Kate Lang: Hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar presentation entitled Navigating the Social Security Administration: Options for Advocates. My name is Kate Lang and I’m the Director of Federal Income Security on the Economic Security and Housing Team at Justice and Aging. I’m the moderator for today’s webinar and I’m joined by four outstanding presenters. Before we begin, I would like to go over a few webinar logistics. Again, welcome to everybody. All participants are on mute, but we welcome your participation in today’s presentation through the Q&A function on the Zoom control panel. Also available in the Zoom control panel is the CC button, which enables closed captioning.
I’ll be watching the participants’ questions as they come in throughout the webinar, and I’ll be asking our panelists some questions that lift up high level themes submitted through the Q&A function at the end of today’s webinar. We won’t be responding to questions about individuals’ specific situations during the webinar. Any questions unanswered during today’s webinar will be addressed via email later. You can use the Q&A function to request technical assistance with Zoom and our staff from Justice and Aging will do our best to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and after the conclusion of the webinar, the slides and the recording of today’s presentation will be available on the Justice and Aging website and will be emailed to all registrants. We would also appreciate your participation in our post-webinar survey that’s going to pop up on your screen at the end of the closing of the webinar.
We’re also providing American sign language interpretation on this webinar. The ASL interpreters will stay on video throughout the training. You have the option to pin the interpreter’s video box to maximize your view of the interpreter. To do this, click on their video window and then select the pin icon. Today’s webinar is hosted by Justice in Aging. Justice in Aging is a national organization that uses the power of law to fight senior poverty by securing access to affordable healthcare, economic security, and the courts for older adults with limited resources. Since 1972, we focused our efforts primarily on fighting for people who have been marginalized and excluded from justice, such as women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and people with limited English proficiency.
Justice and Aging produces a wealth of information on a variety of topics like the webinar you’re viewing today, along with fact sheets, issue briefs, alerts, and other material to keep you up to date with important developments. If you’re not already a member of our network, we encourage you to join by going to our website and signing up or sending an email to info@justiceanaging.org. So now we’re going to get started by having our presenters introduce themselves. And we’re going to get started with Stacy Cloyd. If you could introduce yourself, Stacy.
Stacy Cloyd: Sure. Hi, everybody. Thank you, Kate, for inviting me to participate today. As the slide says, I’m senior staff attorney in the Public Benefits Unit at Legal Aid DC, where we look at a variety of public benefits, and I have a special interest in SSI and SSDI. I’m very pleased to be here and I hope to share some tips with you.
Kate Lang: Thank you, Stacy. Next up is Stephen Pozgay.
Stephen Pozgay: Hi there. Very happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation to join Justice and Aging on this topic. I’m a caseworker in Senator Wyden’s state office, and I’ve been with the team for about over four years at this point. I handle Social Security as well as CMS casework, HUD, OPM, and FEMA. And one of my projects is to work with other caseworkers across the Senate to talk about a peer support network to support caseworkers in the challenging work that we do. So caseworkers are much like the advocates I believe are attending this call, and I hope that y’all get something out of the info that I have to share later. Glad to be here.
Kate Lang: Yes. Thank you so much, Stephen. We really appreciate your participation. Next up is Eve Rutzick.
Eve Rutzick: Hi, everybody. I’m glad to be with you today. I’m the public benefits lead at Change Well Project, where I work with benefits advocates across California who assist individuals applying for SSI and SSDI. Previously, I worked at a legal aid in Los Angeles, supervising a team of attorneys and paralegals who do SSI and SSDI work. And prior to that, I was at the Social Security Administration for almost nine years, first as an attorney advisor, writing decisions for judges, and then as the group supervisor in the Office of Hearings Operations. I’m excited to join you all today.
Kate Lang: Thank you, Eve. And our fourth presenter is Katie Savin. Can you introduce yourself?
Katie Savin: Sure. Hi, everyone. I’m Katie Savin. I’m an assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento in the social work school. And I am also a Ford fellow in disability policy research at the National Academy of Social Insurance. I do primarily qualitative research on the experience of receiving social security benefits and administrative burden and other parts of the welfare state. And prior to that, I was a medical social worker. And prior and after that, I was an SSDI recipient, which kicked off this whole journey. So thank you so much to Justice and Aging for inviting me. I’m excited to be here.
Kate Lang: Great. Well, we’re going to get started by asking you to talk a little bit about your most recent research, Katie.
Katie Savin: Okay, great. So I’ll be sharing about a report I just published about a month ago with my colleagues, Callie Freitag from University of Wisconsin-Madison and Matthew Borus from University of Binghamton at SUNY. It’s called In the Last Year It’s Gotten A Lot Worse: Barriers to Disability Benefits in 2025. There is a QR code to scan for the full report, and there’s also a link in the chat. So, slide please. Thank you. As you all are likely familiar, in 2025, the start of the second Trump administration brought a series of rapid changes of policy and administrative changes, changes to the default overpayment and withholding rate, changes in staffing, changes in what claimants can access by phone.
And there’s a lot of chaos that resulted. And amidst all of this, Social Security stopped reporting the call wait times and other customer service data on its public dashboard that it had previously. And as a SSI researcher and along with my colleagues, we were concerned about the fact that amidst all of this chaos and change, we were actually losing transparency and insight into what was going on for claimants and for those who represent them. So that inspired this research project. Slide, please.
So we decided to develop this report that was published by DREDF and AAPD. Slide please. We attempted to understand what the policy and administrative changes did, what the actual impact was of them through interviews with people who represent claimants, both attorney and non-attorney benefit representatives. We did this because you all, those folks have really a good bird’s eye view. You’re always talking to social security, so it’s easier to have a sense of the before and after, whereas some claimants, it took more time for them to be impacted. So we interviewed 52 different legal service providers across 32 organizations that together represented over 8,000 SSI and DI claimants. We were focusing on disability benefits in this report, but of course our findings and the organizations are also relevant to other types of social security benefits. And we made sure to interview people across the United States.
