Editor's Note: In September of this year Visiting Fellow Norman Eisen was featured in the Council on Government Ethics Law (COGEL) members-only magazine, The Guardian. An abbreviated version of his interview is featured below.

Interview conducted by Wesley Bizzell, Assistant General Counsel, Altria Client Services LLC.

Recently, you addressed the Italian Parliament to discuss ethics in government, as that legislative body considers adopting its own code of ethical conduct. In that speech, you noted you believe there are four key concepts at the center of Federal U.S. ethics laws. What are those four concepts and why they are important?

Firstly, I’d like to note the importance of focusing on four concepts. The House of Representatives Ethics manual is 456 pages long; too long to be of any real use in creating an ethics system. Instead, these four principles serve as a foundation upon which different governments can build their own sets of rules based on their own unique needs.

I focused on just four to make a point about priorities. The first is “conflicts”—that is, problems that arise when an individual’s personal interests and parliamentary duties may be at odds with one another. The second is “gifts”. Even if there isn’t an explicit quid-pro-quo style agreement involved, when a political figure accepts a gift from someone with a demonstrated interest in government decision-making, the suspicion of misconduct will always be there. “Revolving door” is the third core concept. When individuals rotate from the private sector to the public sector over and over again, they are naturally going to form relationships that tempt them toward unethical behavior. Finally, “use official resources.” Officials must be careful to use official resources only for official purposes, being particularly careful not to conduct any campaign activity on the taxpayer’s dime. The goal with these four priorities is not only to keep people from behaving unethically, but also to make sure it doesn’t seem like anyone is doing anything unethical either.

In that speech, you said that focusing on these four areas keeps you from losing the forest for the trees when working with ethics codes. Can you elaborate on that?

There’s always a danger for members of the executive branch, because the system of rules and regulations that governs ethical behavior is itself so complex. When it’s imbedded in equally complicated and overlapping sets of statute you risk creating rules so specific that they’re practically useless. The same is true in the legislative branch and I dare say in the federal judicial branch, as well as at the state and local levels. You’re always on the edge of being lost in the minutiae.

In fact, you can often make wrong decisions if you focus in too much on the specifics, because you lose sight of the larger picture that guides the rules. There are always options in ethical dilemmas, and the big picture needs to be kept in focus.

While at the White House serving as Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform you oversaw numerous significant changes in the area of open government—including helping craft and implement President Obama’s Open Government Directive; publishing White House visitor logs on the internet; and generally improving the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process. What change in the area of open government are you most proud?

I was struck when we began the interview by the list of topics—campaign finance, lobbying, ethics, elections, and FOIA issues—because all of those were part of my portfolio as Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform during the first two years of the Obama administration. I would have to say that I’m most proud of my role in the President’s decision to put all of the White House visitor records on the internet.

Remember, in previous administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, plaintiffs had to litigate for years just to get a handful of visitor records. To have all of the visitor records on the internet, categorized into various types, opens access to the White House to an unprecedented degree. There are now over four-and-a-half million visitor records available on the White House website, with more added every month. I think that that is remarkable.

Truthfully, I was torn between that accomplishment and a second one, which is that the President and his staff in the White House have had the longest run in presidential history (knock on wood) without a major ethics scandal or a grand jury investigation, indictment, or conviction. I was tempted to list that second fact as the accomplishment of which I was most proud. But it occurred to me that the death of White House scandal is actually a function of the exceptional level of transparency that the visitor records represent. Transparency helps ensure people don’t have meetings they shouldn’t be having, which keeps them out of trouble. So I’ll offer that second accomplishment as a part of the first one.

In your view, what was the most significant lobbying and ethics reform during your tenure at the White House?

No doubt about it: reversing the revolving door. Craig Holman of Public Citizen, who studies these issues, says we were the first in the world to create a reverse revolving door. I think it is absolutely critical to slow the revolving door in both directions—both coming out of government and going in.

I should also note that the comprehensive nature of the ethics system we put into place in the Obama administration bears a responsibility for the good results. The first rule, of course, of any ethics system is “tone at the top.” The president exemplifies that. He has the highest standards of ethics himself, and as a result everyone around him feels he will be personally let down if they don’t embrace the ethics system. Good results flow from that. Looking back, we can identify certain aspects that have more and less successful, but it’s important to recognize that the positive results are owed to the gestalt. Our transparency and ethics system was one of the most through and transparent that I’ve seen in any government, and the result speak for themselves.

How has the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—signed between the P5+1 and Iran one year ago—played out in practice? Several Brookings scholars, many of whom participated prominently in debates last year surrounding official congressional review, offered their views.

Earlier this month, the College Board released SAT scores for the high school graduating class of 2015. Both math and reading scores declined from 2014, continuing a steady downward trend that has been in place for the past decade. Pundits of contrasting political stripes seized on the scores to bolster their political agendas. Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation argued that falling SAT scores show that high schools need more reform, presumably those his organization supports, in particular, charter schools and accountability.* For Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, the declining scores were evidence of the failure of polices her organization opposes, namely, Common Core, No Child Left Behind, and accountability.

Petrilli and Burris are both misusing SAT scores. The SAT is not designed to measure national achievement; the score losses from 2014 were miniscule; and most of the declines are probably the result of demographic changes in the SAT population. Let’s examine each of these points in greater detail.

It never was. The SAT was originally meant to measure a student’s aptitude for college independent of that student’s exposure to a particular curriculum. The test’s founders believed that gauging aptitude, rather than achievement, would serve the cause of fairness. A bright student from a high school in rural Nebraska or the mountains of West Virginia, they held, should have the same shot at attending elite universities as a student from an Eastern prep school, despite not having been exposed to the great literature and higher mathematics taught at prep schools. The SAT would measure reasoning and analytical skills, not the mastery of any particular body of knowledge. Its scores would level the playing field in terms of curricular exposure while providing a reasonable estimate of an individual’s probability of success in college.

