Battle of the Barons
Fialka, John J.
Battle of the Barons by John J. Fialka Reformers who believe that a federal takeover is the solution to the welfare mess will be interested in the following story about the...
...He called SSI a “paper-clogged administrative nightmare...
...It was hardly debated by Congress, but it forced Social Security to replan SSl at a time when the agency had expected to be putting on the finishing touches...
...We tried to stop the run...
...The money had been owed her since 1973...
...Battle of the Barons by John J. Fialka Reformers who believe that a federal takeover is the solution to the welfare mess will be interested in the following story about the Supplemental Security Income program...
...Suddenly, the old welfare system had been grafted onto the new system...
...Blakeney’s husband died in 1970...
...In September, the Blackeney checks stopped, and Mrs...
...I’m so happy I could scream,” said Mrs...
...He is a friend of Elliot Richardson (another former Massaclnusetts lieutenant governor), then head of HEW...
...Fortunately, this was accomplished through federal funding...
...Then he pulled out a few at random to see what they looked like...
...The job description says ‘management focus.’ I’m in an impossible grind among many strong: tough, experienced forces...
...Social Security, which had expected the assignment and was proud of its reputation, had been preparing since 1971 to undertake this new task...
...The widow says she called her local Social Security office right away and was told not to worry because they were probably retroactive checks that she was entitled to because of her disability claim...
...Blakeney had figured out what the green check meant, a computer letter arrived say-ing that because she had received such a large check she would be deemed ineligible for SSI...
...Drafting claim...
...Blakeney thought little about the matter until seven months later, in April 1975, when Social Security summoned her to her local office for an interview and presented her with a bill for $2,099...
...He worked up a “grandfather clause” that would require Social Security to figure out what a person’s welfare check would be under the rules of the 1,149 local welfare programs (many of which have a varjety of different payment formulas...
...Rather than federalize the entire welfare system through a negative income tax, as Moynihan (and others, such as candidate George McGovem) proposed, Congress voted in October 1972 to take over and administer directly only those programs providing extra money to the elderly, blind, and disabled...
...Frances Blakeney, 62, a widow who lives in a small cottage in the Watts section of Los Angeles...
...IBs name is Si1 inner C7...
...These are some fairly typical comments taken from routine field reports in August 1975, 19 months after Ed Cramer first noticed that there might be trouble ahead: “The instructions for this [how to figure out payment formulas] come in daily and from every known resource within the agency,” wrote the manager of Salinas, Kansas, office...
...I stocked up quite a bit on staples...
...Some congressmen spend years trying to pass major changes in social programs...
...They don’t make mistakes like they do with SSI,” she said...
...Blakeney appealed her case to a Social Security administrative law judge, who admitted he could not figure out from the records just how much the widow had received in overpayments...
...He decided that it would be “prohibitive” to take $50 a month, so he ruled the agency should deduct $25 a month for the next 80 months...
...Social Security chased those checks with mailgram, notifying Vermont recipients that a mistake had been made and the federal Wvernment wanted the money back...
...Whittier’s incentive system is the oldest one known to bureaucrats...
...Unable to shake up the staffs of the other barons, Whittier continually changed around his own staff...
...The orders are full speed ahead, and try to ignore the torpedos,” he wrote in a memo issued to his staff shortly after he took command of RSSI...
...By the end of the day, they had plucked out 3,000 checks, most of them sizable overpayments headed for Ventura County...
...It took Long two weeks...
...Nine months later, early last August, there was still another variation on the theme...
...Under the new law, the maximum amount of an SSI check was supposed to be $235...
...The actual operation is performed by BDOO in the taking of applications and deciding of eligibility...
...I bought some clothes, some underclothes, and a new black-and-white television...
...McConnachie had to convince them that he was there to try to save federal money, not to steal it...
...tive disability case...
...A total of $49,652,000 was overspent in California by SSI during the program’s first six months of operation...
...As the January 1 deadline approached, Cardwell refused to exercise the option Congress had given hiin of delaying the start of the program if there werc problems...
...One was for “Francis C. Blackeney,” and one had the proper spelling of her name on it...
...Giving away billions of dollars a year is not an easy job...
...Whittier, a former Jieutena n t governor of Massachusetts, and he was 64 years old when he arrived at Social Security in 1972 to take over the fledgling program...
...In February, the administrative fog that had gathered around the Blakeney case was finally parted...
...A computer expert retained by Social Security in the winter of 1974, after a year of electronic chaos, found that a t least three different bureaus were making changes in the programs without consulting each other and without making records of the changes...
