Comment from escareno, r.m., none- a concerned citizen and fund contributor and tax payer

The proposal to amend the rules under consideration is not a clarification at all. From my study of the current relationship between the Social Security Administration and its independent Administrative Law Judges it is more than apparent that the ALJs have the sole duty and responsibility under the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the Administrative Procedures Act, current rules and decades of actual practice to set the time and place for a hearing. This is in keeping with the judicial independence of the ALJs who must act as and in fact be independent judges of the facts and law when American claimants bring an action for relief against the Agency. ALJs must not only protect the due process rights of the claimants who seek independent decision making from the ALJs but also protect the hard earned money of the invisible American Social Security trust fund contributors and American tax payers who by their work and dollar contributions support not only the Social Security Agency’s disability insurance program but also the Agency’s supplemental security program. The ALJ alone is invested with the duty to protect all of the American people who seek relief from or need their hard earned money protected from the vagaries of an Agency of government that necessarily runs it programs with a political agenda set from the Administration in power at any particular point in time. The ALJ has no agenda except to protect the very essence of due process hearings that inherently require not only a consideration of the rights of the claimants but the rights of the American Social Security fund contributors and the American tax payers. An independent judiciary owes no one while the Agency heads, managers and bureaucrats owe their existence to someone above them in the power structure. Making a sea change by granting the right to set the time and place for a hearing bestows the power to shape the quality of the due process hearing in the very Agency against whom the claimant seeks redress. Such a change places in peril a reasoned decision and a correct decision that would otherwise permit the ALJ to fend off unworthy and fraudulent claims and thereby permit the ALJ to protect the public fisc. Even now the Agency bureaucrats ferociously seek to encourage ALJs to conduct hearings without any expert witnesses when the medical and other evidence is two years old, but the ALJs rebuff that attempt by insisting upon the development of the file before the hearing is set so that a fair picture of the individual disability claim may be drawn and a both a correct and timely decision may be made. It is more than apparent to all reasonable, objective observers that the Agency wants to create the appearance of providing more “service” to the American claimants by churning out decisions in ever more record-breaking numbers. In order to achieve that political face saving practice, the Agency wishes to seize control of the hearing setting authority to attempt to force the hearings to go forward and thereby hope to create a show of a bigger number of dispositions for public consumption. Such a plan is ill conceived and short sighted. Forcing hearings to proceed when the case is not developed will only cause the right thinking ALJs to continue the case in order to assure that all of the relevant records are in so both the claimant and the fund/tax payers get a fair shake. For those ALJs who accept the crammed and ill-prepared case for hearing, the natural and overwhelming tendency is to pay the case and in essence pay the drawer because it is so much easier to pay the case than to bother with the cumbersome, time consuming and challenging writing of a denial decision. At this juncture in time, no one in the Agency is reviewing ALJ pay cases and therefore no one is going to criticize those ALJs, mostly the Agency management ALJs, who opt to pay down the backload to make themselves look good to their Agency management bosses to whom these ALJs are beholden for the positions as management ALJs. Should ALJs decide that the case crammed down the pipeline for hearing will not be continued and will not be paid, the ALJs merely foist the ill prepared case with its unlikely legally defensible decision on the Appeals Council and/or the federal court system where already more than half of the cases appealed are reversed or more likely remanded. Those politicians, managers and bureaucrats in the Agency do not care much, of course, whether that occurs because the short sighted ALJs who choose that course not only get a credit, as does the Agency, for a disposition the first time that the case goes out the door, but for every time that it is returned and then sent out again. Consequently to satisfy the need for numbers, those number hungry ALJs who quickly push a legally indefensible decision on a poorly prepared case for disposition are rewarded by getting double credit for that case that was not well disposed of in the first place. If the case on the third try is given to a like minded ALJ, the number gain can continue a couple of more times without any real service being rendered to the claimant or the American people as a whole. This duplicitous and duplicative process burdens the federal court system and the administrative judicial process within the hearing offices. The promise that placing the power to set the time and place for hearings in the hands of Agency politicians, managers and bureaucrats will increase efficiency in the hearing process and reduce the number of pending cases is totally incorrect. Doing so will only cause more continuances that will slow down the hearing process. Doing so will cause certain ALJs crammed with more cases to pay more cases on marginal or unworthy claims which in turn will encourage other people with unworthy or marginal claims to file claims for Disability Benefits and/or SSI benefits further jamming the already clogged system and jeopardizing the availability of the limited funds and tax money paid in by overwhelmed fund and taxpayers to support the DI and SSI programs. The Agency proposal cites the historic proportions of the number of cases awaiting a hearing, but the Agency completely ignores the dire effect that its rash, unwise rule change proposal would have by: compromising the integrity of the due process hearing; encouraging ever higher percentages of pay case decisions, many of which must be as poorly conceived as the one-half of denial cases rejected by the federal courts; requiring conscientious ALJs to continue many more cases because the cases are in fact not ready to be heard under due process standards; further burdening the already overwhelmed federal court system and its own federal administrative judiciary with legally indefensible decisions and the remand of those cases; encouraging even more would be claimants to file unsupported or marginal claims; and actually making more inefficient the already inefficient management of Social Security claims. There is a reason for judicial independence. That reason forms the heart of the current rules, the Collective Bargaining Agreement under which ALJs labor and the Administrative Procedures Act under which the American people, claimants, fund contributors and tax payers are protected against the changing political winds and whims of the politicians, managers and bureaucrats who are not beholden to justice under due process but appearances under political expediency. The rule change would be a tragic disservice to the American people.