The Social Security Administration (SSA) recently announced that it is making a major change that could help more people qualify for disability benefits (SSDI), the change includes a practice used by the program to determine if an applicant with a disability could, in fact, find another job that suits their abilities, which could result in the rejection of benefits.
To make that decision, the SSA relies on a database of jobs to determine if there are any jobs that the applicant can still do, but critics have commented that the database is unfair and flawed, since it was last updated in 1977 and within it dozens of obsolete occupations are included.
New SSDI Disability Job List Aims for Fairness
Among those occupations are a reptile breeder, a railroad telegraph operator and a clock repairman; jobs that, according to the SSA, are now going to be removed from the database, the decision comes after the Washington Post highlighted the case of a disability applicant who had worked as an electrician, but was rejected after a judge determined that he could find a job as a nut sorter, a peg inspector or an egg processor, in fact, all these aforementioned occupations no longer exist.
“It makes sense to identify occupations that now exist in very limited numbers in the national economy,” Martin O’Malley, the Social Security commissioner, said in a statement. “By making this update, decision makers will no longer cite these works when rejecting a disability application”
The changes will be applied to both the Social Security Disability Insurance program (SSDI) and the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, the former pays benefits to people who cannot work, because they have a medical condition that will take at least a year or is expected to result in death, the latter program is inclined to disabled people who also have low income.
Both the Social Security disability programs and those of the Department of Veterans Affairs have been considered “high risk” by the Government Accountability Office, a term that is applied to federal programs that are vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse or that require a review to address their problems, both programs use “outdated criteria to decide whether people qualify for benefits,” the GAO said in an April study.
SSA Reform: Outdated Jobs No Longer in Disability Evaluations
The change is “giant”” Anansi Wilson, a law professor at Mitchell Hamline Law School, said Monday on X, the old Twitter. “There is more work to be done, but HUGE, especially for disabled people of color, who are more likely to be rejected. We hope for immediate relief for the thousands of people who are now in court!”
What Are the Jobs That Will Be Eliminated?
The Social Security Administration indicated that it is going to remove 114 occupations from the database, including more than 12,000 types of jobs, SSA judges can no longer use a “not disabled” decision in the case of an applicant citing any of these jobs as an example of work they could do, the agency said.
Some of the jobs that are being excluded are:
- Canary breeder
- Character impersonato
- Directory assistance operator
- Drama art historian
- Film projectionist
- Newswire photography operator
- Radiotelegraphy operator
- Reptile farmer
- Watch repairman
The Social Security Administration said it will now only consider the most important occupations when deciding when someone applying for disability benefits can have other jobs.
The changes “will make life easier for millions,” the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy wrote in X on Monday.