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     I've finally gotten around to the sort of list you've seen a lot of in the last couple of weeks -- the most important things that have happened in the Social Security world in the last decade. Below is my list but feel free to post your own list. I came up with eight and didn't want to pad it to make it ten. Constant administrative under-funding of the Social Security Administration accompanied by frequent shutdown threats and occasional actual shutdowns. Agency performance suffered as a result. Service has deteriorated to levels that would have once been thought unimaginable; After the number of Social Security disability claims soared in the 2000-2009 decade, the number of claims started declining in 2010. That decline is continuing. We think we know why claims soared from 2000-2009 -- primarily the aging of the baby boomer population -- but no one has a good handle on why the number of disability claims filed has gone down so much since then or why the declin...

     The Social Security portions of the Committee report (Social Security part begins at page 157) on the Fiscal Year 2020 appropriations bill covering the Social Security Administration that has been passed by Congress: The agreement includes an increase of $100,000,000 for SSA's base administrative expenses for additional hires and resources to improve public service at SSA field offices and direct service operations.  Continuing Disability Reviews . - The agreement directs SSA to include in its next continuing disability review (CDR) report to Congress an evaluation of its CDR prioritization models and a cost-benefit analysis of how it uses estimated savings in determining which beneficiaries receive a full-medical CDR . Additionally, the agreement requests in the fiscal year 2021 Congressional Justification, the process by which SSA intends to pace its CDR workload to properly manage Limitation on Administrative Expenses funding.   Disability Cas e Proces...

     From a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General: SSA [Social Security Administration] is developing DCPS [Disability Case Processing System] as a common case processing system for the DDSs [Disability Determination Services]. The Agency expects DCPS to simplify system support and maintenance, improve the speed and quality of the disability process, and reduce the growth rate of infrastructure costs. SSA is using an incremental approach to develop and deploy DCPS. In December 2016, the Agency released its first working software to three DDSs, enabling them to process certain disability cases in the new system. Since then, the Agency has developed and implemented new releases that have provided additional functionality and has made the system available to users in 31 DDSs. In September 2019, SSA made DCPS available to 31 participating DDSs, that, on average, used DCPS to process approximately 7 percent of their workload. DDS Administrators reported ...