George Failla Oral History Interview
This is an interview in the SSA Oral History Series. This interview is with George Failla. The interviewer was Larry DeWitt, SSA Historian. The interview took place on December 1, 1995 at Mr. Failla's Home in Timonium, Maryland. The interviewer's remarks and any editorial comments are shown in italics to distinguish them from Mr. Failla's comments. The interview was transcribed by Barbara McIntrye, Robert Adams and Gail Hooley of SSA's Braille Services Unit.
Q: George, what I want to do is basically walk you through your career and talk about the jobs you had and the people you worked with and the issues and events that were happening during that time. Let's start by having you tell us how and why you came to work for SSA, what your first job was and where you worked.
Failla: All right, I can remember the first time I saw SSA, believe it or not. I don't know why it made an impression on me, but I do remember applying for my Social Security card when I was 14 at 250 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. Maybe because it was my first job, it made an impression on me, but I always had a memory of that office. It's ironic because that office was called (I did not know it as a private person at the time) the Borough Hall District Office. Coincidentally, that is the first office, and the only office, where I worked in the field.
I was approached during a career day at college by a man who was then the Assistant Manager of the Downtown District Office (DO), and his name was Tony Parotti. Tony Parotti is still with the Agency as the manager of that same Borough Hall DO. He came to our school and he interviewed a number of people and he impressed me because of his energy. He was really interested and really very positive about discussing Social Security. There were a number of us that were interested and it was really very easy. He then came back and gave us the Federal Service Entrance Exam right at school. We didn't have to go anywhere. After identifying the ones who passed who were still interested in the job, they arranged to have three other assistant managers come to the school to conduct a panel interview with all of the participants. I guess it showed me two things: 1) the professionalism of the place; 2) their interest in recruiting people was sincere, and they really went out of their way to make it as easy as possible.
I know to this day that from that recruiting trip that he made, I know for sure there were four people who ended up with in excess of 30-year careers in SSA. Four of us I know who are in Baltimore, Phil Young, Bob Neubauer, Mike Esra and myself, and there were one or two others that were recruited at the same time--they may still be around, I don't know. To think that one little recruiting trip ended up with four 30-year employees, I guess that was an extremely cost-beneficial trip that he made.
After talking to him and listening to him, I really didn't know that I was going to come to work for Social Security. At the time we still had a draft and I was 1-A.
Q: This is 1962, right?
Failla: The late winter and spring of 1962. It was pretty difficult to get something in the private sector before your service obligation was handled. I say that because I don't know that I intentionally set out to have a career with SSA. In fact, I probably thought it would be a temporary thing until I got drafted.
As it turned out, I got a couple of other job offers, and to this day I don't understand how one of my economics professors knew about Social Security. I had a couple of offers and I was talking to him about which one might look interesting, I mentioned Social Security. His name was Maurice Benowitz, and he said to me: "Take the job at Social Security." He said "it is really a good organization. They have a very good reputation." He said: "It is probably a good place to start a career if you stay there because the first generation of people who are running that place are all going to be retiring in the next 10 years." Of course, he was right, and to this day I have no idea how he would know such an obscure thing about Social Security since his principal field of specialization in economics was labor economics not public policy or finance policy. We had one or two of those in the Department, and one or two friends of mine ended up staying in that field and specializing in Social Security and public finance. To this day, I still do not understand why he thought it was a good organization and how he knew that there was a period of growth ahead because the first generation of leaders were going to be retiring.
Q: And where were you going to school? Where was this school?
Failla: I went to the City College of New York. Dr. Benowitz was from Harvard. It was also interesting that later on in my career at SSA that one of my classmates ended up being my boss, and it was one of the more enjoyable work experiences I had at Social Security. In any event, I decided to take the job and I started training in the Borough Hall DO June 25, 1962.
Q: It was a Claims Rep job?
Failla: Claims Rep Trainee, grade 5. There were 13 people in my training class. It was an unusual class at the time because there were more men. I guess at that time there were probably more females being recruited for the job at a college than men, so our class was 50-50. I guess that was somewhat unusual.
The training instructor was Betty Wolinsky, and she was probably a few years older than us. Sam Cohen was the District Manager and Hy Siegel was the Assistant District Manager. It was a pretty large office. It was a class one office. It had about 110 employees, probably close to 30 Claims Reps, and that's where I started.
About two weeks later there was another class that was started in the same DO, also about 13 people in the class. So we had two classes running 2 weeks apart in 1962. I guess they were recruiting because the insured status rules had just changed, going from one to three to one to four. Disability was still relatively new and the workload in that area was growing. Because of the change in the insured status requirements, and the new start, application volumes were picking up. By the time I got out of training, we probably had about 70 to 80 claims pending for each Claims Rep.
I was immediately impressed by the intelligence, professionalism and care of the staff that worked in the office. It was pretty much a young staff. That was one of Sam Cohen's traits. He liked training pools because he would like to pick a couple of people from each class and he was not afraid to have young people who were learning. He thought that was a good healthy environment. In fact, we had an experiment in the office after I became a Claims Rep where we had a unit entirely manned by people who were just out of training, with a very good supervisor. Her name was Rita Harris. It worked as well as the other units in the office. We had five units at the time. There was a healthy competition among the people in the office. Everyone was young. Everyone was looking ahead, and there was competition in providing service.
We did keep a lot of in-house statistics on who did what and where. Each Claims Rep each month got a report card (that's what we used to call it) and it talked about your workload time, the number of 30-day cases you had pending and your error rate, which was the number of claims that were bounced back to you from the clearance unit. In those days we did not all sign the claim before it went to the Program Center. You would have somebody redo the final review of the claim before it left the office, and you would get a report card every month on what your accuracy was.
Although we had that kind of day-to-day feedback, we did not have appraisals as you have them today. We just had the traditional Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, and Outstanding, and nobody, nobody got anything like an Outstanding. That was just the way it was, you were satisfactory or unsatisfactory. If you were unsatisfactory (this was before unions), they would just approach you and say: "We don't think this is the right job for you and you probably should be looking for something else. How's two weeks sound?" And people would go.
The staff was recruited in a slightly different manner. The Claims Rep position was exclusively manned by college graduates. In fact, it was impossible at the time that I joined the organization for someone to come in as a Claims Development Clerk and subsequently become a Claims Rep. There was a definite split, that had some good and some bad repercussions, I think. On the good side, you were coming in out of college feeling that you were a professional, that you were starting a career in an organization, and that made you different. It also affected the way you approached your job. People were there to learn about the program, talking about what was happening, why it was happening, and to approach problems in the office with much more of a managerial bent on what would be good, how do you make things work better, how do you make things run better. And it wasn't the kind of adversarial relationship that came about later on.
The down side was that there were some very, very talented Claims Development Clerks, that typically were high school graduates, who came in to work in the office who had nowhere to go. They were grade 5's and after a point in time, (I guess it was around 1964 or 1965) they developed what they called a Service Rep job which initially was simply a receptionist. It was supposedly intended to allow Service Reps to take some easy actions, particularly in the postentitlement area and the reception area. Basically these people worked as glorified receptionists; that went on for about a year, and that's one of my interesting experiences that I'll go into in a minute on the Service Reps functioning in a different way.
Clearly, coming to work at Social Security, the training of 13 grueling weeks, exams every week--it was very impressive to someone coming in from the outside. It was clear to us that here was an organization that was willing to make an investment of their time to make sure that at the point we were going on the job to serve the public, we knew what we were doing and we did it very well.
They also did something else in those days. Within one year from the time you came to work for Social Security as a CR, everyone came to Baltimore for two weeks, for two reasons: to let you see what headquarters was like and where things were coming from, and also to give you a good foundation not only in the organizational structure of Woodlawn, but also a solid foundation in the rationale of the program. I think that the sense of management at the time was that every single Claims Rep, in particular, was a representative of the Agency. Whether it be in day-to-day contact with friends and relatives, or whether they were going to be asked to go out to do some public information field work or making speeches, you should have a sound foundation in what the program is about, how it got to where it was, what it was intended to do, and to be able to discuss it intelligently in public. That was one of the things that was thrown away during one of the many budget crises, and I must admit, over 32 years, I think we had a budget crisis every other year. There's nothing new going on right now, and everything was always going to be tight coming into the fiscal year. Things didn't change all that much.
Clearly, that particular training effort of bringing everyone to Baltimore, getting to meet people from other parts of the organization (from the Payment Centers, from the Headquarters components, from Systems) was really a very good opportunity to know a little more about the organization and to know what made it tick. I was really sorry when they stopped that and I don't know it will ever come back. Although I think at this point in time there is probably more of a need for it where we recruit in a different way than we did before and we have many more people coming through the ranks from the clerical positions. I think there is a need to bring people along and what I used to call in my career "bridging the gap," developing a different mind set on how to approach a job and developing a confidence in that individual that they can do whatever they need to do and they can do it well. I think that where we're bringing more people in through the ranks, it is more important to give them the kind of programmatic rationale background and exposure and learning more about the organization and what makes it tick than it even was at the time we were doing it when I first joined SSA.
Q: Tell me a little about working as a Claims Rep, how you found that experience and how you found the day-to-day work.
Failla: I found the Claims Rep job to be extremely interesting. As I said before, there was a sense of responsibility. You were responsible for a specific piece of the alphabetic breakdown. Initially, you had everything. About a year after I started, they changed that a little bit in terms of disability and how disability was handled. I will go into that in a minute. Typically, you had about 60 to 80 cases pending at a given time. You took care of all initial claims and postentitlement activities for that portion of the alphabet. Everyone was a generalist in that sense, and I found it very interesting.