Note that even in this capacity, the scores never suffice alone; they are only used to make admissions decisions by colleges and universities, including such luminaries as Harvard and Stanford, in combination with a lot of other information—grade point averages, curricular resumes, essays, reference letters, extra-curricular activities—all of which constitute a student’s complete application.

Today’s SAT has moved towards being a content-oriented test, but not entirely. Next year, the College Board will introduce a revised SAT to more closely reflect high school curricula. Even then, SAT scores should not be used to make judgements about U.S. high school performance, whether it’s a single high school, a state’s high schools, or all of the high schools in the country. The SAT sample is self-selected. In 2015, it only included about one-half of the nation’s high school graduates: 1.7 million out of approximately 3.3 million total. And that’s about one-ninth of approximately 16 million high school students.  Generalizing SAT scores to these larger populations violates a basic rule of social science. The College Board issues a warning when it releases SAT scores: “Since the population of test takers is self-selected, using aggregate SAT scores to compare or evaluate teachers, schools, districts, states, or other educational units is not valid, and the College Board strongly discourages such uses.”  

TIME’s coverage of the SAT release included a statement by Andrew Ho of Harvard University, who succinctly makes the point: “I think SAT and ACT are tests with important purposes, but measuring overall national educational progress is not one of them.”

SAT scores changed very little from 2014 to 2015. Reading scores dropped from 497 to 495. Math scores also fell two points, from 513 to 511. Both declines are equal to about 0.017 standard deviations (SD).^[i] To illustrate how small these changes truly are, let’s examine a metric I have used previously in discussing test scores. The average American male is 5’10” in height with a SD of about 3 inches. A 0.017 SD change in height is equal to about 1/20 of an inch (0.051). Do you really think you’d notice a difference in the height of two men standing next to each other if they only differed by 1/20^th of an inch? You wouldn’t. Similarly, the change in SAT scores from 2014 to 2015 is trivial.^[ii]

A more serious concern is the SAT trend over the past decade. Since 2005, reading scores are down 13 points, from 508 to 495, and math scores are down nine points, from 520 to 511. These are equivalent to declines of 0.12 SD for reading and 0.08 SD for math.^[iii] Representing changes that have accumulated over a decade, these losses are still quite small. In the Washington Post, Michael Petrilli asked “why is education reform hitting a brick wall in high school?” He also stated that “you see this in all kinds of evidence.”

You do not see a decline in the best evidence, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Contrary to the SAT, NAEP is designed to monitor national achievement. Its test scores are based on a random sampling design, meaning that the scores can be construed as representative of U.S. students. NAEP administers two different tests to high school age students, the long term trend (LTT NAEP), given to 17-year-olds, and the main NAEP, given to twelfth graders.

Table 1 compares the past ten years’ change in test scores of the SAT with changes in NAEP.^[iv] The long term trend NAEP was not administered in 2005 or 2015, so the closest years it was given are shown. The NAEP tests show high school students making small gains over the past decade. They do not confirm the losses on the SAT.

Table 1. Comparison of changes in SAT, Main NAEP (12^th grade), and LTT NAEP (17-year-olds) scores. Changes expressed as SD units of base year.

 *p<.05

Petrilli raised another concern related to NAEP scores by examining cohort trends in NAEP scores. The trend for the 17-year-old cohort of 2012, for example, can be constructed by using the scores of 13-year-olds in 2008 and 9-year-olds in 2004. By tracking NAEP changes over time in this manner, one can get a rough idea of a particular cohort’s achievement as students grow older and proceed through the school system. Examining three cohorts, Fordham’s analysis shows that the gains between ages 13 and 17 are about half as large as those registered between ages nine and 13. Kids gain more on NAEP when they are younger than when they are older.

There is nothing new here. NAEP scholars have been aware of this phenomenon for a long time. Fordham points to particular elements of education reform that it favors—charter schools, vouchers, and accountability—as the probable cause. It is true that those reforms more likely target elementary and middle schools than high schools. But the research literature on age discrepancies in NAEP gains (which is not cited in the Fordham analysis) renders doubtful the thesis that education policies are responsible for the phenomenon.^[v]

Whether high school age students try as hard as they could on NAEP has been pointed to as one explanation. A 1996 analysis of NAEP answer sheets found that 25-to-30 percent of twelfth graders displayed off-task test behaviors—doodling, leaving items blank—compared to 13 percent of eighth graders and six percent of fourth graders. A 2004 national commission on the twelfth grade NAEP recommended incentives (scholarships, certificates, letters of recognition from the President) to boost high school students’ motivation to do well on NAEP. Why would high school seniors or juniors take NAEP seriously when this low stakes test is taken in the midst of taking SAT or ACT tests for college admission, end of course exams that affect high school GPA, AP tests that can affect placement in college courses, state accountability tests that can lead to their schools being deemed a success or failure, and high school exit exams that must be passed to graduate?^[vi]

Other possible explanations for the phenomenon are: 1) differences in the scales between the ages tested on LTT NAEP (in other words, a one-point gain on the scale between ages nine and 13 may not represent the same amount of learning as a one-point gain between ages 13 and 17); 2) different rates of participation in NAEP among elementary, middle, and high schools;^[vii] and 3) social trends that affect all high school students, not just those in public schools. The third possibility can be explored by analyzing trends for students attending private schools. If Fordham had disaggregated the NAEP data by public and private schools (the scores of Catholic school students are available), it would have found that the pattern among private school students is similar—younger students gain more than older students on NAEP. That similarity casts doubt on the notion that policies governing public schools are responsible for the smaller gains among older students.^[viii]

Writing in the Washington Post, Carol Burris addresses the question of whether demographic changes have influenced the decline in SAT scores. She concludes that they have not, and in particular, she concludes that the growing proportion of students receiving exam fee waivers has probably not affected scores. She bases that conclusion on an analysis of SAT participation disaggregated by level of family income. Burris notes that the percentage of SAT takers has been stable across income groups in recent years. That criterion is not trustworthy. About 39 percent of students in 2015 declined to provide information on family income. The 61 percent that answered the family income question are probably skewed against low-income students who are on fee waivers (the assumption being that they may feel uncomfortable answering a question about family income).^[ix] Don’t forget that the SAT population as a whole is a self-selected sample. A self-selected subsample from a self-selected sample tells us even less than the original sample, which told us almost nothing.