We did this by thinking through the 10 different, what had been the 10 SSA regions. We talked to people in rural and urban areas and small and large organizations, trying to really get a large kind of swath of different experiences. So I will be presenting our findings to you today. Slide please. We organized our findings into seven main themes. The first theme was worsening access to disability benefits. Our respondents described a series of small, seemingly banal changes that together amounted to what people described as a loop, that they got stuck in a loop. There were changes to the phone systems, changes so that when you called one field office, you might be automatically rerouted to another. There were newly restricted access to field offices.
Staff were incentivized to retire early or leave the agency. Staff were moved from, say, looking at cases in the field office to answering the 1-800 number. And all of these changes together meant that there was really reduced access to staff. Staff were doing jobs that they were not used to doing, and some of those most seasoned staff were no longer there. This resulted in much longer processing time for all types of things, for overpayment waivers, for applications. There were delays in getting payments, more denials, more seemingly erroneous denials. So one respondent said, “I just have so many cases that are stuck in purgatory because they don’t have enough workers to work them, and they don’t have enough workers to answer the phone to tell me what’s happening to them.” And this kind of sense of, “I just can’t get the information.” Really pervaded all of our findings.
One respondent said, “Now with the new change,” Referring to the system where when you call one field office and nobody answered, you would get automatically rerouted to another one. “It’s pretty easy to get a human on the phone, they just can’t help you.” So people were understandably frustrated that they would have someone respond and say, “Oh, you need to call this other office to get the number, to get the person you want to speak to.” And that was the office they had called. Somebody said, “They’re meeting every single,” They referring to a client, “They’re meeting every single eligibility standard and they’re just getting denied.” So while in some cases processing took longer, in others, applications would be turned around very quickly with denials that didn’t seem to make sense, that didn’t follow the logics that they had seen before. Another respondent said, “They’re not getting notices for the check problems. Clients are getting cut off without notice.” Respondents described their clients not receiving overpayment notices and finding out about overpayment simply by not receiving a check or receiving a smaller check than they were used to.
And another respondent who had been working with clients, was representing clients for SSA for a long time said, “I’ve never seen a delay in getting paid this bad ever.” So these findings of the barriers to disability benefits, they weren’t all new. Some of these issues, many of them in fact had existed before, but there were new aspects to them that made it harder to use the same strategies to push past them. And people found that even if they’d been working for decades in this area, the barriers had changed and were greater than they had been before. Slide, please. And what were the consequences of all of these changes? Our respondents told us that they were really dire and that they didn’t impact everyone in the same way. One respondent said, “They’re losing access to their housing. They’re losing their food services. I’d say 25% become homeless while we’re working with them.” So our respondents were watching these delays at Social Security while also seeing their clients lose access to basic material needs.
Another said, “This woman is dying. She’s going to die. She has a very serious medical condition and she’s living outside.” We talked to people in medical-legal partnerships, people who are working with clients who had advanced cancer, who knew that their clients would be eligible for social security benefits, but were so seriously delayed in getting them, that they saw their deaths accelerated. And as I mentioned, not all the clients were impacted in the same way. As one respondent said, “Most of our clients have not been successful at creating MySSA accounts. It prevents them from accessing this whole world that social security is envisioning makes things easier.” So the push towards online services for customer service is something that theoretically for some clients is very helpful, but many clients were unable to access these online services, particularly the MySSA accounts presented a lot of challenges for people with limited access to internet, unstably housed people, people who just sort of struggled interfacing with computers.
Another said, “Not everyone has a reliable internet connection and not everyone’s comfortable using the internet. People who aren’t computer savvy, people who don’t have reliable internet access, someone who’s in their 20s, but unhoused, and someone who’s in their 70s and having issues with memory loss.” So we kept hearing that some of the clients that were really in most need of help from social security were the ones who were most struggling by the changes such as this push to online services. Another said, “People who have any sort of speech or hearing issues are not going to be able to navigate that menu effectively at all.” This was a respondent speaking about the introduction of the AI chatbot to the 1-800 number. People with communication disabilities in particular struggled to access that. One respondent told us that she had a client with a speech impairment who came into the office every time they needed to call Social Security because the AI chatbot couldn’t understand this client’s speech, and that simply shouldn’t be how citizens need to access the government.
Another respondent said, “Has there ever been a fear before now that SSA was going to comply with some crazy order to share all kinds of data? No, there hasn’t.” This was a respondent speaking to their clients’ fears who were immigrants or part of mixed status families who were newly scared to access their benefits, to apply for benefits that they might be entitled to because of fears that SSA might share their data with DHS. At that point, these interviews were conducted in the summer of 2025, and our respondents described simply being unsure of how they should advise their clients. Since then, we have learned that SSA has shared information, has shared this data showing us that these fears are founded and that the consequences of this SSA decision will have challenges, particularly to immigrant families, regardless of the citizenship of the claimant in particular.
So when our respondents talked about encountering issues that SSA in the past, they talked about how it was difficult, but they did have ways to try to respond, to try to persist and get their clients what they needed. What they found now was that these accountability mechanisms were simply not there for them. One respondent said, “The biggest change is that right now I don’t have the email addresses for the people who used to be my problem solvers.” Probably most of us on this call know that SSA is not an agency where you can simply call any number or email anyone and get a simple answer. People really get a lot of work done for their clients through these personal connections that they have with staffers.