I found it very interesting for the first year or year-and-a-half. I say that because after a year-and-a-half interviewing can be a little tiresome, because it's a question of getting the same things over and over and over again. And while dealing with the public is nice and you get a good sense of satisfaction if you are helping someone and giving someone what they are entitled to, after a while just doing interviewing was not exactly as challenging. It was saying in the textbooks at the time that you get one year of experience 10 times or 10 years of experience. I think as a Claims Rep after about a year-and-a-half, you start to have the same year-and-a-half experience again and again. Fortunately at the time the program was growing. We were beginning to hear rumors and whispers about Medicare being passed, and there were opportunities to do the things in a different way or do different things in the office.
When you were initially a Claims Rep, one of the things you aspired to was to become a Clearance Unit Rep because you were one of four or five people (we had one in each unit) who did the final review of claims before they went to the Payment Center to be put into payment status. You aspired to be the Clearance Unit Rep because that was a step up and it was also one of the ways that you thought that at some point in time you had the potential to become a Field Rep and to get to a Field Rep panel. It means that you aren't being left behind.
In late 1963, maybe even in early 1964, they started another activity which was called a Disability Expediter. What they did was, they took all of the disability claims in a single unit and put them on one desk. The person who was the Disability Expediter was responsible for doing all of the development on those claims. They did not necessarily take the claim. In fact, most Disability Expediters and Clearance Unit Reps did not do any interviewing unless it was busy in the office. The Disability Expediter, to a degree, ended up acting as an assistant supervisor. Once the claim was taken by a CR, it came to that disability desk. You reviewed the claim. You started the request for medical evidence, the request for the earnings record, and did any other development that you needed to do in order to process the claim. It was really an interesting job.
Q: You were actually requesting medical evidence at this point?
Failla: That's right.
Q: In effect, you were doing part of what the Disability Determination Services (DDSs) would do later on?
Failla: Yes. We did develop the medical evidence. We sent requests to doctors, to hospitals. We sent requests for assistance to the local DOs when we had to get medical evidence from hospitals that were out of our service area. You also followed up on that medical evidence including calling the doctor, nudging the doctor to get that medical evidence in here because in the Disability Unit a 30-day case is still a 30-day case. The goal was not to have 30-day cases. The whole emphasis was on making sure you got that evidence in as quickly as possible, so you could get the case out to the State Agency. You cajoled doctors in doctors' offices, and nurses, and you cajoled the claimant. You would say to him: "Look, I can't do anything with your file because I don't have Dr. DeWitt's report, and unless that report comes in, we can't do anything with your claim. So you need to go down to the office and sit there until he fills out the paper." And they would do it.
Q: You would hold the file in the office until you got the medical evidence?
Failla: Yes, we held the file until we felt there was sufficient medical evidence for the DDS to make a determination. We weren't medical specialists, trust me, although we did have training for all the CRs on a regular basis on how to take disability claims. One month we would bring in somebody from the Heart Association. Another month we would bring in somebody from the Cancer Association. We would bring in local doctors. We would bring in somebody from a local hospital who would explain how to look at the classification of heart disease and what that meant, and to give us better information on how to do the original (form) 401 interview which I guess now is a (form) 3368 and (form) 3369, what kinds of questions to ask, what kinds of medications people were probably on if they had a given condition, and that was one of the ways you went through that interview.
In terms of developing a claim and getting the claim out to the state DDS, what you tried to get was evidence that was related to the principal condition that the person was complaining about and any other conditions that seemed significant, making sure that you had some medical record that covered the onset of the disability and also current information about his condition.
I must admit that there was one other thing that was a little bit different even though disability was a little bit harder. I would say that probably (we are only dealing with Title II, don't forget) about 60 to 70 percent (at least in my District Office) of the claims that were handled came in during the waiting period. We would get them around the 4th month, so you really did have some time to develop the claim. I thought we provided good service because generally the people did get a decision pretty soon after their waiting period was over. I thought that was good service. It was not as true on the RSI side. I don't think we got as many people to come in two to three months before. On the RSI side, most of the time claimants came in at the time they retired. Even though we did a lot of public information about coming in early, I don't think the percentage was as great of those who came in to file early for their benefits.
The Disability Expediter job was really interesting because you got to do other things and you took responsibility for that whole piece of the work for your unit, and I found it very interesting and gratifying.
Q: What was the morale and the esprit in the organization like at that time? It sounds like you enjoyed it and that people liked the job at SSA. Was it a good place to work?
Failla: Yes. Before I get to that, let me say a little bit more about disability.
There were concerns even in those days about disability. Even though the cash benefit program started with the 1956 Amendments, by 1963 they were already concerned (1964 for sure) about people being on the rolls who shouldn't be on the rolls, even though we had a regular series of Continuing Disability Reviews (CDRs)--and we did have a budget for CDRs in those days.
They did a special study in 1964 on CDRs where we went a little bit further than we did in our normal CDR development. You actually went out physically to visit the person, to observe him in his own home surroundings, not how he looked when he came into the office. It was a very good program in terms of looking at the person in a different way. You did it unannounced, and I don't know whether we uncovered a lot of fraud, per se, but you certainly uncovered people who looked like they might be getting better and I think they came off the rolls. It was somewhat labor-intensive, but it illustrated concern at that time, already, about the growth in the rolls and the fact that people got on the rolls and were staying on even though the definition was much more strictly interpreted at that time. I think people who were on our rolls were a lot sicker than the ones later on.
The morale in the office was excellent. Most people felt they were building a career. There was a tremendous amount of pride in the program. Everybody felt that it was a good program, that people were getting their money's worth from the program, and that people were being treated in a way that befitted someone who had an earned right to a benefit. Our job was to get them every penny that they were entitled to, not a penny more, but every penny that they were entitled to, and to assist them in any way we could because they had bought some insurance and were coming in to claim their benefit.
We treated the public with that kind of dignity, and I think they treated us the same way. There was a formal dress code. I'm sorry, maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think, at least in the field offices, we should still have that dress code. When you walk into an office and the person who greets you is wearing a suit or suit coat and a tie and a woman is dressed appropriately, it adds professionalism to the office. And I think the public treats you in a different way, and I think it helps you treat the public in a better way. I am really very sorry that we lost that dress code in the field offices. I think it detracts from the professionalism or the appearance of the office. I think it also affects the way in which claimants interact with us. I know other things have happened and we will get into them later, but I really believe strongly that dress code and professionalism in an office really made a difference.
At the office we were very young, at the time I was there, on average our ages were in the 20s. There were 35 Claims Reps in my office. I would say 30 of us were less than 25 or 26 by the time I left. There was no we/they conflict with management. We did not always agree with managers and we had one Assistant Manager who drove us crazy. But you looked at it as being part of the solution to whatever problems existed in the office, and how do you fix it and go ahead and provide good service.
Service to the public was just pounded into you and was accepted by everyone. We would never think of letting people wait a long time to get interviewed. We would pull everybody out to interview, even though some people supposedly were off interviews, even getting some of the better Claims Development Clerks when things got very crowded. We pulled them off and had them do simple straight retirement claims. It was really an effort not to have people waiting in that reception area for a long period of time. It was really a good organization and I don't know how I can stress that enough.
Before moving on, let me say one more thing about the Claims Rep job and how times have changed. In the Title II area, the principle issues that came up repeatedly were proof of age and earnings issues. Even at that point in time, in the early 1960s, we still had some reporting problems where people--particularly domestic workers, but even some people who worked for small businesses--were not getting their earnings reported.
Very often during a claim you were developing earnings. We had some situations, especially after the change in insured status from one to two to one to three and one to four and the New Start, you had some bogus employment histories where people would put somebody on the books for a few years as they were getting close to 62 or 65 just so they can get insured status and then get a benefit for the rest of their lives. We did a good bit of development of what we called bogus employment, and the other area is in the self-employment area and capital gains area to make sure somebody actually retired when they were 65 and not continued to do their business. Those were the principal areas of work that we did as Claims Reps, and some of it was kind of interesting. Going through somebody's books to see how something was transferred and not hidden so they could get it off the books and collect their benefit, was a challenge at times.
In late 1964 the management of the office decided that rather than have these Service Reps, who were going to become grade 7s at some point, rather than just have them be glorified receptionists, what we would do is to set up a postentitlement unit and pull all the postentitlement workloads away from the regular Claims Reps and give them to Service Reps. I don't know whether this was a regional decision, whether it was tried anywhere else, because even though you were part of a region you didn't really see a whole lot of other district offices unless you moved around from one office to another.
So the Service Reps started operating in a different way. They had a desk, a breakdown, a clerical, and handled all the postentitlement work related to a specific part of the alphabet. Even though I was still a Claims Rep at the time, they asked me to start that unit up and to work with it. They gave me one Claims Rep (I won't comment on whether it was the best or the worst Claims Rep in the office but I remember him to this day) and they gave me all of these Service Reps and said: "Okay, go run a unit."
It was really an interesting challenge because while some of these Service Reps had been Claims Development Clerks before and knew what a breakdown was about, and some had done some minor interviewing, the challenge of it was getting these people to think and to act in a different way, and teaching them confidence. Even though some of them had done some interviewing before, they knew the Claims Manual, they knew what proofs you needed, they knew the forms that had to be used, when they were responsible for the desk, they would get cold feet. They would bounce something off me and say: "I'm going to do this, okay?" They needed some kind of assurance when they took over their own responsibility of the whole desk. The confidence and comfort in interviewing, especially interviewing difficult claimants. You always had some of those because we did postentitlement. You had to process nonreceipt of checks. You had other problems that would come up which stopped somebody's check, and brother, they could become irate pretty quickly. That was really a challenge to help work with these people in developing the confidence that we knew they should have in themselves to just carry out the work that we do. Showing them how to exude that confidence was one of the bigger challenges of that job; it was great fun.
