One of Russell Vought’s top regulatory policies upon taking the helm at OMB this year was, according to a former Trump administration official, the implementation of regulations that would reduce the number of Social Security disability benefits awarded to older individuals. Current regulations require Social Security to consider older age as a factor in making disability determinations. The Vought proposal sought to reverse that.
Disability attorneys scored a major victory last week when they brought Vought’s proposal down. Jason Turkish, a disability attorney, told the Washington Post that Frank Bisignano, the Commissioner of Social Security, “assured him in meetings” that Vought’s regulation would not be pursued.
Social Security’s disability program is one of the most important safety nets in the U.S., providing $155 billion per year in payments to disabled individuals. In recent years, disability attorneys, who are paid when a claimant is awarded benefits, have proven to be a political force to be reckoned with in both the Biden and Trump administrations. Their success against someone as powerful as Vought shows that smart, small-ball political tactics can still win in Washington.
The defeat for the conservative Vought is even larger than it first appears. The Vought proposal also included a technical change that would have required the Social Security Administration (SSA) to use modern labor market data in judging whether a disability applicant could still work. That part of the proposal was laudable and uncontroversial. The failure to switch to newly available data leaves in place the Biden Administration’s tinkering with occupational data that will, over time, likely liberalize the disability determination process.
The Biden Administration’s tinkering with occupational data was a response to an explosive report in the Washington Post in 2022 about the unusual occupations that SSA cited to deny disability benefits. Denied claimants were told, for example, they could not get disability because they could work as “Addressers”, an occupation from the 1970s that involved addressing envelopes by hand or typewriter. Rather than switch to new data that had become available, the Biden Administration simply dropped some occupations from the 1970s source data (a book called the Dictionary of Occupational Titles or DOT).
This tinkering was a political response and made the situation worse from a technical perspective. SSA would often cite the “Addresser” occupation as work a denied applicant could perform because the DOT said it was unskilled (could be learned quickly) and sedentary (had low physical demands). “Addresser” jobs no longer exist in the modern economy, but other unskilled and sedentary work does. For example, new data from the Occupational Requirements Survey indicate there are 5.6 million workers in the United States in unskilled and sedentary jobs.
In short, the Biden Administration chose to focus on only half the story: striking defunct occupations but not adding counterbalancing information from the modern labor market. Over time, good attorneys will have increasing success at winning cases against this rump-version of the DOT.
While both the Trump and Biden administrations have treated the data issue as an opportunity to restrict or liberalize the disability determination process, Congress has largely played it straight. It has funded, on a bipartisan basis, the collection of new labor market data. Further, due to congressional pressure, vocational experts under contract with SSA are now allowed, on a voluntary basis, to use the Occupational Requirements Survey.
But SSA has displayed bureaucratic inertia for decades over the data issue and it is possible that disability determinations are still, largely, just perfunctory uses of junk data from the DOT.
From a public policy perspective, it would be useful for Congress to get more involved in the data issue. As part of its oversight responsibilities, Congress should ask SSA for reports on which occupations are currently being cited in disability denials, how often the new Occupational Requirements Survey data is being used by vocational experts, and a timeline for moving away from the DOT.
Conservatives and liberals will, naturally, have different views on disability policy. But the competing policy debates have overlayed and confused the discussion of the real issue: it is time for SSA’s disability program to finally move away from using labor market data gathered in the 1970s.