And so many of them described, “The one person who I could always get that fix for a client issue or get this information from doesn’t work there or has been reassigned.” Another said, “As quickly as we think we have a contact, they’re gone or they’re retired. It makes it doubly hard getting anything done. We don’t know where the expertise is in an office to get the answers that we need.” So as I’ve mentioned that as some of the more seasoned employees were incentivized to early retirement or employees were moved to say, answer the 1-800 number, figuring out who had the specialized knowledge in a given field office got very challenging.
Another mentioned, when we encounter very egregious mistakes or errors, now we don’t have anybody to go to for that, which really left some advocates we talked to feeling sort of hopeless, not knowing where to go when they knew that something was happening that wasn’t right, that wasn’t legal. So this left some of our respondents feeling like they were screaming into a black hole. In fact, six independent individuals used that phrase when they were speaking to us, which was very striking. One said, “My hands are completely tied. I feel like I have a gag order. It’s really depressing. We, up until this year, had multiple ways to escalate a case.” Next.
And another respondent speaking to trying to get client information into a field office said, “I’m convinced there’s a great big trash can underneath the fax machine. Even when we’re doing electronic filings, electronic appeals, they just kind of disappear.” So this image of black holes and great big trash cans that are just absorbing all of the client data with no pathway to get to somebody who can help a client was really striking and kind of came through in my conversations with legal service providers. And the impact of all of these issues, of all the barriers to access, the consequences on claimants, the lack of accountability mechanisms really had impact on advocates and organizations themselves as well. One person said, “I get a lot of calls from people who simply just want our help trying to get in contact with social security. It kind of gets to a point for us that I think we also get a little bit frustrated. There’s very little on our end of things that we are actually able to do.”
And so many of our respondents said that they were felt like they were increasingly doing the work of SSA and doing work that they didn’t necessarily have a special ability to do. This other respondent said, “We have to make four phone calls when we send one piece of paper to make sure it’s received and processed and understood and interpreted in a way that helps the client.” This was a tremendous amount of time and labor. And another said, “It used to be that if something went wrong, that’s what you would need a lawyer. Now you’re needing an attorney to make sure something gets off someone’s desk.” Which meant that, of course, attorneys had a lot more and more granular, less technical work that they had to do in order to help their clients.
And so as one respondent explained, “If you’re doing that with a number of cases, it’s really cutting into the number of cases that you can competently represent.” And that was the impression that we got across organizations, that people were concerned that they might not be able to continue representing the same number of clients given the increased amount of work they had to do for each individual client. And given the barriers that providers had to representing their clients, many of our respondents mentioned, and we as researchers also wondered, what must it be like to be a client attempting to access these systems?
So the rest of this webinar is going to be about how you can help, you can work on navigating these systems. And I will leave that to my incredible fellow panelists, but just briefly mention that we concluded our report with some macro recommendations for social security and primarily among them was really to staff up so that the clients are able to get appointments, for example, within 30 days. To expand walk-in services so that clients don’t have to depend on phones that aren’t answered or internet services they can’t access. Ending that automatic rerouting of phones between field offices. Returning overpayment withholding rates to 10%. Addressing the issues of timeliness and accuracy in claims processing. And ensuring that as we improve and build on online and AI-based systems, that there are always alternatives for people who, for all kinds of reasons, do not have access to them.
And that immigrant claimants are protected, that data sharing stops, and that as the agency continues to consider policy changes, that they always start those processes with engaging with stakeholders because the people we talk to and the clients they represented know this policy in and out, know how a policy might end up having an unintended effect and are really available to be communication partners with Social Security around us. Thank you.
Kate Lang: Great. Thank you so much, Katie. And I really want to encourage everybody to go and take a look at the whole report. Katie’s just given us a high level overview of their findings, but it’s a great read and I encourage folks to take a look at the whole report. Next, we’re going to turn to Eve. And I think as we get into more of the nitty-gritty for this webinar, I thought it would be helpful for us to turn to Eve as somebody who used to work at the Social Security Administration and it’s a huge agency with different components. And I think when folks are trying to figure out how to address problems that clients are facing at the agency, it’s very important to identify where that problem is within the agency and be as specific as possible about where the problem is happening and where to escalate from there.
So next, I’m going to turn to Eve to give us an overview of a couple of the different components that advocates interact with. So we have that kind of, I think of SSA as having their own terminology, and it’s really important when interacting with the agency to be familiar with their terminology and use those terms that they rely on to communicate with them. So I’ll hand it off to you.
Eve Rutzick: Thanks, Kate. So to start with, I completely agree with what Kate said. Using SSA terminology when speaking with SSA employees, I think can certainly help move cases forward. It also reflects credibility for you as an advocate, that you know how they do their work. And it’s also extremely true that when there’s a problem, if you contact a component that is not dealing with the case at that stage, they’re not going to do anything. The best thing we can hope for is someone in the component where the case is will do something, but someone in a different component absolutely will not. So I labeled this as the hierarchy because the truth is is that SSA is very hierarchical as a government agency. Employees typically like claims and cases and advocates to follow the set order. So that’s how these slides are designed. So to go through at sort of a high level, we’ll talk about the field office, which is one component under what they call operations.
We’ll talk about hearings, which is where individuals go when they have cases in front of administrative law judges, and we’ll talk about DDS, which does the medical determinations for cases. Each have separate hierarchies and each are very siloed. Although, as Katie’s report described, there has been immense change in the last little over a year with social security structure and particularly a lot of flattening of the top of the hierarchy. To the best of our knowledge, these workflows still exist at the more local levels. So first, there’s the area director. It is going to be very hard for any advocate to get in touch with an area director. There would have to be really widespread problems at that point, but that is sort of the person who is in charge of many field offices. Again, this is all within operations, so strictly the field offices where claimants can walk into.
