Got Problems With The Government? Thank The Republicans!

[Gimpy]

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES BURIED UNDER BACKLOGS --

Poor planning by Federal agency leaders and underfunding by the Republican controlled Congress these past 8 to 10 years created debilitating backlogs that may take years to resolve.

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Buried under backlogs

February 25, 2008


More than 400,000 veterans are awaiting decisions on disability claims they filed with the Veterans Affairs Department, and roughly one-quarter of those have waited more than half a year.


Social Security Administration staffs are grappling with more than 600,000 disability claims.


Regional service centers at the Homeland Security Department’s Citizenship and Immigration Services are buried under more than 1 million citizenship applications.


And the Food and Drug Administration is more than a decade from inspecting every foreign pharmaceutical plant it is obliged by law to inspect.


Poor planning by agency leaders and underfunding by the Republican led Congress these past few years created these debilitating backlogs that may take years to resolve, according to federal officials, legislators and watchdog groups.


At the start of the Bush administration in 2001, VA had more than 400,000 pending claims for disability ratings, which determine a service-disabled veteran’s employability and disability benefits. The department made progress in the early years of the Bush administration reducing that number: By 2003, the backlog was down to around 250,000.


But then the nation went to war.


“VA was kind of cruising right along with a certain volume of claims until the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Then the volume of claims increased,” said Belinda Finn, VA’s assistant inspector general for auditing. “We still had the same processes for handling a lower workload, and the system just hasn’t been able to handle the increase in claims.”


And so the backlog started creeping up each year since 2003. By 2008, the VA once again has more than 400,000 pending claims for a disability ratings. About 25 percent of those are officially considered backlogged, meaning they have been pending longer than six months.


“The number of claims that we receive each year has been going up pretty steadily,” said Michael Walcoff, VA’s associate deputy undersecretary for field operations. “In 2000, we got 578,000 claims, and last year got 838,000. That’s a pretty significant increase, and certainly some of that can be attributed to the soldiers coming back from [the wars].”


And even as the backlog was increasing, the VA was trimming its staff — against the recommendations of the Govenrment Accountability Office. The Veterans Benefits Administration reduced its staff by about 400 employees from 2003 to 2005. Only after 2006 did the agency start hiring any significant number of new adjudicators.


“It takes, by the VA’s estimates, two years to get a person really trained,” said Steve Smithson, legislative director at the American Legion. “This is extremely complicated stuff … so they obviously need more employees, and they need to be able to retain those employees as well.”


Similar poor planning has led to large backlogs at other agencies. Citizenship and Immigration Serices (CIS) hiked its fees last summer — prices for permanent residency and citizenship doubled — and the agency saw a predictable flood of applications in the months before the increase. But staffing at CIS remained virtually flat.


Poor funding


Years of tight budgets have also hurt agencies. Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue described his agency as a victim of its own “budget constraints”: Congress appropriated less than the president’s budget request for 12 of the last 14 years.


That has forced the agency to reduce its staff of administrative law judges, who adjudicate claims for disability benefits. The agency is down from 1,200 such judges to almost 1,000, almost as low as during the mid-’90s.


Among the recent new additions to the agency’s workload: processing claims under Medicare’s Part B insurance program and Part D drug plan, and verifying immigrants’ status through Social Security numbers.


Critics say Congress has done worse by the Food and Drug Administration. Dozens of laws passed since 1994 have expanded FDA’s regulatory role, but the agency’s budget and staffing hasn’t kept pace to meet those new demands.


On the contrary, FDA has lost more than 1,000 employees to tight budgets; after inflation, its appropriations have remained basically flat.


“This is not a new problem,” said Marcia Crosse, GAO’s director of health care. “There are resource issues at the FDA. … GAO warned about these issues 10 years ago, and nobody in Congress paid attention.”


As a result, the agency has fallen behind in almost every area of inspections. It is supposed to inspect foreign medical device manufacturers every two years.


But FDA has inspected fewer than 1,500 of roughly 5,000 plants from 2002 to 2007. The worst numbers were in China, where FDA inspected fewer than 10 percent.


Appropriations have finally started increasing at VA, after years of neglect. The new Congress (Democrats!----Gimp) funded the department at $3.7 billion above the president’s request in 2008, and legislators expect that trend to continue in 2009.


“We have been fighting this problem piecemeal,” said Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, new chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. “As the number of troops sent to the war zone increases, funding for VA must increase in step.”


That additional funding should allow VA to hire more than 3,000 adjudicators — but Walcoff warns the full benefits from those new hires could be years away.


“I think they [the new hires] will address this increase in receipts, we just have to get them trained,” he said, agreeing with Smithson’s assessment that training takes about two years.


