These employees are now reaching retirement age. As this pool of experience is lost it will become more difficult for the DDSs to train and mentor new examiners. NADE has consistently urged that SSA's administrative budget, like its program budget, be removed from the cap on discretionary spending. The agency's tight resource constraints limit its capacity to respond to these growing workloads. This is as true in the DDSs as it is in the Field Offices.
Additional staff is needed to handle the increasingly complex workload.
The Social Security Administration has announced their intention to revise and update a number of the medical listings. While it is important that the criteria used to establish disability be updated, this again impacts resources. The time necessary for an examiner to address issues like credibility and functionality will increase the time adjudicators will spend on each case. While this should increase the quality of our decision-making, it will decrease the time available to spend on other cases. Adjudicators will necessarily have to assume smaller caseloads.