The fee waiver share of SAT takers increased from 21 percent in 2011 to 25 percent in 2015. The simple fact that fee waivers serve low-income families, whose children tend to be lower-scoring SAT takers, is important, but not the whole story here. Students from disadvantaged families have always taken the SAT. But they paid for it themselves. If an additional increment of disadvantaged families take the SAT because they don’t have to pay for it, it is important to consider whether the new entrants to the pool of SAT test takers possess unmeasured characteristics that correlate with achievement—beyond the effect already attributed to socioeconomic status.

Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University, calculated the effect on national SAT scores of just three jurisdictions (Washington, DC, Delaware, and Idaho) adopting policies of mandatory SAT testing paid for by the state. He estimated that these policies explain about 21 percent of the nationwide decline in test scores between 2011 and 2015. He also notes that a more thorough analysis, incorporating fee waivers of other states and districts, would surely boost that figure. Fee waivers in two dozen Texas school districts, for example, are granted to all juniors and seniors in high school. And all students in those districts (including Dallas and Fort Worth) are required to take the SAT beginning in the junior year. Such universal testing policies can increase access and serve the cause of equity, but they will also, at least for a while, lead to a decline in SAT scores.

Here, I offer my own back of the envelope calculation of the relationship of demographic changes with SAT scores. The College Board reports test scores and participation rates for nine racial and ethnic groups.^[x] These data are preferable to family income because a) almost all students answer the race/ethnicity question (only four percent are non-responses versus 39 percent for family income), and b) it seems a safe assumption that students are more likely to know their race or ethnicity compared to their family’s income.

The question tackled in Table 2 is this: how much would the national SAT scores have changed from 2005 to 2015 if the scores of each racial/ethnic group stayed exactly the same as in 2005, but each group’s proportion of the total population were allowed to vary? In other words, the scores are fixed at the 2005 level for each group—no change. The SAT national scores are then recalculated using the 2015 proportions that each group represented in the national population.

Table 2. SAT Scores and Demographic Changes in the SAT Population (2005-2015)

The data suggest that two-thirds to three-quarters of the SAT score decline from 2005 to 2015 is associated with demographic changes in the test-taking population. The analysis is admittedly crude. The relationships are correlational, not causal. The race/ethnicity categories are surely serving as proxies for a bundle of other characteristics affecting SAT scores, some unobserved and others (e.g., family income, parental education, language status, class rank) that are included in the SAT questionnaire but produce data difficult to interpret.

Using an annual decline in SAT scores to indict high schools is bogus. The SAT should not be used to measure national achievement. SAT changes from 2014-2015 are tiny. The downward trend over the past decade represents a larger decline in SAT scores, but one that is still small in magnitude and correlated with changes in the SAT test-taking population.

In contrast to SAT scores, NAEP scores, which are designed to monitor national achievement, report slight gains for 17-year-olds over the past ten years. It is true that LTT NAEP gains are larger among students from ages nine to 13 than from ages 13 to 17, but research has uncovered several plausible explanations for why that occurs. The public should exercise great caution in accepting the findings of test score analyses. Test scores are often misinterpreted to promote political agendas, and much of the alarmist rhetoric provoked by small declines in scores is unjustified.

As government funding for disability insurance is expected to run out next year, Congress should re-evaluate the costs of the program.

Nine million people in America today are receiving Social Security Disability Insurance, double the number in 1995 and six times the number in 1970. With statistics like that, it’s hardly surprising to see some in Congress worry that more will enroll in the program and costs would continue to rise, especially since government funding for disability insurance is expected to run out by the end of next year. If Congress does nothing, benefits would fall by 19% immediately following next year’s presidential election. So, Congress will likely do something. But what exactly should it do?

Funding for disability insurance has nearly run out of money before. Each time, Congress has simply increased the share of the Social Security payroll tax that goes for disability insurance. This time, however, many members of Congress oppose such a shift unless it is linked to changes that curb eligibility and promote return to work. They fear that rolls will keep growing and costs would keep rising, but findings from a report by a government panel conclude that disability insurance rolls have stopped rising and will likely shrink. The report, authored by a panel of the Social Security Advisory Board, is important in that many of the factors that caused disability insurance to rise, particularly during the Great Recession, have ended.

• Baby-boomers, who added to the rolls as they reached the disability-prone middle age years, are aging out of disability benefits and into retirement benefits. 


• The decades-long flood of women increased the pool of people with the work histories needed to be eligible for disability insurance. But women’s labor force participation has fallen a bit from pre-Great Recession peaks, and is not expected again to rise materially. 


• The Great Recession, which led many who lost jobs and couldn’t find work to apply for disability insurance, is over and applications are down. A recession as large as that of 2008 is improbable any time soon. 


• Approval rates by administrative law judges, who for many years were suspected of being too ready to approve applications, have been falling. Whatever the cause, this stringency augurs a fall in the disability insurance rolls.

The American people deserve to have a federal government that is both responsive and effective. That simply isn’t the case for more than 1 million people who are awaiting the adjudication of their applications for disability benefits from the Social Security Administration.