Next, you have the district manager, who’s the person in charge of a particular field office. It’s also going to be hard for advocates to get in touch with the district manager. So sort of the top person in the hierarchy that most advocates can reach would be the assistant district manager. If you throw around the term ADM, when you say, “Can I speak with the ADM?” You will get a little bit more credibility with the person that you’re speaking with. It really does make a difference to use SSA’s lingo. Under the ADM or the assistant district manager are what are called operations supervisors. They are the first line supervisors over the individuals working on actual cases. So most field offices historically have had an operations supervisor who’s in charge of what an SSA lingo is called T2. That’s what’s on the slide. T2 is for Title II, meaning SSDI, and they have a different operation supervisor who’s in charge of what they call T16 or Title XVI, which is for SSI.
Even within the field office, there is pretty significant specialization between Title II or SSDI and Title XVI, SSI. The T16 OS or the SSI operations supervisor is not going to know almost anything about the SSDI program. They really specialize. And the reason, of course, as advocates know is because these are very complex programs. And so it’s sort of impossible to get the level of depth of knowledge that you would need to be specialists in both. So speaking with a T16 OS about a T2 case, they’re not going to really be able to help you. Under the operation supervisor, there’s sort of three levels, what are called technical experts or TEs. Those are folks who typically don’t have a caseload. Their work is just to figure out more complex cases that come up. And again, there’s usually a T16 TE, meaning an SSI technical expert and a T2 TE, meaning a SSDI technical expert. This is how specialized it is in the field office.
Then you have claims specialists. They used to be called claims representatives. You may know that term CR. It’s been a number of years now that they’ve been called claims specialists or CSs. In my experience, social security employees don’t like being called caseworkers, or workers. That’s often true in other public benefits offices. People are called workers. Social security employees tend to not like being called workers. So they’re called claims specialists. And those are the folks who are assigned specific cases. So these are the people who you’re desperately trying to get in touch with who almost never are going to return your calls. They’re the ones who are listed on letters that are if you have an appointment typically, although now they’re making appointments all over the place for folks, which is ridiculous. So again, the claim specialists tend to be specialized in either SSI or SSDI.
If a case is both, they often go from the SSDI side to the SSI side, depending on what’s happening in the case. And then there are what are called customer service reps or CSRs. And those historically have been the people who are standing at the counter when the public comes in and answering phones. As we know, there’s been this major shifting in the last year where now they’ve put a huge amount of focus on answering the phones. So a lot of folks were taken out of their frontline customer service work at the field office and directed into the 800 number, which is a different component. The folks who answer the 800 number are not part of this field office hierarchy. We can go to the next slide, please. So we just talked about operations. That’s the field office. Now I’m moving to what is called the hearing office, which is under what is now being called just hearings. Again, these are totally separate components.
If you contact a field office about an issue at OHO, the field office isn’t going to do anything. They’re barely even going to know how to contact the folks at the OHO office. So it really is not a good use of time to contact the wrong component, which is why we’re going into this level of detail. So within the hearing office, there is also a hierarchy. At sort of the top of the hierarchy is what is called the hearing office chief administrative law judge or HOCALJ. There are thousands of acronyms that SSA uses. HOCALJ just flows off the tongue. That is the chief judge over all the rest of the judges in the office. They supervise the rest of the line administrative law judges or ALJs. The chief judge typically does have their own caseload of cases that they hear, and they are meant to supervise when issues come up related to an ALJ’s either work or workload or other things that come up in the course of their office work.
The HOCALJ technically is also over what is called the hearing office director or the HOD, and that is the main manager. So with sort of day-to-day operations of the hearing office, it’s the HOD who’s in charge of that. It’s not the HOCALJ. The HOCALJ is working on their own cases and dealing with the judges. They’re not really working on problems with interpreters or cases that haven’t been assigned forever. The HOCALJ typically is working more on sort of policy compliance and that sort of thing. Under the hearing office director is what are called group supervisors. That’s the role that I used to play. Those are both attorneys and non-attorneys. Those are the first line supervisors for the rest of the folks in the office. Group supervisors typically are the best person to reach out to in the hearing office when you have a problem, because they are the ones assigning the work.
They see where cases are getting delayed. They’re the ones who can add what we call critical case designations. They’re the ones who, if there’s a congressional complaint filed, it’ll typically go that the group supervisor will work it up. So group supervisors are typically the sort of best place for an advocate to try and move something along. They supervise a variety of people. What our people often refer to as the judge’s assistant. There isn’t a judge assistant role at OHO. They are called case technicians or senior case technicians. So again, if you say, “Are you the judge’s SCT?” As opposed to saying, “Are you the judge’s assistant?” You may gain a little credibility that way. There are also then attorney advisors and senior attorney advisors who are the individuals who are writing the judge’s decisions.
Historically, there have been schedulers. I think from what I understand, it’s kind of going back and forth. There’s now a separate sort of scheduling cadre, but they do still draw from the hearing office schedulers sometimes. And so there’s typically usually just one or two to the extent they’re still using them in OHOs. And then there are receptionists. There typically are not actually just one receptionist in the OHO. They often have the senior case technicians or the SCTs kind of floating in and out of that role. I will say as just a pro tip, it’s absolutely useless to leave a voicemail on the main phone line of the OHO. Nobody’s checking those voicemails, in my experience. You really have to reach the senior case technician, potentially the decision writer or attorney advisor if you ever get that contact info or the group supervisor. You can go to the next slide.
And then DDS is more simple. There’s a bureau chief who is in charge of a given DDS office. They supervise managers who are the first line managers. And then of course, there’s the medical consultants who are the doctors, psychologists who are reviewing the medical documents and making determinations. And there are the analysts who are not medically trained, who are reviewing medical records, making recommendations, obtaining medical records. DDS also has what they call public relations specialists who can be a good point of contact when a case is languishing at DDS where you run into other issues with DDS.
