Rob Wendt, NOSSCR President

As NOSSCR starts a new year, with new opportunities and new challenges, we should briefly look back to 2023, when NOSSCR moved to Washington, DC, for a clearer picture of how far we’ve come and where we hope to be by this time next year.

The 2023 move to Washington was a sea change event for NOSSCR, the most profound change since our founding in 1979. The goal was to modernize our operations and to become the most powerful and effective advocates for our disabled clients on Capitol Hill and in the Office of the Commissioner, in accordance with our mission statement:

To advocate for improvements in Social Security disability programs and to ensure that individuals with disabilities applying for Social Security Disability and SSI benefits have access to highly qualified representation and receive fair decisions.

Few NOSSCR members know the full story of how ambitious and challenging this project turned out to be. NOSSCR was essentially reinvented from the ground up – new staff, new procedures, new systems, new everything! The new NOSSCR was a non-profit startup operation and if you’ve followed the epic business startups of the last few decades, you’ll know that the following AI description only begins to capture the enormity of NOSSCR’s transformation:

The startup experience is characterized by a blend of innovation, creativity, and the entrepreneurial spirit. It involves taking on new challenges, making quick decisions, and often working under tight deadlines. Startups require individuals who are adaptive, proactive, and capable of driving growth. The experience can be both rewarding and challenging, as it often involves learning new skills and technologies quickly to meet the startup’s needs.

For many years, NOSSCR served its membership well in terms of continuing legal education, news of political, regulatory, and legal developments, and support for appellate litigation on important legal doctrines. But NOSSCR’s effectiveness as an advocate with members of Congress and with SSA’s top leadership was never sufficiently strong or strategic and became even less effective at a time when political pressures had degraded our ability to achieve timely approval of our client’s claims, or to keep our law practices profitable.

By the 2000’s, the Social Security Administration had become overly bureaucratic and sclerotic, with aging computer systems and outmoded procedures, complicated by increasing workloads and insufficient staffing, and a series of Commissioners more focused on policy rather than operational issues. In 2011, Tea Party members of Congress took control of the House and relentlessly attacked the disability program, resulting in a devastating drop in ALJ award rates, and for almost 14 years, the Commissioner failed to increase the $6,000 fee agreement cap to account for inflation. Something had to change to protect our clients and our law practices and the only way was through the political process.

David Camp, president of NOSSCR in 2022, decided to take action, and devised a plan to move NOSSCR to Washington and to reform our political advocacy strategy. He shopped these ideas around with various board members, including me, and found the support he needed. I told David that in 1996, at the NOSSCR conference held in my home town, Charleston, SC, I had arranged a surprise public meeting at a nearby hotel, open to all NOSSCR members, to discuss the deficiencies in NOSSCR’s political strategy, and ideas for building a more effective political presence in Washington. It was well attended and members had a lot to say. David was excited to hear about this history, and named his reinvention idea, “The 1996 Project.”

Over the last three years, David, the new NOSSCR staff, and numerous past and present NOSSCR leaders have worked at a whirlwind pace to transform NOSSCR into the premier advocate for the Social Security disability community in Washington. In a surprisingly short period of time, David and NOSSCR gained the trust and respect of both the Republican leadership and Democratic members of the House Social Security Subcommittee of Ways and Means, and of SSA Commissioners Martin O’Malley and now Frank Bisignano, as they pursued major reforms of the disability program.

David Camp and NOSSCR are now the most trusted stakeholder partners with Congress and the Commissioner of Social Security, in an unprecedented reformation of the Social Security disability program. From the elimination of archaic and inefficient procedures to the use of modern IT systems and business practices, the disability program is being radically transformed, to the benefit of our clients and the nation. The profitability of our law practices has been restored by these reforms, and by the raising of the fee agreement cap to $9,200, another great achievement of the new and improved NOSSCR.

This year, through our political advocacy, we hope to achieve free medical records for all Social Security disability claimants. Soon we will have an improved portal for disability claimants’ representatives to obtain vital information about our clients’ claims, including payment center information and direct electronic communications systems with the agency, and much more. Prior to the new NOSSCR, none of this was available.

The achievements of the last few years have come at great sacrifice and financial cost, and we’ve learned a lot of lessons, many of them the hard way. But we’ve traveled light years in the reformation of the disability adjudication process, and in the improvement and profitability of our law practices. The Social Security Administration and NOSSCR have a short window of opportunity to complete this reformation, and we need all of our members to support us, and our clients, in this once-in-a-lifetime project.

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