High-tech fixes


Ask Smithson, the American Legion legislative director, why VA has so many problems processing claims, and he holds up a copy of the department’s application for benefits.


“You have to fill this monster out,” Smithson said, flipping through the 16 pages of questions veterans have to answer.


Many federal agencies are still running what Astrue called World War II-era systems: lengthy paper applications, filled out by hand and stored in warehouses. At a Senate hearing last month, CIS Director Emilio Gonzalez said his agency still sends files from one office to another via U.S. mail.


But agencies are finally starting to modernize.


Social Security will unveil a new Web-based benefits application over the next 18 months. The form will take less time to complete, and for most applicants, it will eliminate the need for an in-person visit. That should reduce long wait times at SSA offices around the country.


“We’re transitioning from a fully paper-based, nightmare system, to a state-of-the-art electronic system,” Astrue said. “Basically what they did, eight or nine years ago, was take the paper form and put it [online] real quick. But it has questions we don’t need anymore, and asks for information we can find at a later time.”


VA is hoping to modernize, too. A congressional hearing earlier this month looked at how VA can use artificial intelligence to identify claims that will likely be approved — and single out the difficult claims for manual review.


The technology already exists: Engineers at the IBM Center for the Business of Government have been working with SSA on a similar system for disability claims.


Field offices “would print out applications, even though they were filed electronically. And it sat on someone’s desk until they got to it,” said Arnie Greenland, an IBM engineer. “We saw some long waits to find a pretty easy decision.”


So IBM worked with SSA to develop the Quick Disability Determination (QDD) process.


QDD identifies applications where the claimant likely is disabled, and where it’s easy to find evidence of disability.


The system moves those claims out of the regular queue, so they can be quickly examined and approved.


Automated systems could also take some of the unpredictability out of claims processing.


“You have 57 regional offices, and you could file the same claim and get 57 different decisions,” Smithson said of VA’s claims process.


Ultimately, agency officials say these backlogs — most of which are years in the making — will take time to fix.


“I’ve gotten the question on the record, ‘Can’t you fix this in a year?’ And I go through a moment of despair,” Astrue said. “If you know what’s going on here, you know this can’t be fixed in a year. This took a long time to develop. And it’s harder to fix something than to break it.”


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(And these past 7 to 8 years there was a LOT of "breaking things" going on by the Republican controlled Congress and the Bush administration! The alarming "evidence" speaks for itself!-----Gimp)

[exlrrp]

Thanks for running up the public debt to astronomical proportions. The Bush adminstration and rubberstamp Republicon government, completely trashcanned the policy of Pay as You Go.... a policy which they imposed on a Democratric President. (Its why Clinton balanced the budget but Bush never did) The Repuglicans have brought America an orgy of public spending and public debt never seen before, eclipsing the deficit spending of ALL Democratic Presidents and congresses in a mere 6 years of misrule.

Thanks for starting a war based on completely phony and fabricated "evidence!" See the picture below? That exact same was what Powell took to the UN as "evidence." Its completely madeup, fabricated, based on the word of " Curveball," a proven liar and fabricator that even his handlers, the german intell agency, says was made up. Nevertheless, the ravings of this lunatic made it into Powell's UN speech and Bush's State of the Union speech, 03, as "hard, incontrovertible evidence." Its actually a Repuglican cartoon, with no basis in fact at all.
All lies, all of it. As is well known now, Saddam had no nuclear capabilities at all, no stockpiles of WMDs, no ties to Al qaeda. But the Bush administration, using phony evidence rushed us into a war they had no clue how to fight and win.

Thanks for starting a war on phony evidence and then mismanaging it. Even your own candidates say so:
John McCain: ""We are paying a very heavy price for the mismanagement—that's the kindest word I can give you—of Donald Rumsfeld, of this war,...The price is very, very heavy and I regret it enormously." ( http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1 )
Mitt Romney: ""I think we did a less than effective job in managing the conflict following the collapse of Saddam Hussein. I think we were underprepared for what occurred, understaffed, underplanned, and, in some respects, undermanaged."

Thanks for supporting Bush in a war he was devious enough to start but wasn't man enough to finish........ but chickenshit enough to leave the job--and the paying--for someone else to do. And its paying a lot too. We're paying roughly $16 billion a month for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Chicken George doesn't think its affecting the economy. Can there be anything more stupid than that? Do they give away Harvard MBA degrees in Crackerjack boxes? Its easy to see why EVERY business George W Bush started went bankrupt--he thinks money grows on trees and for him, it does: Daddy's contributors bailed him out on everyone of his bankrupt businesses but unfortunately theyre not doing it here.

