House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls it a "sick" federal welfare program that needs a strong dose of Republican medicine. And there can be little dispute that Social Security's $65 billion disability plan is out of control. Equally clear is that it won't respond to quick cures.
In a recent interview with The Sun, the leader of the new Republican majority said he saw the program as a classic example of government killing initiative and encouraging bad habits, destructive lifestyles and dishonesty -- at great cost to taxpayers.
As this series has shown, the program has turned many children and adults with mild disabilities into virtual wards of the government, and given drug addicts cash that they have used to kill themselves. It has undercut the work ethic of new immigrants and spawned a seedy industry of "middle men" who profit by getting people on the rolls.
But as a House of Representatives Ways and Means subcommittee convenes this week to examine the problem, its members would do well to abide by the words of the new Republican speaker. History, Mr. Gingrich says, is the best teacher -- and the history of the federal disability program shows that ill-considered reform can backfire.
The last man who tried to fix it was President Ronald Reagan. His effort to save taxpayers $3.4 billion by slashing the rolls did much to bring on the current crisis.
When Mr. Reagan took office in 1981, the program was already a shambles.
The General Accounting Office had just reported that almost 600,000 people were getting $2 billion a year in disability checks that they didn't deserve. Social Security had admitted making another $1 billion in overpayments because of computer problems.
"Everybody knew that Social Security was making disability errors like mad," said Bert Van Engel, a former agency official.
"The law of averages would indicate that we were probably giving out checks to a lot of people who didn't deserve them," added former Social Security Commissioner Robert M. Ball. "But that was the will of Congress."
What Congress had done was to order the agency to absorb 3 million people who were collecting state disability checks into a new federal program for the elderly and disabled poor called Supplemental Security Income -- whether or not they qualified under federal rules.
Congress went on to declare that whole classes of new 'f applicants with certain handicaps could automatically qualify if they chose not to work. It also forbade Social Security from considering certain forms of income in determining whether they were poor enough to get aid.
In 1980, the nation's lawmakers did an about-face and ordered Social Security to check existing recipients to make sure they were qualified, then gave it 18 months to gear up for the job. That wasn't soon enough for Mr. Reagan.
He went after the program with a vengeance in 1981.
The president ordered Social Security to immediately review more than 1 million case files for signs of irregularities or fraud -- a job that would entail 1,400 worker years of extra labor, or a full month if the agency ceased all other operations. He then began cutting 20,000 employees.
Something had to give.
For starters, new applicants would have to wait while the agency investigated current recipients. The backlog of new claims grew to more than 500,000.
Some 1.4 million old case files were pulled into the agency's offices and evaluated to determine if the recipients suffered from disabilities that theoretically should have improved.
Without face-to-face interviews, medical exams or any attempt to contact the recipients' doctors, the purge began in the spring of 1981.
"Benefits for thousands of claimants were ceased ... without a hearing," wrote Judge Christine M. Moore in an American Bar Association report last summer. "In so doing, the agency chose to largely ignore" the law.
An eruption of lawsuits followed -- hundreds of thousands of appeals, dozens of class-action suits, box loads of reapplications. So furious was the legal assault that lawyers were copying the lawsuits of other lawyers, complete with the same typographical errors ' and advertising for clients on billboards and TV.
"The worst thing Reagan did to this country was trying to shut down these entitlements by doing it wrong," Judge Moore said in an interview. "The attorneys swooped in."
The poor, elderly and handicapped rallied around the disability program, coalescing into a powerful and sympathetic lobbying force. Stories broke out in the media as thousands of truly needy people were hit by the Reagan ax -- including a Vietnam veteran who had received a Medal of Honor from the president.
"What are we doing?" Mr. Reagan asked aides at one point.
Criticized by the governors of 18 states for bringing on a disability crisis, he finally called off the purge in 1984. But the backlash was just beginning.
Of the 600,000 people who were thrown off the rolls, half got their benefits back at a cost of untold millions in legal and administrative expense to U.S. taxpayers. In opinion after opinion, courts found flaws in the disability law and in Social Security's policy manuals -- striking down paper roadblocks that had kept thousands of applicants off the rolls.
