I think even my most anti-big government readers would admit there are some things that are best run by the federal government. For example, it's best to have national military services to fight our wars as opposed to a hodgepodge of state and local militias. And it certainly is preferable to have one nationwide air traffic control system rather than a collection of independent radar operations run out of each airport in the country. And using the same logic, it is best to have one federal agency (the Social Security Administration) manage our nation's Social Security programs, as opposed to having hundreds of state or county government bureaucracies each with their own rules and regulations, trying to make sure almost 60 million folks get their checks on time each month.

Yet that's not the way we manage one significant part of Social Security. I am talking about the disability program. When you file a claim for Social Security or Supplemental Security Income disability benefits, whether it is at your local Social Security Administration office, or via one of their call centers, or even using their online system at www.socialsecurity.gov, that claim is immediately shuffled off to a state government agency for processing. These agencies are usually called Disability Determination Service offices, although some states use slightly different names. The DDS office is usually part of a larger agency within the state. Sometimes it is part of a state's social services bureaucracy or it might be connected to a state's department of vocational rehabilitation.

Each of these agencies is funded through the federal government using the portion of the Social Security payroll tax designated for the disability program. And they all follow the same federal guidelines for deciding whether a person is disabled or not. But the point is there are 51 of these DDS agencies around the country (one for each state and another one for the District of Columbia). And that means there are 51 separate bureaucracies all involved in the Social Security disability program. Well, 52 if you count the federal Social Security Administration that oversees the work of all these state agencies.

I bring this up because I just read a news story with the screaming headline, "Social Security's $350 million IT boondoggle." (IT of course stands for information technology — or in other words, computers.) The story is about how SSA has spent $350 million (so far) on a new computer system that's intended to speed up the processing of Social Security and SSI disability claims. The computer upgrade is a couple years behind schedule and will probably take several more years to complete. Private sector contractors have been involved in the process from the beginning, but new ones have been brought on board to try to clean up the mess.

What the news stories I read glossed over is the reason why the new computer system is needed. And that reason gets back to those 51 bureaucracies around the country that process disability claims. Each of those agencies has its own computer systems. And it's getting those sometimes very different systems to talk to one another and to SSA's national disability office and to SSA's field offices around the country that has been one big reason why it takes so long to adjudicate an initial claim for disability benefits (it runs about 3 to 4 months now) and why it takes even longer to process appeals if the first claim is denied. It could take about a year and a half before a disability appellant can be scheduled for a hearing.

The new IT system SSA is trying to develop is intended to get those 51 state DDS offices all on the same page — computer-wise. But I have a better idea. Simply federalize the whole process. Why do we need 51 separate state agencies around the country to implement one set of federal guidelines? Especially since they are all already funded by federal tax dollars anyway. Well, I actually already know the reasons why. One is historical. And the other is political.

Before disability benefits came along in the mid 1950s, Congress had already established a provision of the retirement program called the disability freeze. The thinking back then was that if a person became disabled and unable to work, the years that person was out of work (and thus not earning any money) should not be counted as zero years in their eventual retirement benefit computation — thus lowering their potential old age benefits. In order to determine if a person met the definition of disability for this new program, Congress felt that state vocational rehabilitation agencies, which already had working relationships with medical professionals within their borders, were in the best position to make such decisions. So the state Disability Determination Services were born. And when the new disability program was introduced in 1956 (essentially replacing the need for a disability retirement freeze), Congress just let these state agencies continue in their role as disability evaluators.

All of that probably made sense back in 1956. But now it is almost 60 years later. Over all these decades, because of a variety of federal programs that have come into being since then, the federal government has established good working relationships with medical providers around the country. There really is no longer a need to have state agencies serve as a go-between.

So why aren't all these state DDS agencies federalized, with one national bureaucracy and one national computer system? Well, that gets to the political reason. There simply is little support in Congress, and there certainly is no support in governor's offices, to expand a federal agency (the Social Security Administration) at the expense of so many state bureaucracies — even though it might make perfect sense to do so. So we are stuck with a 60-year-old hodgepodge structure of disability decision making that we are now trying to patch together with an expensive new computer system. Like military service members and air traffic controllers, I think those people who make decisions for a national disability program should be federal employees. This would be one important step in speeding up the disability claims process.

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has the answer. Contact him at [email protected]. To find out more about Tom Margenau and to read past columns and see features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.