When I was a Disability Expediter they said: "We need to have more expertise taking these claims." Rather than having any Claims Rep taking disability claims, the Disability Expediter did it now. Instead of being off interviews, the Disability Examiner was on interviews, and he took every single claim including the 401 interview. Some of those days, by the time you finished three or four or five 401 interviews, it was a long day. And doing the development, you did both, the whole thing.
(Ed. Note: The 401 was the form used to record the medical information.)
Q: You were doing in 1964, 1965 something like what we are talking about doing now with the Disability Claims Manager that's part of the disability reengineering?
Failla: That's correct. Everything comes around full circle. In part, we stopped it because of what happened with the implementation of Medicare. Soon after I left the DO, (I don't know exactly when it was) we stopped doing medical development.
Q: Tell me, since we are contemplating doing this again in the Agency, give us the benefit of your experience. Was that a successful experiment from your point of view? What were the problems with it? What were the good things about it?
Failla: The problem was taking all those interviews; after a while there was some burnout. There was also a tremendous amount of satisfaction; you were doing the whole thing from beginning to end. If you do the interview and you have that person across the desk from you, you develop a sensitivity for the claimant. A sense where you think he may be disabled, and you really believe it. I think you do a better job in developing that claim and doing a really good 401 interview. You get the background information you need because there is a human connection. I don't think just doing paper handling of disability claims without getting to know the claimant, you develop the same kind of connection to the claimant. I don't think you do as good a job. That's my personal opinion.
I was a little bit involved in the reengineering activity, of the Disability Claims Manager idea, and I clearly was very much in favor of it. I may be totally wrong. 1995 may be totally a different time than 1965, and this may not work. I think the basic foundation of meeting that claimant the first time in that office, going through his case with him and then developing it to a point of being able to make a decision (and now if we ever get some adjudicative authority in the deal), that would be even greater. I think that makes sense, and I think it can work. Time will tell.
Q: All right, you became an informal supervisor and then at some point you became formally a supervisor, is that right?
Failla: We had a freeze on in those days.
Q: Sounds familiar.
Failla: I'm sure people know about that. For a while it took you two-and-a- half years to become a full-fledged Claims Rep. You were a grade 5 CRT (Claims Rep Trainee) for 6 months. You were a grade 7 for another year-and-a-half, and then at grade 9 you took the T (trainee) off your signature line. Once you were a full-fledged CRT and you were in grade for a year, you were eligible to be selected to go for a panel interview to become a Field Rep. At that point in time the Field Reps and the Supervisors were the same grade. Most people became a Field Rep first. It happened during that timeframe where they both ended up being the same grade.
Q: Were the Claims Reps and Field Reps the same grade?
Failla: Originally, Claims Reps were an 8, Field Reps were a 9, and Supervisors were a 10. During the time of my early work there, while I was a CRT, they changed the Claims Rep job to 5, 7, 9. Then they had to make the Field Reps grade 10s. For a good period of time (into the 1970s) the Field Reps and supervisors were the same grade and they were grade 10s.
When I was eligible for a panel interview, there was a freeze on. It was almost a year where they did not conduct any panel interviews. While I thought this was a good organization to have a career in, (I also felt that way after I visited Baltimore and I knew I was going to end up in Baltimore one day) in the New York Region the only grade 11 jobs were something called Section Supervisors which were sort of an Operations Officer who was responsible for the internal duties. Assistant Managers usually worried about the Field Reps on the outside and the Section Supervisor coordinated and ran the claims operation inside the office. Obviously, you had to have a big office to have a Section Supervisor. You had to have at least four or five claims units, so they were pretty large offices. I don't think there were more than 10 or 15 grade 11 jobs in the region at the time I was a Claims Rep. It took a long time to get beyond a Field Rep or Supervisor because there weren't that many jobs open. It changed a little bit after Medicare, but basically it was tough to get above a grade 10 in those days.
Q: In 1965 and 1966 you were a supervisor, right?
Failla: Yes. I started being an acting supervisor even before I ever went to a field panel. Then I finally did go to the panel and I became a supervisor.
Q: You were never a Field Rep?
Failla: I was never a Field Rep. The only thing I did was fill-in in the field. I made a couple of speeches, filled in if somebody was on vacation, and the old timer Field Reps would save all of the disability claims because they hated to do them. They would save them for the Claims Reps who came out on a temporary basis.
Q: The field panel was a panel to become either a Field Rep or Supervisor?
Failla: It was to become a Field Rep or a supervisor.
The Field Reps we had in those days were career Field Reps. In my office we had seven Field Reps, and six of them probably were Field Reps in the 1940s. They had become Field Reps, they liked being out of the office, and it wasn't a bad job in New York City. They never came back. They never wanted to come back into the office. They said for one grade, it wasn't worth it. And then for a good time it was the same grade as the supervisor, with much less aggravation and the promotion line was not that great in those days, so they would just as soon stay out in the field. We had people as career Field Reps for 20 years, and they loved every minute of it.
After I did go to the panel, I had already been an Acting Supervisor. Then they wanted to send me to another office, and I'll never forget this because I did not want to go. I liked this office. This was the only office I knew, and it took some back and forth between the manager and the regional office to let me stay in the office. I guess the point was that they did not want you to stay in the same office as a Supervisor that you were a Claims Rep because of the friendships you had developed and how close you were to the staff on a personal level. They did not think it was a good idea, and they were probably right, in general. Because I already worked as an Acting Supervisor, they told the regional office: "It's not a problem, he's already done it, so let him stay here." Otherwise, I was on my way to East New York, and I will never forget it. I went to East New York and was interviewed by the manager, and I was ready to go. At the last minute they said: "No, you can stay." I stayed and that was an exciting year as well.
I thought the Service Rep experiment was kind of fun, but my year as a Supervisor from mid 1965 to June 26, 1966 was an exciting year because Medicare had passed, and Medicare covered a lot of people who were not entitled to Title II benefits. We had a massive enrollment to get all these people on the rolls, new account numbers for some, taking claims, developing proof of age, and people came in droves. We had worked stacked on our desks. Even with overtime, Saturday work, it was impossible to keep up with it. The reception areas were so crowded, and we weren't used to this. We tried to get people out of that office within an hour at worst. Here you had people overflowing, and we tried everything. One of the things I found very funny was taking 20 to 30 old-timers into one of the training rooms, sit them down with an application, and try to walk them through the application, getting them to fill out the information.
Q: It was a mass interview?
Failla: A mass interview. It was laughs. We were working every night, and Saturdays, just to try to keep up. Somehow we got everybody enrolled. I don't think there was a real big problem. In July 1966 people were enrolled, their Medicare cards got out to them, and it was really an exciting time.
It was a challenge for the Agency and one that we took a lot of pride in because we were able to do it and get it done on time. Baltimore was busting at the seams, too, not only in terms of getting people on the rolls, but also the providers certified and included. It was a massive effort, and it was a brute force effort that SSA took because the systems were antiquated. I think we just started to get, I guess what became the SSADARS system, at that point in time.
Q: Teletype?
Failla: Yes, the teletype machines, and it was still a very labor-intensive and paper-intensive process. There was a great amount of pride in getting everyone on the rolls at that point.
This ended my career in the field. I spent 4 years, almost to the day, all in the same DO, training, CR'ing, and supervising, which I guess is a little bit unique. It was really a good time. You left work every day with a sense of accomplishment and a sense of having done something useful. I would not have traded it for the world.
Q: Before we leave your career in the field, I want to go back to the two-week training period in Baltimore. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened there and what you did during that two weeks?
Failla: Yes. As I said, it was one of the highlights of the training program, and it was there that I clearly realized that I would end up in Baltimore one day because it seemed so exciting with some of the kinds of work that was going on.
They broke everyone down into classes of about 20. They taught you basic program philosophy, and also some basic analysis techniques and things that would help you on the job. The clear focus of the two-week period was to come out with an understanding of the organization, the interrelationships within the organization of SSA, and the program from the beginning until that point in time. What were the significant pieces of legislation over the years; what was the original intent of the program, how things evolved, how disability and health insurance were really intended to be part of the original Act, how through the 1940s it was introduced and reintroduced without success, and what had taken place during the 1950's before they could overcome some of the American Medical Association objections to the disability program. Because you have to understand that at that point in time there was a great fear that this was going to give the federal government a foot in the door to socializing medicine. That wasn't the intent, and it obviously did not happen, but that scare still comes up every so often. It came up with the health care reform efforts two years ago and will continue to come up.
We got a chance to meet with leaders of the program, and that included every one of the Bureau Directors. In 1965 the Bureau of Old Age and Survivors Insurance was abolished in a reorganization and the old components of BOASI began reporting directly to the Commissioner, so there was no longer a Director of BOASI, as such. We met each of the Bureau Directors, and they talked about their organization. We met with Vic Christgau who was originally Director of the Bureau of Old Age and Survivors Insurance (he was also a former Congressman) and Bob Ball, Art Hess, Jack Futterman, Hugh McKenna, Joe Fay who ran the Bureau of Data Processing and Accounts which was the systems organization at the time, Tom Parrot who was in charge of Claims Policy, Ida Merriam who ran Research and Statistics, and Bob Myers, who was the Actuary.
