Scoring Soon

[southernmiss]

I have heard that OPM is trying to get the scoring done by March 3.

[ldtajesq]

Here's some info passed on to me from an ALJ friend re: a recent telephone conference call held by SSA mgmt:

Here is another report from 02/11-02/12/09 meetings in Falls Church:

A quick summary of what I gathered is as follows.

ODAR expects that OPM will be finished with the final scoring of the new Register on 3/3. This is after the OPM process of evaluating the batch of new applications to become ALJs that were accepted last summer. ODAR will then ask for a list of eligibles off the new Register to commence the hiring of 155 to 157 new judges this FY. They plan on 3 classes, with the actual start day of the 3 classes being 7/6, 8/3 and 9/14. In an ideal world, ODAR would like to give the new hires about 2 months advance notice of their report date. If they are able to accomplish that goal, then the 7/6 class would start by reporting to their new home ODAR offices 2 weeks prior to 7/6, so they should get word they are hired in about mid April for that first class.

They are looking to have this year's ALJ educational conference for 1/3rd of the corps, probably in July. They will select this year's attendees so they have a random cross section of judges from all parts of the country. Presumably, last year's hire of the 189 new judges will not be included in this random selection, as the new 189 judges will instead have their own "1 year" refresher training this summer. I did not get a clear idea as to whether these two separate types of training would each take place in one week, or if these sessions would be spread over several weeks. Logic says that if the corps of judges is about 1190 judges, and you subtract the 189 new hires, then you have about 1000 judges left. 1/3rd of that number would equal about 333 judges they want to send to their version of an educational conference this summer. As far as the random selection goes, they may make a list of all ALJs by ALJ #, and then select every 3rd judge off that chronological list. But ths is a reasoned guess on my part, and no definite decision has been made yet on how to do the selection.

Of the 155 to 157 new hires this year, they are proceeding on the basis that there will be an attrition of about 60 judges from the corps this year. Therefore, 155 - 60 = about 95 more total judges than in the current FY. As to the next FY, they are already trying to get a sense of how many new judges they will want to hire, and I got the sense that they may be wanting to hire as many as even 250 new judges next year.

Again, this is nothing reliable at this point, as budgets are such a speculative matter at this point.

[flannery]

ldtajesq

Thanks for this useful information. But even having said that, you are, IMHO, certainly astute in observing that, no matter what scuttlebutt is suggesting, budgets rule and they are certainly speculative at this point. Given that constraint, literally anything could happen and that is why, again IMHO, Lady Luck rules in this proceeding.

[alj]

As you guys got some what off topic by talking about the budget, this ought to fit right in. It came from a note to the SSA Advisory Group. The article itself isn't copied, but the gist of it is in the introductory comments:

"Below is an article from the Federal News Radio where the Commissioner is interviewed about the National Computer Center, SSA’s budget and its backlogs. Note the Commissioner says in this article he expects SSA’s budget to be $126 million more than the President’s budget. So he is presuming the House proposed amount will be accepted by the Senate. He also states in this article that SSA will hire between 3,000-6,000 employees. I wonder if the article should have said 5,000-6000 as he was quoted with this number last week."

Looks like a lot of money headed this way. That will probably translate into more judges than originally expected.