In these waning days of the Democratic Senate, the majority is taking advantage of a muffed procedural maneuver by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to confirm a passel of otherwise stalled executive branch appointees.
Carolyn W. Colvin, who President Obamanominated last June to be Social Security commissioner, won't be among them. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid withdrew her confirmation vote from the calendar for unexplained reasons. What his action means is that as Social Security faces the sharpest increase in its workload and its most bitter political challenges since its creation in 1935, it will continue to chug along without an official commissioner. Colvin, 72, will stay on as acting commissioner, a post she has held since February 2013.
Do the Democrats care about Social Security? This latest failure to provide the program with a fully accredited boss inspires doubt. It's another example of the not-so-benign neglect that the party has shown toward its most important achievements, such as the Affordable Care Act, and it may be the real reason that the Democrats have lost credibility with the middle class.
Democratic politicians have failed utterly to communicate to the great mass of American voters how the Affordable Care Act is a boon to them, and they're not doing nearly enough to protect and promote Social Security, which is the most important program for the middle class ever devised by the U.S.
This is not to denigrate Colvin's performance as acting commissioner. Senate Republicans have said they held up her nomination because of questions regarding a nonfunctional $300-million computer project; Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has mumbled something about "criminal conduct."
This is typically fatuous GOP chatter. The computer project began under Colvin's predecessor, Michael Astrue, a George W. Bush appointee; Social Security expert Eric Laursen points outthat the investigation on which the Republicans are basing their complaints was ordered by Colvin.
In any event, there's no reason to doubt Colvin's commitment to Social Security, which she served as a high-level executive from 1994 to 2001, returning in 2010 as deputy commissioner. As Paul Van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities observes, Colvin has to work with the budget cards she's dealt: "She been doing a good job under very difficult circumstances, with a continually shrinking real budget," he said.
Indeed, the problem is Social Security's budget -- and the Democrats' failure to safeguard it. The crisis emerged in 2011, when Congress started to pare the president's budget requests for the Social Security Administration. From then through fiscal 2013, Social Security got $2.7 billion less than the president sought. Some of the shortfall was restored this year, but most of the increase was designated for anti-fraud programs, not pure administration.
A study by the Senate Committee on Aging released this spring examined the consequences. Staffing in Social Security field offices fell by 14%, to 25,420 from 29,481. Across the country, field office hours were slashed. By March 2013, about 12,000 visitors a week had to wait two hours or more to get served, "a figure that had almost tripled in the previous four months." For those who tried to obtain information via the program's 800 number, the rate of busy signals also tripled. The agency tried to pare down foot traffic to its offices by eliminating some face-to-face services, advising people to resort to the Internet instead.
Field offices themselves are disappearing. Since 2010, the report found, the agency has eliminated 64 offices, the largest such reduction in any five-year span in its history.
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Are the Democrats allowing Social Security to twist in the wind?