One of the things that really struck you as an employee was the scope and depth of the program, learning about the history of the program, how it evolved, what kinds of studies were done to get things moved from one spot to another, and developing a relationship with the leaders of the program who you could look at and say: "Hey look, they started just like I did." Bob Ball was a Claims Rep and a Field Rep in New Jersey, and came into headquarters in the training office, and then went to what was then called OPEP (Office of Program Evaluation and Planning) which was the legislative arm of SSA which did most of the things that OLCA (Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs) does now. You can see all of these people had come from the field organization, and were able to come up through the ranks and become leaders of the program. Boy, if that didn't do something for your morale, looking at a career in the future, I don't know what could have.
It really was a striking experience, and I do not think I would have traded it for anything. The program knowledge you got was just so useful in doing your day-to-day job and talking about the program in general to the public. As I said before, and I'll say it again, I wish we could do something like that again.
Now, let's go back to 1965, 1966. I guess because of Medicare, because there was a need for additional people here in Baltimore, also some needs in the Office of Disability Operations where the Baltimore Payment Center was (as they called it at the time) because of the growth in the disability program, there was a good deal of recruitment going on. What that recruitment was, was recruiting people from the field to come into headquarters. That's the way we did most of our headquarters recruitment at the time. There were a couple of exams they gave. The Standards & Methods Test was one of them. We had our own internal intern program. We had a limited external intern program for people coming from outside of SSA. You would take the exams, people would look through these lists of potential people, come out and interview you, sometimes offer you a job, and that was the way I got to Baltimore. This is how I ended up in the Office of Research and Statistics.
The first person who came to interview me was a man from the Evaluation and Measurement Systems Staff. This was a relatively new organization. I don't think they started until 1963. It was soon after I had come on board. It was a somewhat unique function to the government, and it's something, after SSI, I think we got away from and got kind of confused. What this function was, was evaluation of the policies that the people in the field were working under. Now this was not quality control, not quality assurance as we typically know it. The quality assurance we had in those days was 100 percent review of every claim at the Payment Center before they effectuated payment. That was your quality control. This was a small sample to validate the policies that we told people to carry out.
One of the ones that we looked at very early was something called the C-2/C-3 Rule. If you got information from the husband about his marriage and you got information from the wife during her interview about the marriage and there were no discrepancies, we did not need a marriage certificate to process the claim. Similarly, unless someone was born in 1900, if the date of birth information was consistent between the SS-5 that the person filled out when they applied for a Social Security card and the claim for benefits, and enough time had elapsed between the two, you did not have to develop for proof of age. That was called the SS-5 Rule.
One of the responsibilities of the Evaluation and Measurement Staff (EMS) was to validate policies like that, not to see how well the Claims Rep out in the field was following the Claims Manual and the instruction, but rather, to go a step before that, and validate the policy that you had. It was an excellent program, and it was placed in the Office of Research and Statistics (ORS) where it would have support from the mathematical statisticians and the analytical type people on the staff there. At the same time it was well enough removed from the rest of SSA so that it was not tainted. They were looked at as being a very neutral body within the organization. It wasn't the Bureau of Retirement & Survivors Insurance (BRSI) worrying about how they would look or somebody else worrying about how they would look. It was a novel way of placing it in an organization, and also the fact that they were doing something like that then was a tribute to the thinking of the leadership at the time in terms of how do you make sure that we are doing the right thing for the public and for the program.
I was recruited to work on that staff. Although they interviewed me in the New York Regional Office, I would not take the job sight unseen. Myself and somebody else who also had been offered a job in Baltimore took a couple of days annual leave and drove down to Baltimore to look around. My manager knew a number of people in BHI (Bureau of Health Insurance) and set up some interviews in BHI. BHI was still part of SSA at the time, and I also had a job offer from the Baltimore Payment Center to work as a Claims Authorizer. A lot of people came in through that rank--Sandy Crank, Rhoda Davis, Nelson Sabatini. I think Lou Enoff was over there at one time. An awful lot of people who ended up at high levels of SSA came in from the field through the Baltimore Payment Center.
As I came and looked around, and since the EMS staff was part of the Office of Research and Statistics, by happenstance I ran into a man named Bert Van Engel who was the Administrative Officer of ORS. The man who was working for him at the time left to join the new Bureau of Health Insurance because there were promotions and there was a lot of growth there. Just by coincidence, the day I walked in he needed somebody, and he hired me. It was something that I will never regret. It was a fascinating job because I was able to learn more about the program and about SSA.
This just came to me and I have to say it. I remember getting my SS-5 when I was 14, getting a job, and I was an economics major in college. Ironically, for one of my economics courses I wrote a paper about Social Security and Social Security financing. I have no idea why I did that, but I did, and I had some knowledge of the place. It must have been preordained that I was going to end up at Social Security because I have no idea why as a college junior or senior I would write a paper about Social Security, but I did. I went to this organization and I knew something about them from what I had done in college.
Every District Office got a copy of the SOCIAL SECURITY BULLETIN which was the publication of ORS. It ran articles about the studies that were taking place and the results of those studies. It also had information about related social insurance programs and statistics on what was going on in the program. That came to every DO and went to every desk, so I knew about this organization a little bit.
When I joined them, it was kind of fun. It was an organization of only 250 people, and the woman who ran it (Ida Merriam) was on the staff of the original committee that put the Social Security Act together, as was Bob Myers, who was SSA's Actuary. She was an incredible woman--dynamic. In fact, she was still dynamic when I last saw her which was about eight or nine years ago when they were dedicating the Wilbur Cohen Building in Washington. I went over there, and she came bouncing around. She had to be 80 years old at that point. I said: "Ida, how are you doing?" She said: "Fine!" She had gotten there by using the Metro, and she was an incredible woman with energy like you could not believe. She ran an extremely professional organization, doing social surveys, both longitudinal surveys, sectional surveys, whole program studies--a first-class statistical organization in terms of collecting programmatic statistics about Social Security and what was going on at Social Security.
I refer to those years as my time in the University of ORS because it was more like a university than it was like a public agency or organization of bureaucrats. It worked very much like a university, doing research and publishing findings, not only inside SSA but outside as well.
It was critical and it was important because we were doing two things. We were trying not to do all of the research about Social Security in-house, but to do it well and to publicize it outside the organization to encourage academic research beyond the borders of SSA. We had to look into the program, have interest in the program because the feeling was that the more people who looked into the foundation of the program, the financing of the program and the purpose of the program, and the more work that was being done, more could get done than the government could fund by itself. It would generate interest and ideas about where the program should be going in the future.
The organization was very active in the American Economic Association, the Statistical Association, the gerontological societies, and it was a constant battle that we always had with the budgeteers at SSA. This is an interesting piece of information about the 13 years I spent at ORS. When I started in 1966, I said we had 257 people that grew to almost 400 after health insurance. Then when SSI came, we added new divisions to look at those programs. But at the time I came in, we had an administrative staff of four people, the administrative officer, myself and one other person, and a secretary. Our job was to do all of the administrative stuff for ORS. What that meant was you did the budget, you did all of the personnel work, you wrote new job descriptions, and you set up new organizational structures, and you went to the Civil Service Commission when we identified somebody at the university we wanted to pick up. It was our job to go figure out how to get them off the Register, and the right Register, and we were probably one of the few organizations in SSA that was hiring anybody above the entry level grades. We would hire up to grade 15 and the equivalent of SES at that time from outside.
My job in the administrative staff was to do whatever we could to get management the resources they needed when they needed them, and to not bother them with administrative detail which was great because we were in all of the meetings. We had to know what was going on because you can't write a budget for a component if you don't know what is going on in that component and where they are going. You can't do an organizational structure for them.
It was Ida's feeling that the people she hired to run the components of ORS were professionals and were experts in their field of study who she expected to be contributing people on the research side. Therefore, I don't want a Ph.D. economist who knows public financing to be worried about writing a job description for a grade 12 on his staff, or to write a budget request. The whole philosophy was that you have a support staff that truly supported the managers so they didn't have to get bogged down in administrative details. That was an interesting philosophy of management, and I learned a number of things from it.
Also, it was an organization that was run like a university where the boss wasn't the only smart guy. It was a bottom up, top down organization. We had a work planning process that was extremely rigorous where each year individual analysts at the grade 12 level, grade 13 level, grade 14 level, would propose projects and areas of study for the next 2 years. Their research proposal in effect went before their branch in their division. If it made it through those levels, it came to the Assistant Commissioner, which was the job title at that time. Ida and her immediate staff, who were the Executive Officer, her Deputy, and the Chief Mathematical Statistician, and often some of the Division Directors from other divisions, would look at each one of these proposals, have the person there explaining what they were trying to do, why they felt it was important, and then make a decision individually on each of these projects that we would commit some resources or not commit some resources. It was an incredibly rigorous process, but a good one. And it was a good management style because it was expected that people at the lower grade would be knowledgeable about where they should be going, what we should be doing. I think it affected the way I managed later on in my career. It's not important for me to have all the answers and give all the instructions, that people should be piping things up. If it's worth it, let them go and let them run with it, and I thought it was a very effective way to run that organization.
In some ways even though it was called the University of ORS, or worse things than that, it was different than the rest of SSA in the way it was run day-by-day. It was somewhat comparable to the Office of the Actuary to a degree, but I guess it didn't fit the SSA mold. The rest of the SSA organization, then and now, is to my mind much, much too top-down. We don't delegate responsibility, much less authority or vice versa. I think authority is easier than responsibility. We have top leadership working on and worrying about the wrong things. I think it does not help the Agency. We have a tremendous number of bright people in the organization. You don't want it to add to your chaos, but it seems to me we could do a better job than what we do now with the top-down focus and structure that we have where the most minute activity has to get up to a very high level in the organization.
