A recent email reportedly that was sent to Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) from Chief Administrative Law Judge Debra Bice asked that all ALJs schedule at least 45-50 disability hearings a month in an effort to reduce caseload backlogs that have left more than 1 million people across the country waiting for disability hearings.
The email was posted here on an ALJ discussion forum
If an ALJ schedules the preferred amount of hearings every month it would equate to 540 to 600 disability hearings a year.
In previous posts we have explained that wait times for disability hearings appear to be getting longer and longer and according to the reported email from Bice, it appears that Social Security already has a hiring freeze for all non ALJ employees at all of Social Security’s Offices of Disability Adjudication and Review (ALJ).
The request to schedule 45-50 hearings a month would result in a minimum of about two hearings on average per day. Social Security disability hearings usually involved a lot of evidence in the form of medical records to go over. Most cases involve the ALJ reviewing hundreds or even thousands of pages of medical records as this evidence is considered crucial to a Social Security disability claim. There have been many different people who have knowledge of the Social Security disability process who have criticized this new mandate handed down by Bice because it is widely known that the ALJs who handle the most hearings tend to have very low approval rates, which makes sense. Consider that an ALJ who averages three hearings a day and all the pages of medical records they would potentially have to review for a hearing? It is the concern of these critics that ALJs could miss crucial evidence if they are not given an amount of time to consider all evidence.
