James Lankford

I think you would find plenty of people that are willing to help you innovate in the areas that are the pinch points.

We are still focused on safety. It is not just about speed.

Safety is the primary consideration. We never want there to be a situation where you just say, 'Let us speed everything up.'

The Iraqi Kurdish forces are one of our critical partners--if not the most critical partner we have in the fight against ISIS.

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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.

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

We had a hearing not long ago on the Federal hiring process, period, and USAJOBS and all of the great joy that it really is in getting through the process.

At the end of the day, I do not want us to end up with a longer backlog because we tried a novel theory that may or may not have worked.

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

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.

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…

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

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).

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.