...Long tucked it into a bill, “Extending the Renegotiation Act of 1951...
...A Case Study Consider the case of Mrs...
...Within the SSI system, there was frenzy...
...The case worker said that meant it was safe to go ahead and cash it because it was from one of Social Security’s regular programs...
...Blakeney looked in her mailbox and found a check from Social Security for $1,813.90...
...One result was that 170,157 cases were found to have been “lost” within the computer’s memory banks...
...What is RSSI’s role...
...On the Saturday before Christmas, while this appeal was pending, Mrs...
...Ed Cramer, public affairs officer for Social Security’s San Francisco region, remembers standing in the Treasury Department’s payment office in San Francisco on December 30, 1973...
...It was one of those moments that bureaucrats take pride in...
...The House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, and the General Accounting Office have all launched investigations to find out why a program that was thought to be the “wave of the future” had tamed into an administra...
...SSI was launched with not one but three field manuals telling local office staffs how to rim the new program...
...In essence, what BSSI had to run was a computer program80 different computer programs, actually...
...Six months later the scene was repeated in Vermont...
...No, honey,” she told a reporter who inquired about her case...
...She remembers spending them, though...
...John A. McConnachie, commissioner for the region, decided that would be impossible...
...Then, before Mrs...
...upon arriving at his goal he did not know where he had been...
...As administrators and taxpayers, we find this not only disturbing, but frightening,” wrote the manager of the Springfield, Massachusetts, office, after describing how $70,000 worth of overpayments had been waived in three days...
...Whittier, who served in the Navy as a lieutenant during World War 11, has a penchant for describing things in nautical terms...
...I admit I got it [the money], but I don’t think it’s right that we should pay for somebody else’s mistake...
...I am very much reminded of the parallels that exist between our splendid BSSI effort and the exemplary deeds of that great American, Christopher Columbus...
...But he had barely scratched the surface...
...Yoii can rely on that...
...Messiah of the Month Time and time again Whittier was bested by the other barons who knew the ins and outs of the agency’s machinery...
...Social Security, having misspent the money, is bound to try to get back as much as it can...
...During the spring and summer of 1974, Mrs...
...Computer-written form letters began arriving in her mailbox in August...
...Cardwell felt Ihe option was really a phantotn...
...I must have a lot of sugar-free, low salt food and that’s pretty expensive,” she explained...
...Knowing that recipients have other government income gives SST a way to check a client’s real needs and reduce his benefits accordingly...
...The link-up with regular Social Security benerit records took place 18 ~nontlis after...
...According to James B. Cardwell, the commissioner of Social Security, at one point 70 per cent of the agency’s 86,600 employees were working on SSI...
...Grandfather Clause There was yet another “baron” who felt the need to make “input” on SSI during 1973...
...Middlelevel Social Security bureaucrats believe that when all the returns are in, the government will find that it paid out over $1 billion too much during the beginning months of the SSI program...
...But only part of the damage caused by SSI’s problems can be measured in numbers...
...Over $400 million of it was known to have been paid out by mistake...
...We would have had to prove, I think, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we couldn’t make it happen in order to get a coiisensiis within either the executive branch or the Congress that a delay was necessary...
...There was no accompanying explanation...
...Doubters were not likely to be promoted and, of course, could never expect to become Messiah of the Month, As the hectic year of 1973 wore on, one of the work products of Whittier’s shop was a collection of memos mocking the florid, nautical tone of Whittier’s memos...
...Forty of the 80 computer programs governing SSI operations had to be completely rewritten...
...Early the following morning, New Year’s Eve, McConnachie and a platoon of his office workers arrived at the payment center, determined to do what they could...
...This was $100 more than she had received in SSI funds, because the agency had begun taking out $50 a month in November...
...It happened so often that the chosen one was dubbed “Messiah of the Month” by the rest of the staff...
...I personally guarantee [it] ,” he said...
...the rest is measured in grief...
...At that time, government had paid out $8 billion in the first year and a half of the new program...
...The Supplemen tal Security Income program (SSI) is administered, logically enough, by the Bureau of Supplemental Security Income (BSSI) of the Social Security Administration (SSA) of HEW...
...SSI began...
...Then the computer caught up with her...
...Determining who is entitled to disability payments is up to the Bureau of Disability Insurance (BDI...
...we estimate that at least 95 per cent are waivable under current instructions...
...The first one said her payment would be cut because “you and your spouse are now living together in your own household...
...Now that was disturbing, because Mrs...