So then the question which I’ve sort of tried to seed throughout is where are some of the best places to exert pressure? And this is in addition to contacting a member of Congress, which really is a highly underutilized step. I probably in five years of being a group supervisor, supervising attorney at OHO, I would say I probably had fewer than 10 congressional cases that were congressional inquiries, and it really does move cases along. So when you’re dealing with operations, meaning the field office, reaching out to technical experts, then going to the district managers, assistant district managers, area director, if you could ever get that high, if nothing is moving, reaching out to the public affairs specialists and the regional communications directors. Those are all the folks under operations. For hearings, as I mentioned, trying to reach out to the group supervisors, potentially going to the hearing office director after that.
And now as the advocates on the call will know, there used to be regional offices for hearings that have been flattened quite a bit. They no longer are geographic. And so now they have what they’re calling the head of hearing hubs. There’s five hearing hubs. And so I’m trying to reach out to the head of hearing hub when there’s an issue that isn’t being resolved. It’s not a perfect solution, but that’s sort of the place to try. And then again, with DDS, reaching out to the bureau chiefs and reaching out to a public relations specialist when you’re not getting anywhere. And I’ll turn it back to Kate.
Kate Lang: Thanks so much, Eve, for that really helpful overview and our primer on all these job titles to know who you’re trying to reach to get some pressure going. So I’m going to stop sharing the slides and turn to Stephen to talk to us more about these congressional inquiries and what members of Congress can do.
Stephen Pozgay: Thanks so much, Kate. And apologies to the attendees that I don’t have slides built up for this, but I hope that you will be able to glean some good information from this overview that I wanted to provide. Again, my name is Stephen Pozgay. I’m a caseworker in Senator Wyden’s office. I’m a constituent services representative handling specifically social security as well as CMS, HUD, OPM, and FEMA. I think Eve and Katie pointed out some great things and I really find a lot of the stuff that you’ve pointed out about hierarchies to be very true anecdotally with my experience working with the agency currently this past year. I get a lot of my information from constituents who are calling or writing to our office to ask questions and ask for assistance, as well as my relationships with the various field offices in Oregon where we are, and then other relationships I’ve built.
So my notes are mine, but I did work with counterparts in the offices of Senators Merkley, Sanders, and Van Hollen who do social security casework, just to make sure that I wasn’t speaking out of turn for anyone. Of course, every office is different, but casework assistance from a member of Congress’ office is a really potentially powerful tool like Eve was referencing to help when things are really truly stuck at SSA, of course, or at another federal agency. This is the one of the clearest direct representation pieces of our representative democracy where an individual is calling upon a member of Congress to help them navigate that federal agency for a specific issue. And as such, congressional casework is pretty fairly strong nonpartisan work. I’ve had folks call me up and say, “I’ve never voted for your boss, but I need his help.” And that’s because he’s the senator for the whole state.
So it’s kind of the be here now of a legislator’s office. It happens within the confines of current rules, regulations, policies, procedures, and laws, and it’s distinct from the advocacy or policy work for changes too that might require work at the legislative level to get a constituent’s wanted result. It’s also worth noting here that casework can sometimes be conducted on behalf of advocates and other professionals when things are kind of stuck in regard to policy that doesn’t align with individual experiences. I caught a couple pieces in the Q&A. There’s a lot of good questions in there that I can’t get to, but someone was asking, “Well, SSA is on the 1696 requiring this sort of ID. I don’t have that because my firm doesn’t allow that. So what do I do?” That might be a good question where things are stuck that you could work with a congressional caseworker.
So for casework, there’s always three options, you have your two senators and your representative. Whichever office submits an inquiry on behalf of the constituent or their representative, it shouldn’t make a difference in the agency responsiveness or level of assistance because the rules are the rules and SSA is supposed to answer based on the rules. SSA will only work with one member of Congress at a time, so they will kick back duplicated inquiries. Sometimes they might get a little testy about that. “We already answered this.” Sometimes constituents or their advocates do shop around. They’re not going to get a different answer. The agency’s providing what they can. And so one of the guidance that I have is that if you are in a larger state with maybe eight or nine congressional districts or more, your House offices might have more capacity to assist with casework requests.
It’s just a question of numbers, it’s not because they have more ability or less ability. It’s just there’s more to go around versus in a populous state like Texas or California, there’s only two senators, over 40 or 50 representatives. So hopefully you can make those connections. And making relations with the caseworker in your member of Congress’ office can be a good relation to build. Jurisdiction matters. So our work is most effective at the field office, DDS office, or payment center or program service center office levels. And that was one thing that Eve didn’t really go into is the structure at PCs. I don’t really have much insight into it either.
There’s only six of them around the country plus two additional PCs and they’re a little hard to know what’s going on in there. So we’re working on it, but work does get done. And I do have correspondence with folks at the various PCs on various different specific cases. So we can help at hearings levels or even appeals council levels, but it’s really limited to administrative assistance or advocating for something to get unstuck or like a dire need, “Hear this, please, immediately, because this person is unhoused and medically unwell, this person is, their case was stuck at the field office for 11 months before it got to the hearing office. So please, can we allow that to be part of the timeline that we’re facing here?” That sort of thing.
Caseworkers can advocate on behalf of constituents or their representatives for full and fair consideration. We can’t advocate for a specific outcome. A member of Congress cannot tell a federal agency what to do. They can provide legislative oversight. They can lean on the power of the purse, the funding, the organization, that sort of thing. But there’s no law that says federal agency, an executive branch agency has to respond to a member of Congress about a question they’re asking. So just know it’s a relationship that every office builds. We typically clarify communications for constituents and their representatives in both directions, because sometimes the agency is saying, “What are they wanting here?” And definitely assist constituents in navigating the options provided by the agency. So I don’t work for SSA, I work for Senator Wyden. I don’t know all their rules. I don’t have all the POMS in the back of my pocket, but I can help navigate the options presented by the agency.