Washington can and must do better. This gridlock harms applicants either by depriving them of much-needed support or effectively barring them from work while their cases are resolved because having any significant earnings would immediately render them ineligible. This is unacceptable.

Within the next month, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan congressional watchdog, will launch a study on the issue. More policymakers should follow GAO’s lead. A solution to this problem is long overdue. Here’s how the government can do it.

Congress does not need to look far for an example of how to reduce the SSA backlog. In 2013, the Veterans Administration cut its 600,000-case backlog by 84 percent and reduced waiting times by nearly two-thirds, all within two years. It’s an impressive result.

Why have federal officials dealt aggressively and effectively with that backlog, but not the one at SSA? One obvious answer is that the American people and their representatives recognize a debt to those who served in the armed forces. Allowing veterans to languish while a sluggish bureaucracy dithers is unconscionable. Public and congressional outrage helped light a fire under the bureaucracy. Administrators improved services the old-fashioned way — more staff time. VA employees had to work at least 20 hours overtime per month.

Things are a bit more complicated at SSA, unfortunately. Roughly three quarters of applicants for disability benefits have their cases decided within about nine months and, if denied, decide not to appeal. But those whose applications are denied are legally entitled to ask for a hearing before an administrative law judge — and that is where the real bottleneck begins.

There are too few ALJs to hear the cases. Even in the best of times, maintaining an adequate cadre of ALJs is difficult because normal attrition means that SSA has to hire at least 100 ALJs a year to stay even. When unemployment increases, however, so does the number of applications for disability benefits. After exhausting unemployment benefits, people who believe they are impaired often turn to the disability programs. So, when the Great Recession hit, SSA knew it had to hire many more ALJs. It tried to do so, but SSA cannot act without the help of the Office of Personnel Management, which must provide lists of qualified candidates before agencies can hire them. SSA employs 85 percent of all ALJs and for several years has paid OPM approximately $2 million annually to administer the requisite tests and interviews to establish a register of qualified candidates. Nonetheless, OPM has persistently refused to employ legally trained people to vet ALJ candidates or to update registers. And when SSA sought to ramp up ALJ hiring to cope with the recession challenge, OPM was slow to respond.

In 2009, for example, OPM promised to supply a new register containing names of ALJ candidates. Five years passed before it actually delivered the new list of names. For a time, the number of ALJs deciding cases actually fell. The situation got so bad that the president’s January 2015 budget created a work group headed by the Office of Management and Budget and the Administrative Conference of the United States to try to break the logjam. OPM promised a list for 2015, but insisted it could not change procedures. Not trusting OPM to mend its ways, Congress in October 2015 enacted legislation that explicitly required OPM to administer a new round of tests within the succeeding six months.

These stopgap measures are inadequate to the challenge. Both applicants and taxpayers deserve prompt adjudication of the merits of claims. The million-person backlog and the two-year average waits are bad enough. Many applicants wait far longer. Meanwhile, they are strongly discouraged from working, as anything more than minimal earnings will cause their applications automatically to be denied. Throughout this waiting period, applicants have no means of self-support. Any skills applicants retain atrophy.

The shortage of ALJs is not the only problem. The quality and consistency of adjudication by some ALJs has been called into question. For example, differences in approval rates are so large that differences among applicants cannot plausibly explain them. Some ALJs have processed so many cases that they could not possibly have applied proper standards. In recognition of both problems, SSA has increased oversight and beefed up training. The numbers have improved. But large and troubling variations in workloads and approval rates persist.

For now, political polarization blocks agreement on whether and how to modify eligibility rules and improve incentives to encourage work by those able to work. But there is bipartisan agreement that dragging out the application process benefits no one. While completely eliminating hearing delays is impossible, adequate administrative funding and more, better trained hearing officers would help reduce them. Even if OPM’s past record were better than it is, OPM is now a beleaguered agency, struggling to cope with the fallout from a security breach that jeopardizes the security of the nation and the privacy of millions of current and past federal employees and federal contractors. Mending this breach and establishing new procedures will — and should — be OPM’s top priority.

That’s why, for the sake of everyone concerned, responsibility for screening candidates for administrative law judge positions should be moved, at least temporarily, to another agency, such as the Administrative Conference of the United States. Shortening the period that applicants for disability benefits now spend waiting for a final answer is an achievable goal that can and should be addressed. Our nation’s disabled and its taxpayers deserve better.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Politico.

Editor’s note: The remarks below were delivered to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget on release of their report on the SSDI Solutions Initiative. 

I want to thank Marc Goldwein for inviting me to join you for today’s event. We all owe thanks to Jim McCrery and Earl Pomeroy for devoting themselves to the SSDI Solutions Initiative, to the staff of CFRB who backed them up, and most of all to the scholars and practitioners who wrote the many papers that comprise this effort. This is the sort of practical, problem-solving enterprise that this town needs more of. So, to all involved in this effort, ‘hats off’ and ‘please, don’t stop now.’

The challenge of improving how public policy helps people with disabilities seemed urgent last year. Depletion of the Social Security Disability Insurance trust loomed. Fears of exploding DI benefit rolls were widespread and intense.

Congress has now taken steps that delay projected depletion until 2022. Meticulous work by Jeffrey Liebman suggests that Disability Insurance rolls have peaked and will start falling. The Technical Panel appointed by the Social Security Advisory Board, concurred in its 2015 report. With such ‘good’ news, it is all too easy to let attention drift to other seemingly more pressing items.

But trust fund depletion and growing beneficiary rolls are not the most important reasons why policymakers should be focusing on these programs.

The primary reason is that the design and administration of disability programs can be improved with benefit to taxpayers and to people with disabilities alike. And while 2022 seems a long time off, doing the research called for in the SSDI Solutions Initiative will take all of that time and more. So, it is time to get to work, not to relax.