Let me give you another little anecdote or tidbit. ORS came into difficulty in the 1970s when the first "lion" retired. Bob Ball would annually have a work plan meeting, not only with ORS, but with every component in SSA--what they were doing, where they were going for the next year or two and discuss what things they needed to be looking at. Bob Ball, and Art Hess when he was his deputy, did this, and he did it with every component. He did it with ORS. He would sit there and talk about what areas of research he thought might be useful. He understood the data. He understood research, and he would do that with all of the components. In the course of some of these work plan meetings you talk about a project: "I want to do a survey on the disabled." Bob Ball would say: "Okay, do you think we can do it? Do you have the wherewithal to do it? Is this what you are going to try to do?" He would say: "Yes, okay, you tell Ida," and Ida would get the money.
When I left ORS in 1979 (I would probably still be there if my job was not abolished) I went into the budget analyst who was handling the ORS budget at that point and I said to him: "Show me last year's special objects budget for ORS that went to the people in OMBP in the budget shop." He pulled out two or three two-inch looseleaf binders that had all of the documentation to justify the research budget. This is external research, extramural research, dollars that we needed to go outside with. I said: "How much money are we asking for?" It was somewhere between$10,000,000 and $15,000,000 for outside studies and research. I said to him: "Let me show you the budget for 1967." It was eight double-spaced typewritten pages asking for about $7,000,000 to $8,000,000, because we didn't have people second guessing the people who were in charge. Bob Ball had enough confidence in Ida Merriam to know how she ran that organization and how she looked at things that the things that should be done were being done, and that we had the money to do it. He would say: "Okay, go get it," without knowing how much it would cost. It's not to say we did not have some battles with the people in budget. "Bob Ball didn't really say that. He didn't really mean that." They handled it. In general, there was much more trust and confidence in people to say: "I need this many horses to do this job. I need this many dollars." There was enough confidence in their integrity and their ability to give them the money and give them the resource, and let them run.
We have gotten away from that. We just kill ourselves to death with detail after detail on every single little item. On paper it may look like it's efficient and we are safeguarding the dollar, but the final remark I made to that budget analyst was: "I'm going to tell you something -- the quality of the decision-making process to get that $8,000,000 of research money and the production of this eight-page document was better than the quality of the decision-making process that forces you to create three two-inch binders worth of documentation and cost benefit analyses to get something done."
When we get to the part of this interview where we talk about strategic planning, I will come back and use that analogy again because one of the things I think hurts strategic planning, that is otherwise necessary and critical to an organization, is bogging it down in paper. We will get to that in a little while.
Q: One thing about ORS that always has interested me is the fact that you had ORS in Washington and ORS in Baltimore, and to some degree they were two separate cultures. Tell me your perspective of the relationship between those two parts of the organization, how they worked and what that was all about.
Failla: That is a very interesting question, Mr. DeWitt. There was a foundation for the split between Baltimore and Washington. It goes back to the origins of the program. The Social Security Act in 1935 established not only the Social Security program as we know it, but I talked to you before about us being the Bureau of Old-Age and Survivors Insurance. We were one part of what was called the Social Security Board. The Social Security Board was housed in Washington and was not limited to Title II social insurance benefits. It included Aid to Families with Dependent Children. It included private pension activities. It included what became Family Assistance. In any event, there were other related programs within the Social Security Act that were created at the time, and the research function for those activities rested in Washington.
In Baltimore there was an organization called the Division of Program Analysis which worked very closely with the legislative people and with the Actuary's Office (the short-term Actuary people). They did some limited studies and did some basic statistics on what was happening in the program--generating program statistics from the Administrative Records System because nobody wanted to build a separate structure to do that. Most of the data on program statistics came from the Administrative Records System. That part of the organization was here in Baltimore and was reporting to the Bureau of Old Age and Survivors Insurance directly.
In the reorganization of 1963, that Division of Program Analysis went away, Ida Merriam was in Washington running the economic research, social surveys and interprogram studies activity, and an international staff that were involved with international organizations, and with the International Labor Organization (ILO). In the 1963 reorganization SSA came into being as we know it today. Ida was given this research function and they added to it the statistical activity that was going on in Baltimore and some of the program studies that were being done, principally to support current legislative activities. That's the reason why one started in Washington and one started in Baltimore, and it continued on that way.
Ida was very adamant about not leaving Washington. Not to be snobbish, us locals always know the difference between Baltimore and Washington and why we can never be Redskins fans. Washington is a much more cosmopolitan city, and there was a real belief that we could not attract the same staff to Baltimore that we could attract to Washington. People from a university environment who wanted to come in might come to Washington, but they wouldn't come to Baltimore. She always maintained that function in Washington and she always recruited that way. That is one of the reasons why it was physically split.
In fact, I must tell you that it was difficult in that you had to relate differently to the people in Washington than you did in Baltimore. When I was on the administrative staff, and later on I ran it, I remember that early on something happened that we had to explain to the managers. I don't know whether it was a change in the promotion plan or the first union agreement. I don't remember specifically what the subject was. My job was to do presentations to the staff who worked in Baltimore and explain what was going on and how it worked, and how it didn't work. The man who was Executive Officer of ORS at the time, a man named Hyman Cooper, sat in on my presentation. He said to me: "You are going to do this in Washington, now, right?" I said: "Yup!" He said: "Well, you can't do it the same way." I said: "What do you mean?" He said: "You can't talk to the people in Washington the same way." Sometimes the people in Washington would refer to "those people over in SSA." They had this identity with the Department and that community, and they couldn't care less about bureaucratic procedures that were going on within the building. You let them know about it to keep them out of trouble, but you didn't expect them to take notes and do it that way.
It was a very interesting environment and it was truly different. The kinds of people they attracted were different. How they saw things were different. When we created organizations after that reorganization, like when health insurance came on board, when SSI came on board later on, we had the same kind of split. The statistical and the program-statistical type functions remained in Baltimore, and the research-survey type function ended up in Washington. It paralleled the prior organization. I don't know what's going on now. I think it's pretty much all gone. That's the way it was done, and there were some benefits to it.
Q: Ida Merriam left around the time of the 1972 election, and Bob Ball left as well.
Failla: Yes.
Q: Who took over ORS after Ida Merriam? Tell me what happened after that?
Failla: I came on in 1966, and she was already planning her retirement. Talk about good management and foresight before the Harvard Business Reviews and others started doing succession planning, she knew that the person to replace her had to be an economist. It couldn't be a statistician. It couldn't be a social scientist. It could not be a survey researcher. It had to be an economist. She went about trying to find an economist. She also felt it would take at least five years for somebody to come in and to become a replacement; you just did not do this overnight.
She did not bring somebody in as a deputy to replace her. She went out and recruited Jack Carroll who was a Ph.D. economist--I think he was at St. Lawrence University and he was somewhere else as well-- whose reputation was public finance. He was well known in the field. I might add people knew about SSA. When I used to do recruiting, they would know about Ida Merriam. They would know about Jack. They would know about the people when you went out into an academic setting, and what kind of work was being done.
She recruited Jack and we brought him in as an equivalent of an SES. We brought him over and put him in charge of the Division of Economic Analysis, or whatever it was called. He was the economist doing long range research, conducting studies, and he came in as that Division Director. She did not want him as her deputy, but she wanted him to be down there running, contributing, doing something that was important, and learning about the inside part of ORS and the rest of SSA. Everyone knew that five years later he was going to become the boss. People on the immediate staff knew that he was going to become the next Assistant Commissioner for Research and Statistics. She did leave in the early 1970s and things changed then.
(Ed. Note: Ida Merriam retired in July 1972.)
I guess it's worth a moment of reflection. In 1968, to be honest, when Richard Nixon was elected, it was clear that he wanted to replace Bob Ball. Although Bob Ball was a bureaucrat like the rest of us and started in the ranks, he was really the consummate politician. He never really worked for any Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, with the exception of maybe Wilbur Cohen, because Wilbur Cohen was part of the group. Wilbur Cohen was on the original staff of the Office of Research and Statistics, as was Isy Falk and some of the other names that we know from the beginning. Bob Ball worked directly with Capitol Hill and he was very powerful. He was almost like the J. Edgar Hoover of Social Security. He was bigger than the cabinet official. He had his contacts on the Hill. He and Wilbur Mills were very close (this was before Mills fell in the Tidal Basin), and there was a partnership between the people in SSA and the people on the Hill, not only in terms of funding and appropriations, but also in terms of the direction of the program. The people who are now in OLCA worked hand-in-hand with the people on the Hill in drafting and developing legislation. I know you interviewed Mary Ross at some point and she was there. We stayed out of a lot of trouble administratively because these people were working so closely on the Hill writing the legislation, what does it mean, how will we implement it, and I think we got better legislation as a result of that kind of activity.
In any event, I think Nixon did not want Bob Ball. He was here three months and Bob Ball had enrolled Bob Finch (Secretary of HEW). "Don't worry about it, you stay and run the Department and I'll take care of Social Security. If you need me, I'm here." Finch immediately took Bob Ball's word for any of it and Ball did what he wanted to do. I think it also came clear early on that given his following on the Hill, despite the fact that he got the normal resignation letter, Nixon could not get rid of Bob Ball without an enormous amount of political infighting; so Bob Ball continued on. After he won the election in 1972, he didn't care any more, and at that time he did accept Mr. Ball's resignation.
