveys
were conducted as supplements to the Current Population Survey
(CPS) conducted by the Census Bureau. Pension coverage supplements
occurred in 1972, 1979, 1983, 1988, and 1993.
[29] SSA had commissioned
Marianne Ferber, Professor of Economics and Women’s Studies, Emerita,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to write one paper
which surveyed women’s employment and the Social Security system
(Ferber, 1994). The other was a piece reviewing literature
on the work and retirement decisions of older women (Weaver, 1994).
[30] Kornfeld and
Rupp (2000) provide summary of Project NetWork results and give
references to several earlier reports from the project.
[31] Prior
to making the data public, SSA received IRS approval for the inclusion
of earnings data from SSA administrative records in the release.
[32] The SIPP and
CPS data were covered by Title 13 of the U.S. Code, and only Census
employees or agents of the Census Bureau were allowed access to
the data.
[33] Before the
Independent Agency legislation (P.L. 103-296), the Social Security
Act provided for a nonpartisan Advisory Council to be appointed
every 4 years to examine issues affecting the OASI, DI, and Medicare
programs. The 1994-1996 Advisory Council on Social Security
was established on March 23, 1994, by the Secretary of Health
and Human Services, Donna E. Shalala, under Section 706 of the
Social Security Act. It was the last one authorized under
that provision.
[34] The Independent
Agency legislation had also created a new bipartisan Social Security
Advisory Board. Among the Board’s responsibilities are those
of making recommendations with respect to (1) policies that will
ensure the financial solvency of the Social Security programs
and (2) policies and regulations about Social Security and SSI
programs.
[35] Rupp and Stapleton
(1998) later published results of that work in their edited collection,
Growth in Disability Benefits.
[36] The Social
Security Advisory Board reports included Forum on a Long-Range
Research and Program Evaluation Plan for the Social Security Administration:
Proceedings and Additional Comments, June 24, 1997; Strengthening
Social Security Research: The Responsibilities of the Social
Security Administration, January 1998; and How SSA’s Disability
Programs Can Be Improved, August 1998. We also consulted
the General Accounting Office report, Social Security Administration—Significant
Challenges Await New Commissioner (HEHS-97-53), February 1997,
and the review of ORES written by Carroll Estes of the University
of California, San Francisco, Institute for Health and Aging.
(The 1997 review was called “Strengthening Policy Development
Work Within the Social Security Administration: A Review
of the Mission, Resources, and Capabilities in the Office of Research,
Evaluation and Statistics.”)
[37] In addition,
a specialized 2-day symposium on the “Impact of Privatization
of Social Security on Retirement Income” was held in May 1999
in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sponsored jointly by the Michigan
Retirement Research center, the Business School, and the Mathematics
Department of the University of Michigan and the Society of Actuaries,
the conference was targeted at actuaries and other professionals
knowledgeable on Social Security.
[38] Because of
a decline in Gopher Service usage, the SSA Gopher server was discontinued
in 1996.
[39] This summary
draws heavily on SSA Research Publications 1999, an ORES
brochure.
[40] Social Security
Bulletin 62:1, p. 1; “We’re looking for manuscripts,” 1999. 62:2,
p. 1; and Social Security Bulletin, 2000, 63:1, inside front cover.
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