Before going any further, I must make a disclaimer. I was invited to talk here as chair of the Social Security Advisory Board. Everything I am going to say from now on will reflect only my personal views, not those of the other members or staff of the SSAB except where the Board has spoken as a group. The same disclaimer applies to the trustees, officers, and other staff of the Brookings Institution. Blame me, not them.

Let me start with an analogy. We economists like indices. Years ago, the late Arthur Okun came up with an index to measure how much pain the economy was inflicting on people. It was a simple index, just the sum of inflation and the unemployment rate. Okun called it the ‘misery index.’

I suggest a ‘policy misery index’—a measure of the grief that a policy problem causes us. It is the sum of a problem’s importance and difficulty. Never mind that neither ‘importance’ nor ‘difficulty’ is quantifiable. Designing and administering interventions intended to improve the lives of people with disabilities has to be at or near the top of the policy misery index.

Those who have worked on disability know what I mean. Programs for people with disabilities are hugely important and miserably hard to design and administer well. That would be true even if legislators were writing afresh on a blank legislative sheet. That they must cope with a deeply entrenched program about which analysts disagree and on which many people depend makes the problems many times more challenging.

I’m going to run through some of the reasons why designing and administering benefits for people determined to be disabled is so difficult. Some may be obvious, even banal, to the highly informed group here today. And you will doubtless think of reasons I omit.

First, the concept of disability, in the sense of a diminished capacity to work, has no clear meaning, the SSA definition of disability notwithstanding. We can define impairments. Some are so severe that work or, indeed, any other form of self-support seems impossible. But even among those with severe impairments, some people work for pay, and some don’t.

That doesn’t mean that if someone with a given impairment works, everyone with that same impairment could work if they tried hard enough. It means that physical or mental impairments incompletely identify those for whom work is not a reasonable expectation. The possibility of work depends on the availability of jobs, of services to support work effort, and of a host of personal characteristics, including functional capacities, intelligence, and grit.

That is not how the current disability determination process works. It considers the availability of jobs in the national, not the local, economy. It ignores the availability of work supports or accommodations by potential employers.

Whatever eligibility criteria one may establish for benefits, some people who really can’t work, or can’t earn enough to support themselves, will be denied benefits. And some will be awarded benefits who could work.

Good program design helps keep those numbers down. Good administration helps at least as much as, and maybe more than, program design. But there is no way to reduce the number of improper awards and improper denials to zero.

Second, the causes of disability are many and varied. Again, this observation is obvious, almost banal. Genetic inheritance, accidents and injuries, wear and tear from hard physical labor, and normal aging all create different needs for assistance.

These facts mean that people deemed unable to work have different needs. They constitute distinct interest groups, each seeking support, but not necessarily of the same kind. These groups sometimes compete with each other for always-limited resources. And that competition means that the politics of disability benefits are, shall we say, interesting.

Third, the design of programs to help people deemed unable to work is important and difficult. Moral hazard is endemic. Providing needed support and services is an act of compassion and decency. The goal is to provide such support and services while preserving incentives to work and to controlling costs borne by taxpayers.

But preserving work incentives is only part of the challenge. The capacity to work is continuous, not binary. Training and a wide and diverse range of services can help people perform activities of daily living and work.

Because resources are scarce, policy makers and administrators have to sort out who should get those services. Should it be those who are neediest? Those who are most likely to recover full capacities? Triage is inescapable. It is technically difficult. And it is always ethically fraught.

Designing disability benefit programs is hard. But administering them well is just as important and at least as difficult.

These statements may also be obvious to those who here today. But recent legislation and administrative appropriations raise doubts about whether they are obvious to or accepted by some members of Congress.

Let’s start with program design. We can all agree, I think, that incentives matter. If benefits ceased at the first dollar earned, few who come on the rolls would ever try to work.

So, Congress, for many years, has allowed beneficiaries to earn any amount for a brief period and small amounts indefinitely without losing eligibility. Under current law, there is a benefit cliff. If—after a trial work period—beneficiaries earn even $1 more than what is called substantial gainful activity, $1,130 in 2016, their benefit checks stop. They retain eligibility for health coverage for a while even after they leave the rolls. And for an extended period they may regain cash and health benefits without delay if their earnings decline.

Members of Congress have long been interested in whether a more gradual phase-out of benefits as earnings rise might encourage work. Various aspects of the current Disability Insurance program reflect Congress’s desire to encourage work.

The so-called Benefit Offset National Demonstration—or BOND—was designed to test the impact on labor supply by DI beneficiaries of one formula—replacing the “cliff” with a gradual reduction in benefits: $1 of benefit last for each $2 of earnings above the Substantial Gainful Activity level.

Alas, there were problems with that demonstration. It tested only one offset scenario – one starting point and one rate. So, there could be no way of knowing whether a 2-for-1 offset was the best way to encourage work.

And then there was the uncomfortable fact that, at the time of the last evaluation, out of 79,440 study participants only 21 experienced the offset. So there was no way of telling much of anything, other than that few people had worked enough to experience the offset.

Nor was the cause of non-response obvious. It is not clear how many demonstration participants even understood what was on offer.

Unsurprisingly, members of Congress interested in promoting work among DI recipients asked SSA to revisit the issue. The 2015 DI legislation mandates a new demonstration, christened the Promoting Opportunity Demonstration, or POD. POD uses the same 2 for 1 offset rate that BOND did, but the offset starts at an earnings level at or below earnings of $810 a month in 2016—which is well below the earnings at which the BOND phase-out began.