And when a constituent says, “This doesn’t feel right.” That’s where I can advocate for full and fair consideration.” “Something does seem wrong. Look, POMS says this, or I’ve had other cases for clients where this has happened. Why is that not the case?” We can ask for a second look where it’s appropriate. A couple quick notes. I said we’re not able to ask the agency to act differently. Caseworkers are not able to provide guidance or recommendations as to what choices to make or strategy to pursue in a claim or remedy, and we’re not able to act as legal or non-attorney representative. That’s hopefully pretty clear, but always should be stated.
A couple other notes. Caseworkers often work directly with local field office and DDS staff as well as hearings office staff. So we do have relationships in each of those offices. It varies a little bit by region. So I have a colleague in New York who told me that they submit all their cases through the Regional Public Affairs office, and then those are farmed out to the field offices. I work with the individual field offices in Oregon or sometimes Washington, depending on where our constituent is living.
So we try to balance the relationships with those staff with assistance to our customers. I will certainly push where it’s needed, but I also want to recognize that if I’m going to the agency about someone all the time, it’s going to wear thin. And we all have to understand that. Just like Eve was talking about, find the people that you can work with to bring attention to your case and use them, but create a relationship. Recently, SSA has released some specific internal agency guideline for handling different sorts of cases, and I’ll put that link to the emergency message. It’s a public release, into the chat with the Justice and Aging folks. So it’s not clear yet whether these are guidelines are aspirational or actual, but there’s information about how congressional cases will be handled, how houselessness cases or dire need cases should be handled. So I think that will be enlightening to some of the advocates on this call.
Just a couple more things I want to say, and I really appreciate this opportunity to talk about casework. It’s something I really enjoy and have found a great community in other Senate offices. There’s a lot that really works smoothly and on reasonable timelines with SSA procedures and policies, but the things that we want to be the quickest are often the things that are the most prolonged. The initial disability claim, the effectuation process. So tagging a constituent case with congressional inquiry does not guarantee an accelerated timeline. That’s really important to note. What it does is it shines a different light on things. It also doesn’t guarantee a favorable outcome. It can be effective in those ways, and it definitely provides another pressure on the agency to complete the work in a timely manner. It’s not direct assistance. Caseworkers often do help people find local and community resources while waiting for Social Security to perform their work.
As we all know here, many people expect processing to happen quickly, but that’s rarely the case. And we often advise folks of that reality and say, “Look, I know you’re going to want this to happen quickly, but you need to have a backup plan.” And then one last thing that one of my counterparts really, really wanted to make sure I mentioned, I didn’t find a way to put this in, but it’s so important, and I’m sure you tell all your clients this, keep the paperwork. Get confirmation receipts from SSA. Keep notes about your calls with SSA staff, dates, names, times, all that stuff.
That’s what I have to say. And you can go on any member of Congress office and find out about how you get support, ask for help with a federal agency. It should be right on that member of Congress’s page. Ours is wyden.senate.gov, and you can see it right there under contact or constituent issues. So thank you so much for this opportunity. Please feel free to reach out to me. I’ll put my email in the chat for folks. I know I might be opening a can of worms. I can help with Oregon stuff or potentially refer you to another state office. So thank you so much.
Kate Lang: Thank you, Stephen. I really appreciate you sharing your experience with our attendees today. So next, I wanted to turn to Stacy to see if you could share your top recommendations for advocates about navigating SSA on behalf of claimants and beneficiaries.
Stacy Cloyd: Sure, thank you. I have a couple of ideas here. The first is to make sure that the frequency and desperation of your outreach is matching the importance of the issue. So what I mean by that is if somebody is, for example, not receiving any benefits, that is a very high priority. If somebody has received what they are supposed to be getting and is waiting for a notice, that may be a lower priority. So making sure that as you are engaging with SSA, you are treating things as emergencies when they are and not treating things as emergencies when they’re not. Included in that is that you can reduce the amount that something is an emergency in some situations. And the two examples I have of that are in continuing disability review cases, if you’re able to obtain statutory benefit continuation for your client so they’re getting paid while their continuing disability review is pending, then it may matter less to your client how long it takes to get the determination in their continuing disability review.
Similarly, if they have an overpayment and they request reconsideration or a waiver of that overpayment and the withholding from their benefits stops while the waiver is pending, many clients would be happy for it to take a very long time for that waiver to ultimately be processed. And therefore you might not have to call regularly to see if that waiver decision has been issued. That can kind of go on your back burner. So I think making sure that things are at the right priority level is very important. Also, making sure that you are using the online services that SSA offers to representatives as much as possible and helping your clients when possible. I know it is not easy to get people My Social Security accounts, but if they have one or they can make one with your assistance, you may be able to get some information from there rather than having to call SSA.
Similarly, using appointed representative services, and again, I know it’s not always easy to get access to that for representatives, can sometimes be helpful because you can check the status of a case without having to contact somebody at SSA directly. I will also say, be very kind and appreciative of SSA employees. Know that that org chart that Eve showed may have a lot of gaps in it right now. I know that a lot of the field offices that I interact with used to have all of the positions that Eve said, but they might not have an operations supervisor for both SSI and Title II right now. They might have one technical expert where they used to have three. That technical expert might have had a few months of training when the previous one had 30 years.
And so being very appreciative of them is important and also not being afraid to push back if what they say to you is completely bonkers because there are people who work at SSA who haven’t had the benefit of the optimal training that we would hope that they would have and they’re overworked and they are tired and that’s not a reason to be mean to them, but it’s also not a reason to let a situation where something is incorrect go uncorrected. So I think being respectful but pointing out problems when they’re meaningful is really important. We talked about a lot of folks that can be helpful at SSA. I will mention the area work incentives coordinator as a potential help, but I will also note that in many places there is no area work incentives coordinator.
