Administrative law judge union to push for expanded annual carryover leave

Officials with a union that represents administrative law judges at the Social Security Administration are preparing for a push to pass legislation to expand the amount of annual leave they can carry over each year.

Administrative law judges at SSA, who hear appeals of initial disability determinations issued by state Disability Determination Service agencies, are hired under the General Schedule, meaning they can carry over a maximum of 30 days of annual leave each year; any remaining leave beyond that threshold is considered “use it or lose it.”

Backlogs both for initial determinations and appellate decisions have been two of the many thorns in the Social Security Administration’s side as it has seen its workforce—and budget—decline over the past two decades, in the face of a rising population of Social Security beneficiaries.

The Association of Administrative Law Judges said it has been hard at work in recent months to build bipartisan support in Congress for a legislative proposal to increase that cap to 90 days. Officials said the change would be fairer to ALJs who undergo more scrutiny than most other General Schedule employees and could offer a novel way to retain a highly specialized and aging workforce.

“You know, Commissioner O’Malley has been on Capitol Hill meeting with appropriators and their staffs about the abysmal budget that SSA has gotten, and he’s made note of the fact that while the number of beneficiaries have increased dramatically, funding and staffing has declined,” said Som Ramrup, the union’s president. “[I] think he’s been rightly focused on the area of the agency—the operations component—that has had the most challenges recently, particularly with regard to the 800 number, appointments at field offices and the backlog at state DDSes. But our proposal is focused on what the agency can do in a proactive way to really address that backlog that will ultimately come before ALJs.”

Ramrup said her organization’s proposal could help the agency in two ways. First, the agency has already seen the headcount of its ALJ corps shrink from 1,645 in 2018 to only 1,170 last year. Data from an internal survey of AALJ members found that in fiscal 2023, SSA administrative law judges forfeited an average of 27 hours of leave per year due to the annual leave cap, compared to just 0.75 hours of forfeited leave on average across the General Schedule from fiscal 2019 to 2023.

At a time when the agency projects the number of initial disability determinations to increase by more than 300,000 this fiscal year—and with them, appeals of those determinations—a boost to the leave cap could allow judges to take more cases.

“We surveyed our members and asked, ‘If you’re able to do this, how much additional leave would you carry over?’” Ramrup said. “And most folks said that they would carry over three works worth of additional annual leave—and the next-largest group were those who said they would carry over two more weeks. Now based on agency data, if you carry over an additional three weeks of leave, that would equate to 28,000 additional dispositions a year, and 10 additional days would be in the 18,000 range.”

Ramrup said that 28,000 additional cases would be the same as if the agency had hired an additional 70 ALJs, minus the monetary and time-related costs of hiring and training new judges to proficiency.

And in the mind of many ALJs, the leave issue is one of fairness, Ramrup said. Administrative law judges undergo more rigorous and more frequent scrutiny than most General Schedule workers.

“ALJs are more similarly situated to Senior Level (SL) employees—SES, ST and SL employees can all carry over 90 days of annual leave [per year],” she said. “We’re subject to a background check every five years. We’re subject to the STOCK Act [barring congressional insider trading]. We complete annual disclosure forms that are public, and we’re further restricted under the Hatch Act.”