Unfortunately, as Kathleen Romig has pointed out in an excellent paper for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this demonstration is unlikely to yield useful results. Only a very few atypical DI beneficiaries are likely to find it in their interest to participate in the demonstration, fewer even than in the BOND. That is because the POD offset begins at lower earnings than the BOND offset did. In addition, participants in POD sacrifice the right under current law that permits people receiving disability benefits to earn any amount for 9 months of working without losing any benefits.

Furthermore, the 2015 law stipulated that no Disability Insurance beneficiary could be required to participate in the demonstration or, having agreed to participate, forced to remain in the demonstration. Thus, few people are likely to respond to the POD or to remain in it.

There is a small group to whom POD will be very attractive—those few DI recipients who retain a lot of earning capacity. The POD will allow them to retain DI coverage until their earnings are quite high. For example, a person receiving a $2,000 monthly benefit—well above the average, to be sure, but well below the maximum—would remain eligible for some benefits until his or her annual earnings exceeded $57,700. I don’t know about you, but I doubt that Congress would favorably consider permanent law of this sort.

Not only would those participating be a thin and quite unrepresentative sample of DI beneficiaries in general, or even of those with some earning capacity, but selection bias resulting from the opportunity to opt out at any time would destroy the external validity of any statistical results.

Let me be clear. My comments on POD, the demonstration mandated in the 2015 legislation, are not meant to denigrate the need for, or the importance of, research on how to encourage work by DI recipients, especially those for whom financial independence is plausible. On the contrary, as I said at the outset, research is desperately needed on this issue, as well as many others. It is not yet too late to authorize a research design with a better chance of producing useful results.

But it will be too late soon. Fielding demonstrations takes time:

• to solicit bids from contractors,
• for contractors to formulate bids,
• for government boards to select the best one,
• for contractors to enroll participants,
• for contractors to administer the demonstration,
• and for analysts to process the data generated by the demonstrations.

That process will take all the time available between now and 2021 or 2022 when the DI trust fund will again demand attention. It will take a good deal more time than that to address the formidable and intriguing research agenda of SSDI Solutions Initiative.

I should like to conclude with plugs for two initiatives to which the Social Security Advisory Board has been giving some attention.

It takes too long for disability insurance applicants to have their cases decided. Perhaps the whole determination process should be redesigned. One of the CFRB papers proposes just that. But until that happens, it is vital to shorten the unconscionable delays separating initial denials and reconsideration from hearings before administrative law judges to which applicants are legally entitled. Procedural reforms in the hearing process might help. More ALJs surely will.

The 2015 budget act requires the Office of Personnel Management to take steps that will help increase the number of ALJs hired. I believe that the new director, Beth Colbert, is committed to reforms. But it is very hard to change legal interpretations that have hampered hiring for years and the sluggish bureaucratic culture that fostered them.

So, the jury is out on whether OPM can deliver. In a recent op-ed in Politico, Lanhee Chen, a Republican member of the SSAB, and I jointly endorsed urged Congress to be ready, if OPM fails to deliver on more and better lists of ALJ candidates and streamlined procedures for their appointment, to move the ALJ examination authority to another federal organization, such as the Administrative Conference of the United States.

Lastly, there is a facet of income support policy that we on the SSAB all agree merits much more attention than it has received. Just last month, the SSAB released a paper entitled Representative Payees: A Call to Action. More than eight million beneficiaries have been deemed incapable of managing $77 billion in benefits that the Social Security Administration provided them in 2014.

We believe that serious concern is warranted about all aspects of the representative payee program—how this infringement of personal autonomy is found to be necessary, how payees are selected, and how payee performance is monitored.

Management of representative payees is a particular challenge for the Social Security Administration. Its primary job is to pay cash benefits in the right amount to the right person at the right time. SSA does that job at rock-bottom costs and with remarkable accuracy. It is handing rapidly rising workloads with budgets that have barely risen. SSA is neither designed nor staffed to provide social services. Yet determining the need for, selecting, and monitoring representative payees is a social service function.

As the Baby Boom ages, the number of people needing help in administering cash benefits from the Social Security Administration—and from other agencies such as the Veterans Administration—will grow. So will the number needing help in making informed choices under Medicare and Medicaid.

The SSAB is determined to look into this challenge and to make constructive suggestions. We are just beginning and invite others to join in studying what I have called “the most important problem the public has never heard of.”

Living with disabilities today is markedly different from what it was in 1956 when the Disability Insurance program began. Yet, the DI program has changed little. Beneficiaries and taxpayers are pay heavily the failure of public policy to apply what has been learned over the past six decades about health, disability, function, and work.

I hope that SSA and Congress will use well the time until it next must legislate on Disability Insurance. The DI rolls are stabilizing. The economy has grown steadily since the Great Recession. Congress has reinstated demonstration authority. With adequate funding for research and testing, the SSA can rebuild its research capability. Along with the external research community, it can identify what works and help Congress improve the DI program for beneficiaries and taxpayers alike. The SSDI Solutions Initiative is a fine roadmap.

Senior Fellows Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill are the first joint recipients of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize from the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS). The prize is awarded each year to a leading policymaker, social scientist, or public intellectual whose career focuses on advancing the public good through social science. It was named after the late senator from New York and renowned sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The pair accepted the award May 12 at a ceremony in Washington, DC. 

In their joint lecture delivered at the ceremony, Haskins and Sawhill emphasized the importance of evidence-based public policy, highlighting Sawhill’s latest work in her book, Generation Unbound (Brookings, 2014). Watch their entire speech here:

“Marriage is disappearing and more and more babies are born outside marriage,” Sawhill said during the lecture. “Right now, the proportion born outside of marriage is about 40 percent. It’s higher than that among African Americans and lower than that among the well-educated. But it’s no longer an issue that just affects the poor or minority groups.”