...The scenes in Weinberger’s office when Cardwell came to report must have resembled those described in Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich: Goering assuring Hitler more and more confidently , as the situation deteriorated, that the troops at Stalingrad would be supplied by air...
...The “can do” spirit was nourished with substantial amounts of overtime, some $60-million worth a year...
...We Can Do It While the bureaucrats played their games, the problems multiplied...
...Because there were millions of dollars’ worth of checks stacked in there, Treasury officials were reluctant to let them in...
...She has heart trouble and diabetes...
...Training programs and other nonessential activities were curtailed throughout the agency as the SSI crunch approached...
...Bigger Battle But there is a much bigger battle involving SSI that is just getting underway...
...She complained to her local office and they apologized for the error...
...This comes in the form of a monthly green check...
...She is entitled to $195 a month in normal Social Security widow’s benefits, benefits paid for by the payroll deductions taken from her late husband...
...As originally written, SSI contemplated a uniform maximum payment for all recipients, regardless of where they lived or how much they had been getting under the old state or county programs...
...The case worker wanted to know whether it was a gold check or a green check...
...We have SSADRS [computer] messages, Bynum memos, SSIH [disability program] transmittals, parallel DO [district office] instructionals, RO [regional office] instructionals, BSSI circulars, Claims Manual transmittals, etc., all on this same subject...
...She also is entitled to a gold check for $85 a month from SSI because she is disabled and cannot work...
...i‘owerfi11 people like Long in the Smate and C‘aspar Weinberger at tlEW tiad parental feelings about SSL Cardwell felt he could not disappoint Ilietn...
...Blakeney is not quite sure...
...One month he would delegate policy making to one person, the next month that person would be frozen out, and another staffer would be placed at the controls...
...Case workers in the 1,200 field offices administering the program work under the Bureau of District Office Operations (BDOO...
...I’m fighting this thing tooth and nail...
...It is apparent,” wrote the manager of the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, office, “that systems-generated overpayments to the extent of thousands of dollars weekly are occurring continuously...
...Her case should not be very complicated...
...As he put it later, explainion to go ahead: “Our political system, the way it operates --1 have dirficulty conveying this to people-doesn’t permit in a period of, say, 30 to 60 days the development of an abrupt change in this kind of policy...
...Uncertainty is natural on a shakedown cruise...
...And Social Security finally sent her a letter admitting that the $1,813.90 check was issued because she had been entitled to receive her widow’s benefits one year before she had been declared eligible...
...Each “baron,” or chief of an SSA bureau, controls a little chunk of what should have been a relatively simple operation...
...We can’t tell what supersedes what...
...That was what made the program “simple...
...Can Do ‘The “can do’’ attitude was one that SSA director Cardwell had tried hard to pieservc- one that he shared hiniself...
...policy regtlations is the job of the Bureau of Retirement and Survivors Insuraice (BRST...
...She took her case to the Appeals Council in Washington, which functions as Social Security’s administrative version of the Supreme Court...
...For six months the Nixon Administration left the commissioner’s slot unfilled...
...The resulting delay meant that some of the computer programs intended for SSI would not be ready when the system began...
...The Bureau of Data Processing (BDOP) does...
...ASS1 has responsibility, but no authority...
...Blakeney...
...He was horrified...
...There would be hell to pay if those checks didn’t go out on time...
...Some of them were not located until the summer of 1975, 18 months after the program started...
...Programmers discovered that a crossed signal had mistakenly told the computer that 15,000 SSI clients had been underpaid for about a year...
...The final blow came in November when, somehow, the system selected about 220 Vermonters who had dutifully returned their earlier overpayments and stopped their November checks entirely...
...The agency has promised to restore the money that it deducted from her monthly checks...
...The following Monday she called her local Social Security office...
...There wasn’t time to go over all the checks by hand, so the team selected certain zip codes that appeared to have the most flagrant overpayments...
...Blake-ney was angry...
...Now they owe me money...
...RSSI, for example, does not control the agency computer system...
...Then there was another shock...
...She has no outside income and-like many people on SSI-measures her life by the checks that appear in her mailbox once a month...
...The agency, she was told, was preparing to subtract $50 a month from her SSI check for 80 months...
...There were six or seven of the Blackeney checks...
...Specifically, lie was worried about 45,000 voiers in his home state of Louisiana who would “ suffer decreases...
...qtratiori rnay take place sometime next year These delays are now believed to be inajor causes of overpayments...