The case of Brian Zebley, a 5-year-old who was cut off despite numerous ailments, wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court. It ruled that Social Security's eligibility rules for children had to be rewritten and that a half-million applicants who had been denied benefits had to be re-evaluated.
This decision alone triggered $1.4 billion in back payments -- including lump sum checks to some families of $20,000 or more.
"Congress went crazy," said former Social Security Commissioner Louis P. Enoff.
Goaded by a roar of constituent complaints about the Reagan purge, Republicans and Democrats checkmated the president with the Social Security Reform Act and the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984.
The two laws contained at least a half-dozen provisions that made it easier to get on SSI and harder to get thrown off. Most important, the Reform Act broadened the definition of what constituted a "mental disability" and allowed 1 million successful applications over the next seven years.
Today, mental illness is the No. 1 claim of applicants and the primary diagnosis for one-third of the 5 million disabled on SSI.
Further, Congress had long ago decreed that the generous rules it had approved for SSI should also apply to another Social Security program called Disability Insurance, which allows workers to draw early from their contributions to the retirement trust fund if they become disabled.
And, in an effort to hold down the growth of SSI, which is paid for through taxes, Social Security has been steering qualified applicants into the DI trust fund for years.
In a 1992 report that went largely unnoticed, the Congressional Research Service warned that this encroachment was jeopardizing the Social Security Retirement Fund -- the keystone of retirement planning for most Americans. The report went on to cite mismanagement, loose rules and free-wheeling legislating by Congress as contributing causes of the crisis.
The Reagan attempt to tame the program and the counter-attack it drew illustrate a cycle that has been apparent for more than a decade: Members of Congress pass bipartisan laws opening up the program to make it easier for their constituents to get in, only to clamp down again to mollify middle-class voters who are paying the bills.
With few exceptions, these measures have come immediately before or during elections. "Politicians on both sides of the aisle have used the program as a sexy issue for years ' to say, 'Look at me voters! I'm getting tough on fraud!' or 'See how compassionate I am!'" said Susan Galbraith, a legal aid lobbyist. "All the while, they were pushing it to the brink."
The Reagan purge and the constant whipsawing by Congress have brought on a profound and lasting crisis at the Social Security Administration.
Headed by 12 commissioners in 20 years, it has been adrift in a political riptide with no consistent leadership or guiding philosophy. A time line of key decisions and events in the agency's history reveals a chain reaction of accidents and unforeseen consequences.
Today, poor people and injured workers are caught up in a backlog of new claims so severe that it can take more than a year for the agency to get help to them.
Meanwhile, thousands of undeserving recipients remain on the rolls because Social Security has all but ceased to check on them to see if they are still disabled. According to the most conservative estimates, the agency is paying out $150 million a year to people who no longer need it.
In the past five years, SSI has doubled in cost and is expected to grow by another 50 percent by 1999. The cost of the DI program will do likewise. The two combined are projected to cost more than $96 billion a year by the turn of the century.
This year alone, disability aid will consume enough in taxes and retirement trust money to run 30 cities the size of Baltimore, build 18 nuclear aircraft carriers or provide a four-year education at Harvard University for almost every child in the state of Maryland in grades K through 12.
Cutting this $65 billion behemoth will be a venture fraught with risk. Simple tinkering will invite charges of political cowardice.
Recalling a recent visit to his home district in Georgia, Mr. Gingrich said: "I had 20 kids in wheelchairs in the last town hall meeting because their association had called and said, 'Congressman Gingrich is going to zero out your funding.' This has to be handled sensitively."
So far, House Republicans have scheduled only two days of hearings. And some members are already calling for deep cuts in funding to children, addicts and immigrants.
To Mr. Ball, Social Security's elder statesman, it sounds like history repeating itself.
"The real problem all along has been that if you don't get the rules right from the beginning, you get this constant overreaction by Congress," he said. "It's a seesaw effect. They rock back and forth between being too strict for a couple of years, then too liberal for a couple more.
"There is no consistency. That has been the history."