One of the ways I know this is that in 1969 (maybe 1970) I was in Washington one day, and I came back on the shuttle bus, and there was a man on the shuttle bus who was talking. The man was coming over to talk to Bob Ball and it was clear that he believed that he was going to be the next Commissioner of Social Security. He was probably the second or third (maybe fourth) political appointee in the organization's history. There was a guy named Hugh Johnson. Chris Guy, I guess, was a political appointee. Hugh Johnson who worked in the Commissioner's Office and a guy named Dave Williams came on during the Eisenhower years as a political appointee, not to SSA initially, but to another organization, and then came over to SSA. Up until that time we had three or four Schedule Cs ever in Social Security. This man came over and it was clear he was telling the bus driver that he was going to be Commissioner of Social Security, and that man's name was Sumner Whittier. That was my first encounter with Sumner Whittier. What actually happened, however, was during that first Nixon Administration the Family Assistance Plan project started in Washington, and we had people working over there. Whittier ended up coming over as the Bureau Director for the new Supplemental Security Income program. I'm sure you will get much history about that elsewhere.
Things were changing. During that time when Nixon came in, I think Ball realized he was not going to be around forever nor would the top staff. In 1968 or 1969 they started two programs, the Staff Development Program which is the equivalent of the Mid-Level Management Program today, and a Fellows program (I think it was called) that was for grade 14s and 15s that was supposed to develop the people who wanted to be leaders the next time around or for the next group. Both of those programs ultimately failed. The reason they failed is because the components looked at some of those programs and used them as a dumping ground for people they didn't feel they could promote within their organization, and to mollify some. There were some good people who were selected, Herb Doggette being one of them. I think Herb was in that program. But it also became a dumping ground and never really worked.
I thought that was one of the failures of the first generation of leaders. They were there from the inception of the program, and I think they thought they were going to go on forever. I don't know that they really created a second tier of people, other than Ida. They didn't create the people who were going to replace them because most of the people who were working with them and were close to them were contemporaries. In the late 1970s we saw a void in the organization. There were some people who were there who had come through, like Bob Bynum, who came to the fore at that point, but in general, I really think there was a gap and a void in the organization because I don't know that they paid enough attention to developing people to take over for them.
We are now in the early 1970s and Nixon does take Ball's resignation in 1973 and Bruce Cardwell came over to become Commissioner of Social Security. He was the Comptroller in the Department at the time. He was also a career person. He was a very good man with a different managerial style than Bob Ball. I think he was here to do two things: to get a handle on SSA, for the Department to have more influence and for the elected officials to have more influence, because we were running wild over here. Their view was that we would do whatever we wanted over at SSA. There was also a shift to the bean-counters, frankly, where everything became cost/benefit analysis, and it changed the way decisions were made. It changed the way projects were funded.
Cardwell also had a legislative agenda. He had the great task of undoing the problem that became known as the notch, which was a heck of a job he did in terms of getting that legislation through. The dynamics, the personality, and the focus of the agency, not to mention the difficulties that came out of SSI, changed the agency.
Q: In terms of the role of ORS, I have the impression that in the early years the research that you folks were doing to a considerable degree was driving policy in the Agency. Then somewhere down the road that became less the case, and the research became somehow more abstract and less connected to policy drivers. Is that correct?
Failla: That is correct.
Q: Is it part of the same change that you were just talking about? Or did it happen later?
Failla: I think that also started to happen in the 1970s and the telling blow was in the 1980s. Let me see how I can put this delicately. Part of the reason for the research was that there's more than one bill being considered in the Congress at any given time. We had a very close relationship with the Hill. A lot of the research was done to show where we should be going--studies about people who were above and below the poverty line, for example.
I can't forget Molly Orshansky. Ida, in her wisdom, early on had a woman who was working for her named Molly Orshansky. Oh, what a character--brilliant, and I loved her office. She had steel racks with computer printouts all over the place. Molly developed the poverty index. Now somebody would say: "What the hell does that have to do with Social Security? Why are we paying somebody on our staff to do this? Is that getting benefit checks out every month?" This was the mentality of some people in SSA. Ida thought this was important. We need to have some index, some way of knowing who the poor people in this country are. Who is affected by something. What happens when you introduce a program. How do you measure what improvement it had and what impact it had, and did it do what you intended it to do? I think that the driving focus behind the whole research activity is: who is the population out there? The original survey of the disabled. What is this disabled population. Who are they? What are they? I think some things came along in disability--health stuff. In any event, Molly developed a poverty index.
Q: One that's been used government-wide since its adoption.
Failla: The joke was there were a couple of people who did this, and it was the best thing in government; it became the standard, and it was used by everybody. It was used by Bob Ball in testimony. It was used on the Hill every time we had new pieces of legislation, how many people lived at the poverty level, etc., all came from this kind of an organization.
Sometimes findings were not popular. I think what happened in the 1970s is somebody felt that people were doing their own thing.
The original founding fathers of the program really had a design of where this program should be when it reached maturity. Obviously the political process doesn't work that way. Nobody buys the whole pie. You get pieces and I guess there was some sense that these people who were leading the research effort and doing these studies had a hidden agenda and they were doing things that would support or come up with findings that would support the direction that the program should be going.
The kinds of people we got from outside were generally supported, and the integrity of the work products themselves, and the validity of the techniques that were used, were not generally questioned. But some people thought the founding fathers, with their long association with the program, were just laying out the happy plan and getting there. And I think that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that the other side was a little alarmed and nervous about it.
And I think that there was much more of an emphasis on looking at what studies were going to come up before they did it. Well, it's hard to do that, if you're doing real research, and clearly in the 1980s, there was a lot more attention on some of the activities that were going on in ORS and much nervousness about what the findings of the studies were, whereas initially, or early on when I was there, there was never any question about publishing our results. In the 1970s and the 1980s, there began to become some question about publishing results and also about embarking on studies for fear that we don't know what the answer was going to be.
So I think this sort of fit in with the politics of the times--this delineation between liberal and conservative thinking being that what these liberal policy wonks were coming up with is going to be not good in a conservative administration. Beginning in the 1970s--talking about the bean counters--that was one of the ways we did it, but there was much less emphasis, much less support for basic research and ultimately almost a breakup of ORS. What exists now is a mere shadow of what that organization was during its heyday.
Now I'm biased, because I was there, I saw it, I was impressed by what was going on and how it was being done. But clearly--and I'm not putting this on a political party, whether a Republican or a Democrat-- I think there's more concern about information that comes out and how it comes out and its effect and the effect with the media and how it makes people look, and maybe there's a little piece of honesty because of media attention that is lost in the process now.
Q: Now let's talk a little bit about the leadership of ORS from that period 1972 until you left in 1979. There was Jack Carroll. Was somebody after Jack before you left or was Jack there the whole time you were there?
Failla: Jack was there until I left, in fact he was there after that for a while. I spent a good number of years, 5 or 6 years, in health insurance, and that too was split the same way, the research and the survey branch being in Washington, and the statistical and the program studies and the current Medicare survey--that was the survey we tried to do ourselves--and that was housed in Baltimore because we needed the clerical work force to process all the information that was coming in.
That was an interesting experiment as well. When disability was formed, they had their own small program studies division and their own statistical organization which was headed up by a guy named Aaron Croup. And that's when Art Hess was the Director of the Bureau of Disability Insurance (BDI). And then when they were forming the Bureau of Health Insurance, the task force to create the new bureau and most of the people, or a good percentage of the people, came from the old BDI.
And it was kind of interesting that people--and Aaron Krute was one of them, he ran the program statistics function, workload and operating statistics function in the Bureau of Disability Insurance--felt they were at a disadvantage when they tried to recruit people, statisticians and economists or social scientists, because they were over there and they couldn't compete with Hess because professionals in that area like to be with other people like themselves. So when health insurance came along, he said he felt that the function that he had should be part of the new organization that was being created in ORS. And another unique thing is that the organizational structures mean nothing, it's people that count. So he was making input to that and he was being recruited to head up the Baltimore part of the Health Insurance Studies Division. And Hess knew Aaron and had a good relationship with him from the BDI days to the point where he said "Okay, I agree with you, we want this program statistics function--the workload and operating statistics activity--to be part of this Health Insurance Studies Division in the research organization, and you will be a part of my executive staff."
So even though Aaron was in ORS, Aaron went to all of the BHI executive staff meetings. And he was providing them with statistics on providers and intermediaries and carriers and how well they were performing, their processing time, and all workload and operating statistics for the new bureau, even though he was not part of that bureau. I can't think of people wanting to share like that these days; especially without trading for the FTE (full-time equivalent, i.e., the job slot) instead it would be: "Oh my God, I don't want them knowing my business, close my walls around me."
I spent a number of years there. I did spend about a year-and-a-half in the Workload and Operating Statistics Section on intermediary statistics. Thank God I got out of that job, because I was a lousy statistician. I was there about a year, and Aaron Krute and Howard West who ran the division from Washington, asked me to come up and work in the front office because we were having some organization problems, budget problems and things, and asked if I could come and be something like a staff assistant, which I did and I thoroughly enjoyed the work--they were two great people to work for. And we had Dorothy Rice who ran the Health Insurance Research Branch in Washington, and who later went on to become the director of the National Center for Health Statistics. That is another anecdote I could throw in here too.
