I am honored, proud and excited to be the new president of NADE. I am now celebrating my twentieth anniversary at the Mississippi DDS. I joined NADE just three months afterwards and have been actively involved right from the beginning. As I think back to all of the changes that have occurred within the Social Security disability program, within my department, and within my own agency, I realize that the sum of all those changes does not come close to being the equivalent of what is going on today in our world of disability adjudication.

While we all believe that the concept of “One-SSA” is a great idea, we also wonder how we will be able to accomplish such an overwhelming task. Process unification and the subsequent rollout of prototype have strained the already inadequate resources available to us. Many states have high attrition rates directly connected to inadequate salaries. The demands of prototype have magnified this problem tremendously. As one of my NADE friends put it, people are not leaving because the work is too hard but because “the work is not doable given the instructions, resources and sheer number of cases” they have been given. While we do need to increase funding, our greatest resource is our trained personnel. We in NADE, who know the workings of the disability program better than anyone else, must help SSA find a way to streamline this process and fix these problems. As professionals we want to do our best to be sure that the claimant who should be allowed is allowed at the earliest point in the process but we do not want to spend valuable time and resources doing additional development on obvious denials.

Over the next month I will be involved in dialogues with Commissioner Apfel, other SSA officials, the Social Security Advisory Board, and the NCDDD so I will have the opportunity to voice the concerns of NADE members. Good communication is essential if we are to continue to be influential in the disability process. That means I need to know what you think about the critical matters facing us so that I can truly represent the members of our organization. Please do not hesitate to contact me with your concerns and thoughts. I not only want your input but I also truly need your assistance and your support in order to do my job as NADE President. Please help me to see all pertinent issues clearly and insightfully so that I can represent you to the best of my ability.