Download Sawhill's slides » | Download Ron Haskins' slides »

The power of evidence-based policy is finally being recognized, Haskins added. “One of the prime motivating factors of the current evidence-based movement,” he said, “is the understanding, now widespread, that most social programs either have not been well evaluated or they don’t work.” Haskins continued:

Perhaps the most important social function of social science is to find and test programs that will reduce the nation’s social problems. The exploding movement of evidence-based policy and the many roots the movement is now planting, offer the best chance of fulfilling this vital mission of social science, of achieving, in other words, exactly the outcomes Moynihan had hoped for.

He pointed toward the executive branch, state governments, and non-profits implementing policies that could make substantial progress against the nation’s social problems.

Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at Brookings and co-director, with Haskins, of the Center on Children and Families (CCF), acknowledged Haskins and Sawhill’s “powerful and unique intellectual partnership” and their world-class work on families, poverty, opportunity, evidence, parenting, work, and education.

Haskins and Sawhill were the first to be awarded jointly by the AAPSS, which recognizes their 15-year collaboration at Brookings and the Center on Children and Families, which they established. In addition to their work at CCF, the two co-wrote Creating an Opportunity Society (Brookings 2009) and serve as co-editors of The Future of Children, a policy journal that tackles issues that have an impact on children and families.

Haskins and Sawhill join the ranks of both current and past Brookings scholars who have received the Moynihan Prize, including Alice Rivlin (recipient of the inaugural prize), Rebecca Blank, and William Julius Wilson along with other distinguished scholars and public servants.

Want to learn more about the award’s namesake? Read Governance Studies Senior Fellow and historian Steve Hess’s account of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s time in the Nixon White House in his book The Professor and the President (Brookings, 2014).

The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) is certainly an intriguing one, and has been gaining traction. Swiss voters just turned it down. But it is still alive in Finland, in the Netherlands, in Alaska, in Oakland, CA, and in parts of Canada. 

Advocates of a UBI include Charles Murray on the right and Anthony Atkinson on the left. This surprising alliance alone makes it interesting, and it is a reasonable response to a growing pool of Americans made jobless by the march of technology and a safety net that is overly complex and bureaucratic. A comprehensive and excellent analysis in The Economist points out that while fears about technological unemployment have previously proved misleading, “the past is not always a good guide to the future.”

Robert Greenstein argues, however, that a UBI would actually hurt the poor by reallocating support up the income scale. His logic is inescapable: either we have to spend additional trillions providing income grants to all Americans or we have to limit assistance to those who need it most. 

One option is to provide unconditional payments along the lines of a UBI, but to phase it out as income rises. Libertarians like this approach since it gets rid of bureaucracies and leaves the poor free to spend the money on whatever they choose, rather than providing specific funds for particular needs. Liberals fear that such unconditional assistance would be unpopular and would be an easy target for elimination in the face of budget pressures. Right now most of our social programs are conditional. With the exception of the aged and the disabled, assistance is tied to work or to the consumption of necessities such as food, housing, or medical care, and our two largest means-tested programs are Food Stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Liberals have been less willing to openly acknowledge that a little paternalism in social policy may not be such a bad thing. In fact, progressives and libertarians alike are loath to admit that many of the poor and jobless are lacking more than just cash. They may be addicted to drugs or alcohol, suffer from mental health issues, have criminal records, or have difficulty functioning in a complex society. Money may be needed but money by itself does not cure such ills. 

A humane and wealthy society should provide the disadvantaged with adequate services and support. But there is nothing wrong with making assistance conditional on individuals fulfilling some obligation whether it is work, training, getting treatment, or living in a supportive but supervised environment.

In the end, the biggest problem with a universal basic income may not be its costs or its distributive implications, but the flawed assumption that money cures all ills.  

Executive Summary

Two-thirds of Americans have broadband Internet access in their homes.[1] But because of poor infrastructure or high prices, the remaining third of Americans do not. In some areas, broadband Internet is plainly unavailable because of inadequate infrastructure: More than 14 million Americans – approximately 5 percent of the total population – live in areas where terrestrial (as opposed to mobile) fixed broadband connectivity is unavailable.[2] The effects of insufficient infrastructure development have contributed to racial and cultural disparities in broadband access; for example, terrestrial broadband is available to only 10 percent of residents on tribal lands.[3]

Even where terrestrial broadband connectivity is available, however, the high price of broadband service can be prohibitive, especially to lower income Americans. While 93 percent of adults earning more than $75,000 per year are wired for broadband at home, the terrestrial broadband adoption rate is only 40 percent among adults earning less than $20,000 annually.[4] These costs also contribute to racial disparities; almost 70 percent of whites have adopted terrestrial broadband at home,   but only 59 percent of blacks and 49 percent of Hispanics have done the same.[5]

America's wireless infrastructure is better developed, but many Americans still lack wireless broadband coverage. According to a recent study, 3G wireless networks cover a good portion of the country, including 98 percent of the United States population,[6] but certain states have dramatically lower coverage rates than others. For example, only 71 percent of West Virginia's population is covered by a 3G network.[7] Wireless providers will likely use existing 3G infrastructure to enable the impending transition to 4G networks.[8] Unless wireless infrastructure expands quickly, those Americans that remain unconnected may be left behind.