Around this time (1975-1976), Dorothy left to become the director of the National Center for Health Statistics. And she had been there for three or four months and the Associate Director for Program Support, which included all of management activities and functions, retired, and she recruited me to go over to the National Center for Health Statistics in Rockville. And I did that, and I lasted six months. I left SSA and I lasted six months. The job was good, the people were good. It was like being in the Office of Research and Statistics, that's the kind of function it was. They're responsible for vital statistics, marriage and divorce statistics, birth and death surveys, health interview surveys that they do keeping track of people over time and illnesses. And it was a research organization--the same kinds of people. And I went over there, and I was lost. I didn't think the transition would be difficult, because it was a similar kind of organization with similar kinds of problem solving there that I had experienced in SSA. And the job was pretty good, except that I was lost. I could not embrace it the same way I could embrace ORS because of my attachment to the program. The National Center was strictly a research organization; it wasn't around a program. And I also did not realize how important the SSA people were to me, after 14 years. The extended family which was SSA is one of the beauties of SSA as an organization. (Although there is a negative side in being home grown and all from within, we sometimes get tunnel vision.) But the other side of it is the people part, that interaction becomes very important and affects the way you do your work and how you do your job. And I really did not know how much that extended family meant. So at the first opportunity, I came back to SSA and I knew then that I would die in SSA; I would never ever leave because I didn't want to. Because the identification and the association with the program and the association with the people over the years was something that was very important to me. And that's how I came back and how I spent the rest of my time here and that's why I don't work anywhere else. If I wanted to work, I would work at Social Security.
Q: During that time that you were in ORS, in addition to Medicare, SSI also came in. Am I correct in assuming that those were the two hot areas of research during that period we are talking about from 1966 to 1979.
Failla: There was a considerable amount of work done about the poor before SSI, and we did keep track of those programs. We had this Interprogram Studies Branch because it was important to see how the whole population fit in the country. And the people who were getting those welfare benefits from the States--the blind and disabled--were something that we always tracked. So we had a core of people who worked in that area and knew something about it. And obviously with the new program coming on, there was a need to set up a similar kind of structure to look at the SSI program, like we looked at the other programs. And again program statistics--what's going on, what's happening, who are the people getting benefits, where are they, how much are they getting, who are the people coming on the rolls, who's not on the rolls, are there still gaps of people not covered for certain things--that's the whole basis of ORS type activity and we did the same thing with SSI.
I'd like to talk about a little bit about SSI, but in a different context.
SSI, and health insurance to a degree, certainly disability to a degree, changed SSA--and some people will not like what I'm going to say.
We had some difficulties in the disability program. We do to this day. We had difficulties in the health insurance program before it was shifted to Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), but still a lot of those people are the same SSA people. And clearly, we've had some difficulty with SSI.
SSA built its reputation on the Title II OASI program. We were invincible; we could do anything. Give it to them, they'll handle it. And we did handle what was given to us and we did implement disability; even though we had some problems, we did implement health insurance. But these programs were much different.
What we were good at in SSA was creating an assembly line for what was essentially a straightforward clerical function. Give them a card, give them a number, get their earnings, track their earnings, compute a benefit, put the check in the mail. Very simple program. Not that much interpretation. Not too many fuzzy lines--either you had insured status or you didn't have insured status. The computation--which you could do by hand in the old days when I started as a CR, you could actually compute by hand. Disability was different. Policy couldn't be written in the same way; it's not insured status or not. What's the degree of disability? And I think the people out there were uncomfortable with it.
Health insurance had less direct impact on us even though we did enroll that population; we did handle complaints, we did try to help people when they ran into difficulty with the carrier. That service is still needed out there, I don't know who's doing it but I still think there's a role there because they identify us--Social Security--with that health insurance. But basically, it was a contractor program, it was contractor administration, it wasn't running something day-to-day and paying the benefit, and I think we had a lot of trouble. We didn't know what we were getting into in terms of how we set up "reasonable charges." I don't think we knew or could anticipate that the way in which we set up that mechanism for establishing reasonable charges would lead to incredible inflation, because even though we weren't paying a given provider in a given year--and doctors in particular--all they had to do was start billing us at the higher rate. And the next time around, we increased their reasonable charge--it was crazy.
On the hospital side, we didn't know how to do real good auditing and cost accounting, and I don't think we did all that well. I think some of the problems that we have in the Medicare program come from our lack of expertise. And in general, we did bring some people in from the outside who had some knowledge of the health industry but this pride--almost false pride that we have in SSA--that we can do it and we know how to do it our way, I think hurt us. I think we should have been much more open in terms of the kinds of people that we brought in when we were starting to run those programs.
SSI, I think there too, we made some mistakes about chemistry, about how it would impact our offices, and we totally misread how that program would evolve. The aged part, which is what we thought was the big piece at the time, seemed easy, after all, this is just helping people that didn't get Social Security or didn't get enough Social Security to get above the poverty line, and what's the difference between that and taking a claim for retirement benefits? As it turned out, it was quite different. Because of the policy areas, especially the whole postentitlement process, it was much different.
In Social Security, the postentitlement operation is basically a few things. Change of address, coming of age and coming off the rolls, doing a recomp on benefits, and figuring out the retirement test; that was the big thing, the retirement test. The earnings record comes in on an earnings statement, you compute the benefit amount, and you give out a benefit. Now with SSI we had a program, even for the aged, of all the "ism's"--like in-kind support and maintenance--what does that mean and how do you do that? And I don't think that we anticipated that well how we would do that in a structured way, in a mass-production way.
I don't know, I may be wrong here. I know we recruited people in the field that worked for the States. I know we had people in the regional office that worked for the States, and I wasn't that close to SSI, but I'm not sure we hired a lot of people from the outside with experience who were in there at the formulation of policy and procedure on how we would do the job.
Q: How about preparing the agency for the culture shock that SSI was going to become for the people in the field offices because of the different clientele and the different nature of the interviews? Did we do anything that you are aware of to train people for that culture shock? Did we expect it or did it just hit us?
Failla: Again, I was far removed from operations at the time and far removed from the field. I cannot believe that we didn't do something. But I do know the anecdotal stories that I heard. Even if we did some, we didn't do enough or the right job.
Clearly, to me, what I heard from the people I knew was that they didn't want any part of it in the field office. That's where we had the separation between Title II and Title XVI; some say it was because of complexity and there was too much to learn, but in fact we had a significant portion of our staff who did not want to go near an SSI beneficiary claim. And part of that was because of the culture of the organization. "You're here because its an earned right. I'm here to serve you because you paid for this personally." With SSI it became, "You're coming to get something for nothing."
We never got that message across--that's number 1. Number 2, I don't think anybody anticipated the volume and what that did--and I certainly believe it hurt morale, even though at the height of the Medicare enrollment period, we had a lot of people. Certainly we didn't have to hire buses (to hold people awaiting interviews). I think it's a function of society a little bit. It was a have/have-not look, and I don't think anyone wanted to be associated with the have-nots. So I don't know how you could have done it better. I think, given the closeness of the activities, the network of offices that we had out there, that it was perfectly logical that a program like SSI be incorporated as part of Social Security. We don't want a Railroad Retirement Board situation--which doesn't serve their clientele very well because they're centralized and there's no real field network. But I don't know how we could have better prepared the field for what was to happen. The up-side was that it created tremendous growth in the organization and opportunities for people, we did an awful lot of recruiting; but even there, I don't know if we changed what kind of recruiting we did.
Should we have had a different kind of person with a different kind of background that we recruited into those positions? Should we have had more of a focus on going out and specifically looking for people with a social work background? We just went and got liberal arts people like we did before--any size fits. And I wish I could say in hindsight I could pinpoint what we did wrong and how we would do it differently. I don't know but I still believe that this ego that we sold ourselves on how good and smart we were because we were able to run a very simple program very well--and we could do it our way and we approached it the same way--backfired a little bit and maybe we needed different kinds of input from people who had more experience than we did.
And I don't remember--Sumner Whittier was there, but Sumner really didn't have experience in welfare. Cotton was there--I didn't know him that well, I think he came from the State side. Danny Bidmar, I think, but I don't know that we had enough people in the leadership positions --they were just SSA retreads. I don't mean that we took the dregs and put them over there, because there were some really good people over there--Renny DiPentima, Lou Enoff, Nelson Sabatini--but we took people with SSA experience and put them in the major leadership roles and policy-making roles. And I don't know if that was the right thing to do, but again, our attitude was we know better than anybody else and we could do it.
Q: In the middle of 1979, you took a new job in the Office of Governmental Affairs. Tell us about that, what was that? That sounds like a dramatic change in your career.
Failla: It certainly was. It was part of the 1979 reorganization of SSA. After Cardwell got the 1977 legislation through, he retired and Stan Ross became Commissioner, and within six months, Ross reorganized SSA. It was the first massive reorganization of the agency since 1962-1963 and it changed the way organizations would function and operate. It was an effort to get rid of "support staffs" because they were overhead, and my job was abolished.
So that ended my career in ORS. And for a short period of time I went to work as the Director of the Division of Surveys and Audits in what was then part of the Office of Finance, Assessment and Management, under Frank DeGeorge. I was there for a few months in a temporary position; there was still a lot of flux in the agency--there were a lot of people at a number of different grade levels who were in temporary jobs as a result of the reorganization. And then there was a "draft" held, and the draft was of all of these people, high-level people who were not permanently placed, and the Associate Commissioners and Bureau Directors drafted people. And I got drafted into the Office of Governmental Affairs.
