by Michael Hiltzik
Tens of thousands of Social Security Administration employees began work last Monday with the sense that a new day was dawning for themselves and the program’s more than 64 million beneficiaries: A Trump-appointed commissioner who had undermined its mission while picking fights with its workforce had been fired after two years in office.
Andrew M. Saul exited snarling. Upon being informed of his ouster Friday, Saul insisted that his firing was unconstitutional and threatened to sue. (Biden had asked for his resignation, and when Saul refused, he was fired.)
Reportedly, he tried to log into his agency administrative account last Monday from his upstate New York home, only to discover that he had been locked out.
President Joe Biden’s firing of Saul removes one of the chief impediments to progress in making this all-important social program even better for workers, their dependents, and those with disabilities by increasing and expanding benefits and demolishing administrative obstacles to gaining benefits.
Those changes rank high on the policy platform of Democrats in Congress, led by Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and many others. Their program would increase benefits for all retirees, improve cost-of-living increases by changing the inflation formula, and raise the minimum benefit for the lowest-income households.
The campaign for improvement requires a knowledgeable and committed commissioner at the forefront, and Saul was anything but.
Saul’s qualifications for the job seemed to go no further than his experience as an executive at a couple of women’s garment firms and as a fundraiser for George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign.
He also had been a board member of the right-wing Manhattan Institute, which proposed aggressive cutbacks in Social Security benefits, arguing in part that the program unfairly transfers wealth “from the poor to the wealthy.” (In fact, the exact opposite is true.)
“He came in not knowing anything about Social Security,” Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, told me, “and that should disqualify anybody.”
His acting replacement is Kilolo Kijakazi, a former fellow with the progressive Urban Institute, whom Biden appointed on Inauguration Day as deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy.
Saul’s departure leaves a mountain of unfinished work for his successors. The most immediate task is to develop a reopening plan for the program’s more than 1,200 field offices, which have been shuttered since March 2020 because of the pandemic.
The White House had given the agency a deadline of Monday to produce a plan.
There’s also the imperative to reverse Saul’s executive policies promptly. Saul’s hostility to the disability program was reflected in a host of punitive regulations imposed on or proposed for its beneficiaries.
Last year, Saul proposed to take some disability appeals out of the hands of the agency’s administrative law judges, who are immune from political pressure, and turn them over to its appeals judges, who are political appointees — and who have no experience actually conducting eligibility hearings.
Saul also proposed to increase the frequency of medical reviews for many disability recipients from every three years to every two years, subjecting them to a complicated and burdensome process that advocates said served no purpose, since there was no evidence that the system was overlooking recipients ready to return to the workforce. The proposal was withdrawn by Biden Jan. 22.
“There was a mindset that everybody’s committing fraud,” Altman said, “that you can’t trust people who are getting disability.” In fact, disability benefits are hard to claim, and fraud rates are low.
Another imperative beginning to work its way through Congress is to improve and modernize Supplemental Security Income. This is a safety-net program serving about 8 million beneficiaries who are very low-income and elderly or have a disability. Although it’s not technically part of Social Security and is funded from general federal revenues instead of the payroll tax, it’s administered by Social Security.
Anti-poverty advocates and congressional Democrats are calling for SSI benefits, which currently top out at $794 for an individual and $1,191 for a couple, or about 73% to 82% of the poverty line, to be raised at least to the poverty level.
They also propose to modernize the income and asset ceilings for SSI recipients. The asset limits of $2,000 for individuals and $3,000 for couples haven’t been raised since 1984 and aren’t indexed to inflation. Had they kept up with price increases, they’d be about $4,500 for individuals and $6,700 for couples today.
The income standard allows SSI recipients $85 a month in outside earnings and phases out benefits at the rate of $1 in reductions for every $2 in earnings above that. The allowance was set in 1962 for a predecessor program and has never been changed. Had it tracked inflation, it would be $745 a month today.
Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
