Government Falters in Effort to Reduce Massive Backlog of Disability Hearings: In his May 2007 testimony to Congress about the state of the Social Security Administration (SSA), Commissioner Michael J. Astrue focused on the problem of the surging growth in the number of individuals awaiting a hearing on their requests for disability benefits. Astrue described an ambitious plan the agency had recently launched “to eliminate the backlog of hearing requests” by 2012 and also “to prevent its recurrence. At the beginning of FY 2007 when the concern over rising backlogs led the SSA to undertake a broad effort designed to improve the agency’s functioning, the appeals of 715,568 individuals were then pending before what is arguably the largest court system in the world. Four years later, in March of 2011, the commissioner testified again, emphasizing the recent accomplishments of the SSA. “We reversed many negative trends,” he said, “most notably with the hearings backlog, and significantly improved service and stewardship efforts.” Very timely government information analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), however, indicates that the overall number of individual claimants awaiting a hearing has not in fact gone down but up, climbing to 728,012, higher than it was when the SSA launched its expensive rehabilitation plan four and a half years ago.”