...SSI clients, because they are the nation’s blind, disabled, and elderly, are, by definition, the least likely to be able to pay it back...
...In his frustration, Whittier himself launched some of the torpedos that damaged SSI...
...It was green, the widow said...
...He passed his hands idly over the stacks of checks...
...That was a considerable blow to the widow who, in good months, may build up as much as $20 in her savings account...
...But Ball retired in March 1973...
...The agency wanted $251 back for the months of October, November and December...
...In the twinkling of an eye, $10,516,000 had gone out in Overpayments...
...Because it had a reputation as the most efficient agency in the government for this sort of thing, with the largest computer system ever devised for peacetime use, the job of writing the checks for the new program was given to the Social Security Administration (in recent years, a division of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...As we jet along on course, smoke billowing from our sails,” begins one, “we realize that we have finally reached our goal...
...Mrs...
...So the battle of the barons, the interfering politician, and the misplaced “can-do” spirit all conspired to disable this first attempt at a rational national welfare program...
...These checks were for between $600 and $800,” Cramer later recalled...
...Natural Metaphors ‘The man who runs BSSl is not himself a career “baxon...
...The stacks of freshly printed gold checks (to distinguish them from the regular Social Security checks, which are green), were ready to go, arranged by zip codes...
...John Fialka is a national affairs reporter for The Washington Star...
...In June 1973, Long learned that the uniform payrnent scheme meant that, while many would have their welfare payments raised, some would have to take cuts when SSI came into being...
...By 1976, this figure was up to $547 million...
...Part of what went wrong is known around SSA (that’s right, Social Security Administration) as “The Battle of the Barons...
...McConnachie thought he had pretty much cleaned up the problem...
...Whittier said he did it to encourage greater efficiency, but his fellow barons disagree...
...This one said, “we made an error,” and promised that one of her two monthly SSI checks would stop...
...One of these was the link-up or “interface” between SSI records and records of government benefits, such as 1 Security retirement and survivor’s insurance payments and veterans benefits...
...The Appeals Council ruled that she was without fault in cashing the duplicate checks and added that any recoupment attempt would mean a hardship for the widow...
...Fighting Tooth and Nail At this point the average recipient might have given up, but Mrs...
...One was drafted by BSSI, another by BDI, and a third by BDOQ...
...In October the people who had received the mailgrams got another batch of inflated checks...
...About a week later another computer letter arrived...
...SSI (and get your initials straight as we go along, because there’s lots more to come) is the part of Pat Moynihan’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP) that made it...
...A quarter of a million dollars in overpayments went out to 2,366 recipients...
...Blakeney found herself receiving checks made out to two different names...
...He rewarded people who told him that SSI’s development was coming along nicely...
...The federal takeover was scheduled to begin on January 1, 1974...
...New information had to be solicited from 48 states, and new contracts had to be negotiated with 31 states which would have to pay the supplement...
...I’he uniform payment system was one of the major bulwarks of SSI...
...Whittier asked Byniim in a memo late in 1973...
...The link-up with records of the Veterans Admini...
...That’s all the recreation I have, you know,” she said...
...In theory, the barons were supposed to work together in what was known as the “coordinative system” under former Social Security Commissioner Robert M. Ball...
...A case worker, she said, explained how she could cash them by signing them Francis C. Blackeney and then signing her right name underneath...
...The Washington Star has printed dozens of stories about people caught in the grip of this maladministered computer payment system...
...Whittier’s major struggle was with Robert Rynum, the director of field operations (BDOO, you will recall), who insisted that the field force would decide just how SSI should be coiltrolled in the local offices...
...According to a team of state auditors who have examined a sample of the 540,693 California SSI cases, 55 per cent of the checks were wrong...
...the ‘we can do it’ attitude of the DO staff that confronted any organizational or service problem in the past has been replaced by ‘we’ll do what we can’ or ‘whatever you say,’ ” wrote the manager of the Farmington, New Mexico, office...
...As you remember, when Captain Chris set sail he did not know exactly where he was going...
...This was Russell Long, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee...
...My black and blue spots are showing...
...If the federal payment was lower than that, the Long aniendment forces the state to make a “mandatory supplement” or face a loss in Medicaid f 1 in...
...He also has a penchant for writing memos...
...Elliot Richardson followed his wandering political star to the Defense Department, and Whittier found himself awash in a sea full of torpedos...
...If BSSI has the responsibility--the responsibility ?or what...
...He was playing office over there,” sniffs one of the career bureaucrats...
Vol. 8 • May 1976 • No. 3
