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Disabled, and Waiting for Justice
Editorial
The NY Times
We know what is behind President Bush’s sudden enthusiasm
for fiscal discipline after years of running up deficits and
debt: political posturing, just in time for the 2008 election.
But one should not forget the damage that his administration
has also inflicted by shortchanging important domestic programs
in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy and his never-ending
Iraq war.
A case in point is the worsening bureaucratic delays at the
chronically underfunded Social Security Administration that
have kept hundreds of thousands of disabled Americans from
timely receipt of their Social Security disability benefits.
As laid out by Erik Eckholm in The Times on Monday, the backlog
of applicants who are awaiting a decision after appealing
an initial rejection has soared to 755,000 from 311,000 in
2000. The average wait for an appeals hearing now exceeds
500 days, twice as long as applicants had to wait in 2000.
Typically two-thirds of those who appeal eventually win their
cases. But during the long wait, their conditions may worsen
and their lives often fall apart. More and more people have
lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting
an appeals hearing.
In one poignant case described by Mr. Eckholm, a North Carolina
woman who is tethered to an oxygen tank 24 hours a day has
been waiting three years for a decision. She finally got a
hearing last month and is awaiting a final verdict, but, meanwhile,
she has lost her apartment and alternates sleeping at her
daughter’s crowded house and a friend’s place.
The cause of the bottlenecks is well known. There are simply
too few administrative law judges — 1,025 at present
— to keep up with the workload. The Social Security Administration
is adopting automated tools and more efficient administrative
practices, but virtually everyone agrees that no real dent
will be made in the backlog until the agency can hire more
judges and support staff.
The blame for this debacle lies mostly with the Republicans.
For most of this decade, the administration has held the agency’s
budget requests down and Republican-dominated Congresses have
appropriated less than the administration requested. Now the
Democratic-led Congress wants to increase funding to the Social
Security Administration, and the White House is resisting.
Last month, Congress passed a $151 billion health, education
and labor spending bill that would have given the Social Security
Administration $275 million more than the president requested,
enough to hire a lot more judges and provide other vital services.
But Mr. Bush vetoed that bill as profligate.
Democrats in Congress are working on a compromise to meet
Mr. Bush half way on the whole range of domestic spending
bills. The White House is not interested in compromise.
If the president remains intransigent, federal agencies may
have to limp along under continuing resolutions that maintain
last year’s spending levels. That would likely, among
many other domestic problems, crimp any new hiring at the
Social Security Administration and might require furloughs,
leading to even longer waits. Mr. Bush should back down from
his veto threat and accept a reasonable compromise. Both sides
should ensure that real efforts are made to reduce these intolerable
backlogs.
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