In the past two fiscal years, federal judges considering appeals for denied benefits found fault with almost 6 in every 10 cases and sent them back to administrative law judges at Social Security for new hearings - the highest rate of rejections in years.
Hurled from a road-paving machine, Michael Sheldon tumbled 50 feet down a Colorado slope and struck a mound of boulders headfirst on a summer day in 2006. After eight surgeries to his head, neck and spinal cord, his debilitating headaches, chronic pain and post-traumatic stress have made it impossible to return to his work preparing roads for new subdivisions.
"They've done everything to prolong this to get me to quit," he said after testifying in March at his fifth hearing. Now 59, he lives with his wife in a trailer in Cortez, Colo., and depends on food stamps and state benefits for the indigent. "I can't replace the battery on a vehicle. Why has this taken 14 years?"
Approval rates for benefits are down at every level of review, Social Security data show, even as the number of disabled people applying dwindled during the coronavirus pandemic. Fewer than 20 percent of those who lose their appeal at Social Security take their claim to federal court, as most lack the time or resources to keep fighting.
Yet federal judges rarely order the agency to approve claims in deference to the government, but instead must typically refer the cases back to the administrative law judges - often the very ones responsible for the errors in the first place, a common practice in administrative law that avoids asking a new judge to rehear a complicated claim.
Yet the rate of cases remanded to the agency from federal judges has long been a source of alarm inside Social Security, current and former officials said. For the last decade, roughly half of all cases that made it to federal courts have been sent back.
While Social Security officials defend the rate of court remands, current and former officials said that the agency's own lawyers are increasingly admitting error before proceedings begin in federal court. Government attorneys frequently ask district courts to remand an appeal before the claimant's attorney submits a written brief, a practice that spiked during the pandemic as the agency fell behind.
Disabled claimants, meanwhile, can spend years battling for benefits, only to see victories in federal court rejected by Social Security after follow-up administrative proceedings. After a Colorado district court found in 2020 that an administrative law judge had erred in denying benefits to Heather Fowler, her claim was returned to the same judge - who reached the same conclusion after a second hearing.
Administrative law judges must hear and make complex decisions in disability cases in less than three hours on average, Ramrup said. The role is complicated by the relatively subjective rules used to award benefits. While the judges ultimately answer to Social Security and do not enjoy the independence of the federal judiciary, they have chafed for years at a system that subjects them to scrutiny over how many claims they approve.
Other Social Security judges with similar rulings have been forced out. Michael Blanton, 63, a Seattle-based judge who approved between 89 and 93 percent of his cases from 2016 through 2020, was placed on administrative leave in 2021, then told he was being fired over alleged performance shortfalls.
"I've read a lot of very bad decisions," Bishins recalled, "because the agency squeezes the [decision writers] so much."Claims for disability benefits have declined from almost 3 million at the peak of the recession to 1.8 million last year, dropping during the pandemic when Social Security's in-person operations ceased, its phones jammed and many claimants could not get help on its website.
Administrative law judges must often weigh medical evidence to determine if someone can still work despite their limitations, and if there are jobs they can still do. Their decisions fall into gray areas that require judgment calls rare in other safety-net programs, experts said. The Supreme Court has allowed vocational experts to refuse to disclose how they come up with jobs a claimant could still do or how many exist in the economy. An internal panel that must consider appeals before they go to federal court sent just 12 percent back to administrative law judges last year.
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