Similarly, the payment center representative call center can be very helpful, especially in Title II cases. Payment centers are really not involved generally in SSI matters, except maybe if there’s concurrent SSI and Title II, but if a case is stuck at the payment center, that representative call center can be helpful. And I’ll finally just note that requesting manager to manager communications can be helpful when things are stuck at the payment center. This is where the manager of a field office contacts the manager of a payment center. It does not always work. I wish it worked more than it did, and I wish that it worked faster than it did, but that is another tool that you can put in your tool belt when something is stuck at a payment center. So I think I’ll pause there. I know Kate’s got other questions for the panel.
Kate Lang: Yeah, these are all very helpful. And I did want to note that in addition to sending registrants the slides and the recording, we’re also going to be sharing kind of a tip sheet of things that we’ve pulled together in writing that will have links to the webpage that has the regional communications director contact information. So there will be information in writing that we’re going to be sending after the webinar as well. But I did want to ask you, Stacy, we’ve heard from Stephen about congressional inquiries. Are there other options for advocates to put pressure on SSA from outside of the agency, not trying to go through the various channels inside for pressure?
Stacy Cloyd: I think sometimes media attention can be helpful. I think many of us have seen what I’ll call the 7 On Your Side type stories where local news will talk about a case like that. Those can be helpful. I think highlighting to regional communications directors that there are potential PR issues involved in a case can sometimes be useful. There’s also, and I think that there have been other webinars on this and there’d be a whole other webinar for attorneys. In some, I would say rare situations, requesting a writ of mandamus in federal court can be an option. I don’t think that’s ever going to be anyone’s first step or probably even fifth step, but there are, in addition to using the power of the legislative branch, folks like Stephen, in some situations using the power of the judicial branch.
Kate Lang: Thanks, Stacy. And yes, I don’t think we have a webinar on the Justice and the Aging website right now on writs of mandamus, but I have done those trainings in other venues for folks and I’m happy to pull together a training on writ of mandamus if folks are interested in that at their program or in their state. As Stacy mentioned, it’s called the extraordinary writ. So it’s not your routine things, but for extraordinary cases, it is an option to think about. And for Stacy and Eve, I wanted to ask you about how you would communicate issues at SSA with claimants and beneficiaries. When you’re talking with clients, how would you recommend advocates communicate with their clients in a way that’s honest about customer service issues at SSA without creating or heightening people’s fear or confusion, especially when we’re talking about people who are unhoused or really rely on these benefits for daily survival. You don’t want to ratchet up their fear or create confusion, but you do want to be honest with them. So how would you recommend folks balance those?
Stacy Cloyd: The two tips that I had written down were, give information about typical timelines, and SSA publishes some of that. So knowing, for example, at your hearing office, the average time that it takes for a hearing to be held and for a decision to be issued, and giving that information to clients so that they have accurate expectations can be useful. And then my second suggestion is only promise what you can control. So I will tell clients, “I will fax this today.” Because I can more or less control that. “I will check with the field office in two weeks. I will ask for your case to receive a dire need case flag.” Because again, those are all things that I can do. I do not promise how long it’s going to take for SSA to do something, if we’re going to get an appointment, when we’re going to get an appointment or what’s going to happen at that appointment because I can’t control those things. And I think that that builds trust with clients to only promise what you can deliver and be honest about what you can’t know or confirm.
Eve Rutzick: I would add, I completely agree with what Stacy said, and I think that Katie’s report reflected very accurately the challenges that claimants and advocates face, which are extraordinarily high. I think in communicating with clients, honesty is always sort of the top level, both as a respect to the claimant because it’s their case and also for just your own credibility. So I think it is important to say honestly that things have been extra chaotic at Social Security. It’s always hard to navigate, but it’s been particularly hard, so that they have a accurate understanding of what they’re going to be facing. I think that empathizing with clients, that it’s very frustrating and scary and people get angry all the time about it, understandably. And that our job as advocates is to try and take some of that pressure and pain off of our client’s shoulders. And so I think that trying to form an alliance with the client where you say, “My job is to try and make this as least painful as I can for you.”
And that doesn’t mean that I have control over all of it, as Stacy said, but you can kind of lay some of the burden of this process on your advocate because that’s our job in my opinion. I also think that it’s important to acknowledge why is it so extra hard. Like I said, it’s always been hard for claimants trying to navigate the system, but it has gotten worse under this administration. And so I think it’s important to respect that clients may have different political beliefs or may not be engaged at all politically. And I don’t want to alienate someone, but I also think it’s important to call out that things have gotten worse under this administration, because that’s objectively true. And so I think it’s important that people know what are these results from how folks vote. And I think that trying to open up opportunities for clients to have a way to keep in touch with advocates.
So sometimes it comes up that particularly when clients are unhoused and/or have significant mental health disabilities, that they may want to talk to their advocate a lot and the advocate may have very limited time in how much they can do that. But I think having systems where the client, if you have a client who calls all the time, you can say, “You can leave me a message whenever you want, I’ll only be able to call you back on Mondays.” Or, “I will send you a text at the end of every two weeks.” Or having some systems you can kind of manage your workload, but that you can maintain contact with the client so that at least they don’t feel as much like they’re screaming into the void.
We as advocates, we know that we are screaming into the void, but we can try and shield our clients from feeling that as much because they’re dealing with everything else that they’re dealing with. And then of course, we have to, as advocates, have self-care and good boundaries for ourselves so that we can continue doing the work, because it is depressing often and frustrating. So acknowledging for ourselves what limitations we need to put around ourselves so that we can continue doing this work.