Though America is responsible for the invention and development of Internet technology, the United States has fallen behind competing nations on a variety of important indicators, including broadband adoption rate and price. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's survey of 31 developed nations, the United States is ranked fourteenth in broadband penetration rate (i.e. the number of subscribers per 100 inhabitants); only 27.1 percent of Americans have adopted wired broadband subscriptions, compared to 37.8 percent of residents of the Netherlands.[9]

America also trails in ensuring the affordability of broadband service. The average price for a medium-speed (2.5Mbps-10Mbps) Internet plan in America is the seventeenth lowest among its competitor nations. For a medium-speed plan, the average American must pay $38 per month, while an average subscriber in Japan (ranked first) pays only $22 for a connection of the same quality.[10]

The National Broadband Plan (NBP), drafted by the Federal Communication Commission and released in 2010, seeks to provide all Americans with affordable broadband Internet access.[11] Doing so will not be cheap; analysts project that developing the infrastructure necessary for full broadband penetration will require $24 billion in subsidies and spending.[12] President Obama’s stimulus package has already set aside $4.9 billion to develop broadband infrastructure,[13] and some small ongoing federal programs receive an annual appropriation to promote broadband penetration.[14] However, these funding streams will only account for one-third of the $24 billion necessary to achieve the FCC's goal of full broadband penetration.[15] Moreover, developing infrastructure alone is not enough; many low-income Americans are unable to afford Internet access, even if it is offered in their locality.

To close this funding gap and to make broadband more accessible, the National Broadband Plan proposes to transform the Universal Service Fund – a subsidy program that spends $8.7 billion every year to develop infrastructure and improve affordability for telephone service – into a program that would do the same for broadband Internet.

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Professor Mwangi S. Kimenyi, senior fellow and former director of the Africa Growth Initiative (AGI), passed away on Saturday, June 6, 2015, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Professor Kimenyi was the heart and soul of the Africa Growth Initiative, something that all of us care about. He believed very much in AGI’s mission, its work, and perhaps, more importantly, its people. His scholarship and work ethic were only matched by his dedication to the AGI team and the issues that we were (and are) striving to accomplish.

Professor Kimenyi not only cared about the right things, but he was also keen about addressing them and doing so in the right way, no matter how difficult or challenging. In many ways, if the world worked like this, the world would be a much better place for all of us to live. In all AGI activities, Professor Kimenyi tried to bring people together, help colleagues advance their careers, and nurture the expertise that is needed in the long term.

Professor Kimenyi dedicated himself to utilizing the resources and prestige of the Brookings Institution to enhance governance, peaceful coexistence, the protection of human rights—especially those of vulnerable groups—and economic and human development in Africa. During his short tenure at AGI and the Brookings Institution, he achieved a lot. Through his leadership and thanks to the generosity of the Brookings Institution, AGI has contributed significantly to the improvement of the policy environment in Africa, as well as to a better understanding of African issues by U.S. policymakers.

Professor Kimenyi was an accomplished man: Before he came to AGI and Brookings, Professor Kimenyi was a professor at the University of Mississippi and the University of Connecticut. He was the founding executive director of the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA, 1999-2005); a resource person with the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC); and a research associate with the Center for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford. Professor Kimenyi earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Nairobi (Kenya), and completed graduate work at Ohio University and George Mason University. He received a Ph.D. in economics  from the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University in 1986.

Through his research, he sought to enhance governance and economic development in Africa. He was especially interested in poverty reduction, pro-poor economic growth, and peaceful coexistence on the continent. He authored or co-edited eight books, many policy monographs, and several chapters in edited volumes. He also published many papers in refereed journals.

Professor Kimenyi was also the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Outstanding Research Award (2001) from the Global Development Network, and the Georgescu-Roegen Prize in Economics (1991). He was recognized by the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Mississippi for his work on the public transit system. In 1994, Professor Kimenyi was named by Policy Review (Washington, D.C.) among the top 10 young market economists in the United States. During his tenure as the executive director of KIPPRA, the institute was ranked the top policy institution in Africa and was recognized as an international center of excellence.

At KIPPRA, he believed in and promoted excellence, leading the institute from its founding in 1999 to Africa’s premier research and policy institution by the time he left in 2005. KIPPRA remains an important and influential source of policy advice for Kenya and the region, thanks to the solid foundation laid by Professor Kimenyi.

He was not afraid to criticize or be controversial when he believed that something important needed to be said. In many of the blogs that he wrote about policy issues in Africa, for example, he challenged President Obama and his administration to take a more active part in Africa. He rebuked the government of South Sudan for its decision to ban all foreign workers from the country and replace them with nationals—a decision that Professor Kimenyi argued would undermine badly needed foreign investment. Nevertheless, in seeking to hold governments accountable, Professor Kimenyi was professional, respectful, and polite.

Despite his extraordinary professional and academic accomplishments, Professor Kimenyi was humble, extremely kind, and loyal to his friends and colleagues. I have worked very closely with Professor Kimenyi on projects in Africa since 1986, and have often been taken aback by the patient and kind manner in which Professor Kimenyi treated young scholars who approached him and asked him to help them further their education or research.

I can recall a particularly memorable incident at Mount Kenya in 2002: We were at the Mount Kenya Lodge to consult with then-vice president of Kenya, Professor George Saitoti, who was working on his vision for holistic development in Africa. While we were eating breakfast, a couple of young people recognized Professor Kimenyi and came to talk to him about their plans for graduate school. He patiently talked to each one of them, gathered as much information from them, gave each person that he talked to his business card, and promised to contact them once he had an opportunity to research their issues further. Despite the fact that his breakfast was going cold, he calmly advised these young people and told them that it was important that they remained hopeful because they held the future of Kenya in their hands. He was truly inspiring. Of course, during nearly 30 years of friendship with me, he remained a loyal and supportive friend to me and my family.

There is no question that Professor Kimenyi was a talented and well-regarded economist. Nevertheless, his colleagues, students, and the many people whom he worked with and whose lives he touched will remember him more for his kindness, warmth, and willingness to mentor younger scholars.

Professor Kimenyi’s untimely passing is a great loss, not only to his colleagues and friends at AGI, but also to the many scholars whom he has mentored in Africa and around the world. He will be greatly missed, not only at AGI, but also at the many institutions that he has worked with to improve economic and human development in Africa.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. May his soul rest in peace.