Leo Corbett was in charge of the Office of Governmental Affairs, and Janice Warden was the deputy there. And I guess one of the reasons I got drafted was because even though I didn't work there, I helped them set up their organization. I had known Janice Warden from her days in the district office in Brooklyn--she also worked in Borough Hall--and when she came up from Atlanta to work in OGA, she was having difficulty setting up the organization and needed some help with setting up a structure and setting up an administrative office and function, and she asked me did I have anybody who could help her? And since my staff was being abolished, I said yes, and I detailed a few people over to her who started working in their organization and setting up the whole function. And maybe that's how I ended up on their draft-day list--I don't know. But I'm sure that the fact that I had known Janice and I had met Corbett once or twice helped. I got interviewed by Corbett and Paula Petkin, who was the chief recruiter for Stan Ross and was interviewing most of the grade 13s, 14s, and 15s in SSA--deciding their careers for the rest of their time on a half-hour interview. Which I thought was amazing in itself. But that's how I ended up in the Office of Governmental Affairs. Needless to say, it was different.
Q: Let me just ask you, before we go on, about the draft pool. Was that a formal event in which people sat down and traded lists, or are you using that as a metaphor?
Failla: It was literally a draft. They had a list of people in the Office of Human Resources--I think Lou Enoff was down there at that point. And they had all the people that were not in permanent jobs and they listed them. There was a logical placement for some because their old component sort of continued, just with a different name and place. But there were a number of people who did not have permanent placement and they actually sat down around the table and picked people. Now the reason I know, we had a similar process later on because after I was in OGA, there were still people at the mid-management level, grade 12s, 13s, a couple of 14s, that were still not placed. And I remember going to a meeting in the 917 conference room with representatives from the different components and that one was part draft, part placement.
There's an anecdote: I wanted to hire a guy and Janice wouldn't let me hire him because she had already hired his wife. And she said, "this wouldn't look good if we had the husband and wife in the same office." But I had him working for me on detail. And when I went to this second placement meeting, Enoff said, "Oh, Failla, he's already working on detail in OGA?" I said "Yes." So Enoff said "he's yours." But there was partially a draft and partially an ultimate placement-- "okay, you get this one, you get that one."
Q: What was OGA like? What did you do there--was it a big change?
Failla: It was a very big change because it was areas I had not been involved in and it was also part of that reorganization, they created sort of an artificial split. Before, they used to have an office called External Affairs--I think it was. Tom Parrott headed it up and Sarah Judy was there, and it combined the public information function and activity-- all the PI stuff that goes out to the field offices and the advertisement stuff, and that public affairs information function was part of it--it also included the Office of Public Inquiries and included some State and local relationship functions and there were some other pretty decent-sized activities in that office.
But in the 1979 reorganization, they split these two organizations apart. And public information, or the Office of Public Affairs, was separate and distinct and that was basically the whole public information activity of SSA--putting out the monthly information stuff, the packages that went out, the local spots, publishing the OASIS, and that kind of activity was one office, which was reasonably small, and the rest of the organization--the Office of Public Inquiries--became part of OGA.
One of the things that was supposed to be a big part of that OGA mission was the beginning of consumer input. And we were supposed to have an office of consumer affairs, in effect, that went out and got input from the public about the program and about where we should be going. And the other big thing that was part of that early effort was the first book which talked about the crisis in the financing of the program. It was a study that was put out that talked about the demographics and how they were going to be changing, and it was the first time you saw stuff about "some day, we're going to run out of money." And part of that organization's charge was to go out and do town meetings all over the country to explain what was in the report and to prepare people that we needed to make some changes down the road in the basic Social Security program. I don't know whether that came out of the original Congressional Commission on Social Security which predated the Presidential Commission on Social Security which ended up coming up with the 1983 Amendments. So that was a big effort and also going out and trying to get input from outside groups and that we were going to do something different in SSA.
The organizational placement was not that good because it wasn't part of the operating organization, and I don't think that the components who would have to use some of the information that we got from outsiders really would have implemented that information in their own structures.
We also started to get a lot of heat on the disability side--this was after the GAO had come out with some reports about the wrong number of people on the rolls. And there was a professional liaison staff which was supposed to be specifically working with all the major organizations: AARP, the National Federation of the Blind, and all the social services agencies the lobbyist types--I don't remember the names of all of the organizations. There were some plaintiff groups also dealing with most of the players who were very active in disability. And one of the purposes of the office was to set up a relationship and a function with these organizations to get input and to help us with changes that we knew were going to come down the road in disability and in the program itself as far as financing of the program.
So it was different, and while it was still not a line activity, it got me a chance to meet people and to work with more people in SSA that I didn't have a chance to work with when I was in ORS. So it was sort of a reintroduction back to the main function or process of SSA. And I was there from June of 1979, or thereabouts, and I was there through the election in 1980. And in 1981, we had to vacate some of our space-- we were located on the 9th floor, the 960 end of the 9th floor--and we had to make room for Dave Swope, Jack Svahn, Paul Simmons, Nelson Sabatini who was working with them, and a few people were coming in as part of the transition after the Reagan election. And at that point, nobody knew who was going to become Commissioner.
Q: Herb Doggette was Acting Commissioner for a while there?
Failla: Herb Doggette was Acting for a very short while, he was Acting Commissioner during that time. Anyway, I knew Nelson Sabatini from a couple of work contacts. . .
Q: So at this point that you're talking about now, Svahn has not been confirmed as Commissioner, is that correct? This is a transition team.
Failla: It was a transition team. In fact, we didn't know he was going to be Commissioner, the scuttlebutt was that one of them would be Undersecretary (Dave Swope or Jack Svahn) and one of them would be Commissioner; but nobody knew at that point which way it was going to end up. And eventually what happened was that Swope became the Undersecretary and Svahn became the Commissioner.
I knew Nelson from his days when he worked with Tom Parrott in the field office, I had a couple of projects that would involve the regions, and that was in the days before the Regional Commissioner was the line manager of the whole regional operation. They reported to Tom Parrott and didn't have line authority over the bureau representatives that were out in the regions. A weird time. But we had stuff that had to deal with the regions when I was in health insurance and I got to know Nelson a little bit and he got to know me. And after they came on, Svahn became Commissioner, Nelson became the Senior Executive Officer, Simmons became the Deputy for Policy and External Affairs and then the other deputy, Herb Doggette was Operations. So basically, we had two deputies at this time; that later changed as you know. They asked me if I would become the Executive Assistant for Paul Simmons, and I did. And I was there with them through the whole two years that they were there. It was a very interesting educational experience for me, because things were really hopping.
We had the whole disability mess where we had started to do CDRs in response to the GAO report, I guess at the beginning of the Administration, that was one of the focuses of the Administration. And we were starting to get hit with the horror stories that were all over the place--the strike that almost went on by the DDSs who refused to do the studies, and I know you will get this from a number of other people. It was a wild and hectic time, what was going to happen, what we were going to do with disability, finally ending up with the moratorium where we virtually stopped everything. And then we got the legislation in 1984 and the medical improvement standards which I think changed the program dramatically forever.
The other thing that was going on was systems. During the 1970s our systems deteriorated--for a number of reasons, including the influence of Jack Brooks (former Democratic Representative from Texas and Chairman of the House Government Operations Committee). When I came to SSA in the mid-1960s, we were the place that IBM would bring visitors from all over the world to show them what a model data-processing operation was. And, in fact, we did work very closely with IBM and they developed stuff directly for us. We were a showplace--the forefront of the field--and within 10 years, we couldn't buy a piece of equipment and we were still running batch operations. We still had the same teletype operation in terms of communication with the field, and we were on the brink of disaster.
And the other big thing that was going on at that point in time was Jack Svahn hiring a few people to put together a plan-- in fact, to create a crisis. It wasn't about going hat in hand and begging. It was really going up to the Hill and creating supporting stories in the media before he went and delivered the plan to make everybody scared, literally, that the system was going to collapse and the checks weren't going to go out. It was a masterful job, the way he scripted it. And I'm sure this was their intent from the beginning--to create a crisis, because problems can't get solved in Washington unless you're at the end and it's a crisis. And he in fact created that crisis, and I think we owe Svahn a debt for that because I don't think we would have started the whole systems modernization--and you can argue about some of the things and how it went--but I think he was brilliant in the strategy that he developed to sell it to the Hill to get the money that we needed. So it was very interesting to be sitting there and watching some of that from the outside, even though I'm not a systems person and I wasn't involved in the development of the SMP (System Modernization Plan), it was interesting to watch.
And of course the third thing that was going on at that time was the negotiations on the Hill coming from that report that I spoke about earlier, where the demographics were changing, and the number of workers supporting the beneficiaries was changing. They were working very closely with the Greenspan Commission in getting that agreement--the famous nonpartisan (after the election) agreement worked out to shift the financing of the program. So it was kind of fun watching. To say I was intimately involved, I wasn't. I was more an outsider than an insider, but it was not a bad place to watch from. I can't say that I earned my salary the whole time I was there, I was just watching what was going on.
Q: Tell us a little bit about Jack Svahn and his management style and what you observed about how the Agency was run during this period and what sort of a change Svahn and those folks introduced into the organization.
Failla: I think they came in with a very specific agenda on a couple of things which, I guess, is a good way to come into a new organization; don't use a shotgun, pick out one or two or three things to concentrate on, and try to get that accomplished. And I think he had a clear focus about two or three areas--the systems area being one, financing legislation being another, and what to do about the disability mess. And that's all he concentrated on.
He did not like meetings, he did not like big staff meetings. I don't think during the time that he was here as the Commissioner he ever used room 917 (the largest conference room). He would meet with the deputies and one or two other people on a fairly regular basis and they would meet at the conference table in his office.
He was a very bright man, and I think he had good managerial skills, but I don't know that we saw them, because he was only here for two years. And I think he did not get terribly involved in day-to-day activities because he was so focused on those three things that he wanted to accomplish and thought he had to accomplish right away.
He also saw the damage that was caused by the 19 |
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