Kate Lang: Great. And we do have about 10 minutes left here, so I’m going to start pulling a couple of questions that if we have time for them from the Q&A, and I appreciate everybody who’s put their questions in the Q&A. You can feel free to put some questions in there. We obviously are not going to be able to get to the 132 open questions in the next 10 minutes, so we’ll follow up by email. But I did want to ask about recommendations for making relationships with folks at SSA. If there are particular people in certain roles, how would you recommend forming those relationships, maybe getting ongoing meetings or regularly scheduled meetings with them, any recommendations you have about that?
Stephen Pozgay: I can answer from my perspective as a caseworker where I do have, because I work for a member of Congress office, I do have specific contacts that I’m given or allowed to navigate. And those are opportunities for me to return and ask similar questions over time and also say, “Well, okay, maybe not on this case, but what is maybe the bigger picture here that I could learn from?” Also, I think it was Stacy who said employees are people too, and they all deserve our respect and care. And so building some kind of light framework of conversation is helpful. In my state and because of my boss’s specific interest in social security and his position as chairperson previously and now ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, which has director oversight to social security, I’ve made it a project when I came on to visit all the local social security field offices, which was a lot fun.
I got to drive around our huge state, ninth biggest in the country, gorgeous. There’s 16 field offices. I went to them all and just to say, “Hey, I’m here. I want to meet you face-to-face. We email a lot, but let’s talk.” So I guess from that, I would say anytime you can get a contact, share your appreciation, ask, “Are you the best person for me to continue contacting about issues like this or is there someone else in your office who might be tasked with this? Is there a way for us to open a professional relations conversation?” That would be my guess and best experience from my perspective. I think perhaps the other panelists might have a little more on the ground experience with building it from that direction.
Eve Rutzick: I would say, like most people, the average SSA manager particularly has many, many meetings on their calendars, so adding more meetings may not be something that many folks are open to. I know some places will have a quarterly meeting or maybe once or twice a year, trying to keep it as few as possible. But if you have an office that’s open to meeting more, excellent. I think as Stacy and Stephen said, recognizing that the person you’re speaking with is a human. They’re doing a job that is quite hard, they’re underappreciated, they’re overworked. And of course there are bad apples who intentionally give wrong information or there’s people who aren’t doing anything, but most people in my experience are trying to do a good job and they’re in the job because it was stable and because they care about public service. That is actually my experience is most people do care about public service who work for the agency.
So recognizing that and trying to help gain empathy essentially for your clients. And this is, for folks in the legal aid context, it’s often a little bit easier because the clients are experiencing homelessness or having other major crises that they’re facing. But I think trying to humanize the clients, being respectful of people’s time. And also, I’ve worked with programs, particularly in more rural areas who’ve taken a box of donuts or a little treat to the field office. And federal government employees are supposed to not accept gifts. And so it has to be small, small, little snacks, things like that. I don’t want to say that that’s a mandatory thing, but everybody likes getting snacks and it can be an opportunity to just introduce yourself. So I think that can be helpful as a way to form a bridge, but really try and not burden the good people that you know who are your contacts, like Stacy was saying, trying to really focus on just the most important issues with them, I think is a good strategy.
Kate Lang: Thanks for that. And we’re running short on time, so I just wanted to make a couple of comments here at the end. I see a lot of questions about people saying they’re getting wrong information from SSA, coming across workers that don’t know certain rules. This is due to lack of training. This is people being put into positions where they have to answer questions and they’ve only gotten a couple of weeks of training versus in the past they would’ve gotten months, if not years worth of training. So this is a lack of training, not that the rules are being changed without public information or being published or anything like that. This is due to the very limited training that they’re getting. So I understand it’s very frustrating, but if we can approach this from a place of empathy rather than attacking them, but to say, “I understand you may not have gotten training on this question I’m asking about.”
I think maybe directing them to someplace in the POMS where you know it says what the rule is, I think can address this issue of pushing back against the bad information you’re getting in a way that doesn’t attack the individual who’s giving you the bad information, but trying to be sympathetic to their position that they’re being forced to answer questions that they haven’t been trained on. And I did want to close us out by saying in the webinar alert, we did say we were going to talk about upcoming developments. And there’s one I wanted to highlight that SSA announced at the beginning of March saying that continuing disability reviews, those medical reviews of people who are currently receiving disability benefits, they announced at the beginning of March that those are going to be moved from the state DDSs in house, into the Social Security Administration, the federal review units.
So that is not happening immediately. It’s going to take some time. Right now, these federal units exist at SSA, but they are more backups. The primary responsibility for the medical CDRs is with the state DDSs and the federal units at SSA are doing the CDRs as a backup when they don’t have capacity at the state DDSs to do all of them in a given year. So that’s going to continue through this fiscal year. We’re in fiscal year ’26, more than halfway through. So basically SSA is looking at the start of fiscal year ’27, which will be October 1st to start moving more and more of those CDRs to the federal review units.
Yeah, I have a lot of questions about this. So we are keeping an eye on this. It’s not an immediate change. It’s not an imminent change. It’s something that is anticipated for fiscal year ’27, which will start on October 1st of ’26. So did want to mention that upcoming development to folks on this webinar. Another thing that they had announced in the past that they are now walking back from is moving everything to a national appointments calendar and national workload management. They had announced that earlier and said that was going to go live in April, and now they’ve walked back from that and said that’s not going to go live. They may do a limited pilot of that in the future. What that might look like, it’s not clear, but I just wanted to make sure that folks were aware that even though that switched to a national appointments calendar and national workload management that had been announced previously is not going live now in April, so we’ll have to keep an eye on that.
But we are at time. And as I said, we will be following up with some written materials by email to everybody who’s registered. And I really want to ask everybody to complete the post-webinar survey that will pop up when we’re done here. So thanks everybody for joining us today and many, many thanks to our excellent presenters.