Thanks for putting the United Stanes of America's name on torture and losing every vestige of whatever prestige we used to have.

thanks for supporting a "free Lunch" financial policy that has brought our economomy to the brink of disaster. Bush's "Ownership Society" has become Bush's "Foreclosure Society." Foreclosures are at the highest rate in modern memory and the rate grows daily. YOU CAN"T BORROW YOUR WAY TO PROSPERITY YOU FREAKING IDOTS!!! but that didn't stop George Bush for Proposing a near record deficit budget( he holds the existing record, 2004) for his last year AFTER saying he was going to halve the deficit by 2008. Bush came in withy a $127 billion surplus---he's leaving with an ALMOST HALF TRILLION $$$$ ANNUAL DEFICIT!!

Thanks for electing a leader so chickenshit, so clueless what to do in time of crisis that he kept reading "My Pet Goat" literally while the walls of the World Trade Center were falling. If we elect leaders to protect the country, 9/11 was the best example ever of the Republicans failure to do so. Bush spent the month before 9/11 on--wait for it--vacation. he followed it up by competely botching the Katrina response, again while he was on vacation. Bush holds the record for taking vacations, beating out even Ronnie Reagan.

Thanks for supporting a party so corrupt you lost 4 Congressmen in a year: Delay, Ney, Foley and Cunningham and now Doolittle's being investigated and Renzi now indicted. Up against this you can only cry Jefferson

I could go on and on---Repuglicans have failed at everything they tried to do and dragged America down in the process. Thats why there won't be so many of them around Washington this year. OUr goal its to see their leadership jailed, the RNC investigated under the RICO act and the clowns who vote for them impoverished and scattered to the winds where they can do no more damage to America

Stay good, Gimp
james

[Robert Ryan]

It isn't just Repbullicans, it is every politican in this country regardless of polictical party. All these idiots care about is the own polictial agendas, and no the citizens of this country.

[MORTARDUDE]

As an employee of the Federal Government from 1972 - 2004, I can attest to the fact that a significant portion of the blame for the failure of "things to get done right", falls squarely on the bureaucracy. I served under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2. I watched contracts given to those that had failed to do the job right in the past. I saw money squandered on computer software and hardware upgrades. I watched when money was plentiful, how travel was misused.....This happens thru out the government on a vast scale everyday......Medicare is just starting to use audits on hospitals to find fraud. There is no telling what the cost of this alone, just over the past 2 decades, is. CBS News runs stories frequently about how government agencies basically "run wild", from first class airline tickets to just about anything else. And then there is Iraq. Billions of dollars have just disappeared. Many contracts let with no competition. You could hear the pigs at the trough.

You can rail against Republicans all you want. The fish rots from the top. From all the "elected-for-life what's-in-it-for-me career-politicians" of BOTH PARTIES, and the 50% of the adult population who are too lazy and apathetic to even register to vote...right down into the bureauracy, protected by their lifetime-Congressional-masters, who go right ahead
giving us what we deserve, no matter who is "President", or how many Billions of dollars are shoveled their way.

Larry

[Gimpy]

Originally Posted by MORTARDUDE

As an employee of the Federal Government from 1972 - 2004, I can attest to the fact that a significant portion of the blame for the failure of "things to get done right", falls squarely on the bureaucracy. I served under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2. I watched contracts given to those that had failed to do the job right in the past. I saw money squandered on computer software and hardware upgrades. I watched when money was plentiful, how travel was misused.....This happens thru out the government on a vast scale everyday......Medicare is just starting to use audits on hospitals to find fraud. There is no telling what the cost of this alone, just over the past 2 decades, is. CBS News runs stories frequently about how government agencies basically "run wild", from first class airline tickets to just about anything else. And then there is Iraq. Billions of dollars have just disappeared. Many contracts let with no competition. You could hear the pigs at the trough.

You can rail against Republicans all you want. The fish rots from the top. From all the "elected-for-life what's-in-it-for-me career-politicians" of BOTH PARTIES, and the 50% of the adult population who are too lazy and apathetic to even register to vote...right down into the bureauracy, protected by their lifetime-Congressional-masters, who go right ahead
giving us what we deserve, no matter who is "President", or how many Billions of dollars are shoveled their way.

Larry

My old friend.

I'm not saying the Democrats are totally without blame for many of the past faults of our government.

What I AM SAYING is that for the past TWELVE YEARS or so the Republicans have controlled Congress and for nearly EIGHT YEARS the Whitehouse, and look what has happened!

They have proven themselves worthy of all the condemnation and scorn that the citizens of this country can heap upon them!

Gimp

PS----The original post PROVES THIS!