Yet, the agency has been unable to hire sufficient numbers of approved ALJs to tackle the rising backlog of cases--a backlog which topped 1 million last year and, may I say, in my own State of Oklahoma around 13,000.

Today we are going to look at several issues surrounding administrative law judges (ALJs), their independence, and the importance of due process as provided by the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).

the Social Security Administration is in the process of moving tens of thousands of pending cases from ALJs to non-APA attorney examiners, who are regular employees of the agency and lack the requisite decisional independence.

I would expect for these administrative judges you are talking about that very few would have representation with them.

This is about the number of qualified people coming in the process.

30 percent of the total group or 30 percent of this non-disability----

How many do you have access to now? If that is the spring of 2017, do you have access to some in the spring of 2016?

Because you have the funding that is necessary to hire the ALJs.

please do not hear from us we are interested in speed and not quality.

The sheer numbers, we are dealing with 1.1 million now in the backlog.

Right. And so you are thinking there are 2,500 or so that are going through the process.

The West Virginia cases that were just exposed were $600 million in fraud.

But is it your expectation at this point that 30 percent of the folks--or 30 percent of the individuals will say, 'I do not want to do a video conference,' and these new AAJs are going to have to travel to those locations?

Because, by the way, in the Federal Government, it is hard to find anything temporary.

the individuals that are truly disabled need to be protected in the system.

We do not want to have that again because every one of these cases is $300,000 to the Federal taxpayer.

And I would comment only in the legal aspects of it. It has not been done before. It will be challenged because it has not been done before.

Thank you, Mr. Kennedy. Thank you to all of our witnesses for their testimony today.

So wait. I am sorry to interrupt you.

We cannot hire enough qualified ALJs to be able to actually hit the backlog numbers that we need.

So either way it is a really bad situation for them.

So if I am picking this up still correctly, we are still talking about trying to get from OPM more people in the process, more qualified people in the process.

So is the assumption that individuals then would say, 'I do not want to do the video conference,' and at that point they are going to have to travel?

I do share Senator Heitkamp's concern on this that the more that we go outside the structure and the system, the more exposed that we are and the more exposed the taxpayer is to some sort of litigation so we have a class action suit coming…

We are talking about, I think, a significant exposure for a class action suit once it is all said and done.