For decades, the Social Security Administration has denied disability benefits to thousands of people, arguing that they could work in jobs that have all but disappeared from the U.S. economy, such as nut sorters, pneumatic tube operators and microfilm processors.
On Monday, the agency will remove all but a handful of low-skilled jobs from an outdated database used to determine who receives benefits and who is denied, ending a practice that advocates have long decried as unfair and inaccurate.
Commissioner Martin O’Malley’s decision to throw out federal labor market data that was last updated 47 years ago comes in the wake of a Washington Post investigation in December 2022 that found that outdated occupation lists meant many recipients who can’t work were missing out on vital monthly disability benefits.
“These are egregious examples of how we weren’t up to date,” O’Malley said in an interview. Relying on outdated duties “undermines confidence in the rest of the process” of applying for disability benefits.
Because many benefit decisions depend on whether claimants can still work, the occupation list was a key factor for administrative law judges considering appeals. “The industrial economy changes, jobs disappear. We weren’t removing them,” O’Malley said.
Lawyers and advocates said the changes would immediately improve an already difficult process.
“This is going to be a really big problem for people applying for disability benefits,” said Kevin Liebkeman, a New Jersey disability attorney who has written extensively about the Social Security Administration’s use of occupational data and in recent months has worked with colleagues to present proposals to O’Malley for changes to the system, including removing outdated occupations from consideration.
“I can speak to the psychological impact it has on a disability claimant when they find out that their disability claim, which they’ve been waiting years for, has been denied because someone said they could do a job that doesn’t exist,” Liebkemann said.
This list of occupations has been used for decades as part of the process by the Social Security Administration to evaluate the work capacity of disability benefit applicants: Before granting benefits, agency officials must determine whether there are a “substantial number” of occupations that the applicant can still hold.
For years, the agency has relied on a massive publication called the Dictionary of Occupations for this assessment, but most of its 12,700 entries on skilled and unskilled occupations were last updated in 1977. That database is compiled by the Government Accountability Office and lists high-risk government programs, highlighting programs and operations at risk of waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement or in need of reform.
The Labor Department, which first compiled the index, discontinued it 31 years ago as a sign of the economy’s shift from blue-collar manufacturing to information services. But Social Security Administration vocational experts frequently cited one of the roughly 137 menial, sedentary jobs on the list — reptile breeder, bank pin adjuster, barrel assembler — to deny benefit claims. Those jobs have long ago been largely moved overseas or replaced by machines.
In 2012, the Social Security Administration asked the Bureau of Labor Statistics to compile an updated list of occupations and their characteristics, a project that has cost the agency about $300 million, with an ongoing annual payment of $30 million. The data is publicly available, but the agency has not yet used it.
The Social Security Administration on Monday will eliminate 127 occupations that were listed in the old database. Some of the occupations being eliminated were successfully challenged in federal court by claimants who were denied benefits because of the defunct occupations. Going forward, the agency will no longer cite occupations such as log scaler and watch repairman.
According to disability support groups, currently excluded occupations are the most frequently cited reason for refusing benefits, but the Dictionary of Occupational Names lists a total of 3,127 unskilled occupations, many of which are not sedentary, and are likely to continue to be used for the foreseeable future.
O’Malley also said Social Security won’t yet switch to a state-of-the-art system put together by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many advocates have called for, because more study is needed.
“That’s the direction we’re heading,” he said.
O’Malley said lawmakers, particularly Republicans, have been pressuring him to “find more cost-effective ways” to keep occupational screening at a “reasonable cost.” He couldn’t say when the new system, which will require a lengthy regulatory process and staff training, might begin to be used.
Employment data has long been a politically sensitive issue for the program, which has drawn criticism that the government has been too generous or too low in handing out benefits.
Disability advocates say switching to a more modern occupation list would likely increase the approval rate for benefit applications, but conservatives, including former Trump administration officials who unsuccessfully pushed government agencies to use the more modern occupation list, argue that because many people with disabilities can do a variety of modern computer tasks, they would actually be more likely to be denied benefits.
Some advocates warned that the changes announced Monday were too incremental to fix a process that has long been broken.
“From merely an impressive profession [Dictionary of Occupational Titles] “This is a political solution to a technical problem,” said David Weaver, a former deputy commissioner of Social Security who led early efforts to modernize the system. Weaver noted that numerous cases are pending in federal court in which the Social Security Administration “rejected thousands of disability applicants who worked in occupations that it planned to eliminate.”
It was not immediately clear how the Social Security Administration would address such ongoing cases that relied on outdated employment data.
The bureau continued to face questions last week from Republican senators on the Senate Finance Committee about the agency’s expensive new system.
“What is essential for social security is [use of outdated occupational data] “They need to be taken off the high-risk list,” Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, the Finance Committee’s top Republican, said during a hearing on work and disability benefits, referring to the GAO list. “Having access to the most up-to-date data will produce better outcomes for recipients and save money in the process.”