Does the Supreme Court's Chevron Decision Open Social Security Up to Millions of Lawsuits?

Clawbacks and the Widow(er)s Benefit Scam Would Be a Great Places to Start.

The Supreme Court just overturned a 40 year precedent that permitted federal agencies, like the Social Security Administration, to issue and enforce regulations where Congressional intent is in doubt.

Are you one of the millions of Americans whose Social Security benefits have been massively clawed back without due process or statute of limitations.

Are you one of the tens of millions of widows and widowers whose lifetime benefits have been dramatically reduced thanks to the widow(er)s benefit scam?

Are you one of the tens of millions of early retirees whose work decisions were needlessly and substantially curtailed due to the Earnings Test scam?

If so, you may be able to sue the Social Security Administration for failing to provide, in Justice Gorsuch’s words, “fair notice or fair hearing.”

Clawing back benefits due to alleged, but generally undocumented overpayments made over years, if not decades (See this 60 Minutes episode.), sounds like far greater agency overreach than forcing herring fishermen to pay a modest sum for monitoring their catch.

So does the Social Security Administration’s failure to notify 13 million widow(er)s that they were simultaneously filed, with neither fair notice nor warning, for both widow(er) and retirement benefit even though such simultaneous filing could only serve to reduce their lifetime benefits by tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As for the Earnings Test, warning early beneficiaries that working and earning beyond a modest amount could come at a draconian loss in benefits without bothering to mention the typically fully or more than fully offsetting Adjustment of the Reduction Factor also sounds like failing to provide fair notice.

I’m not a lawyer and I may be engaging in journalistic overreach, but Social Security’s 22,000 pages of rules in its Program Operating Manual System about its 2,728 rules in its Handbook about its 13 benefits constitute a mother load of provisions that were not directly legislated by Congress.

Consider the POMS’ examples for when to issue a clawback waiver predicated on a beneficiary’s “reliance” that the benefits they received were their’s to keep. These examples were specified very narrowly to limit the Agency’s issuance of waivers. But they have no concrete basis in law. No act of Congress, to my understanding, provides detailed examples of when and when not to issue waivers based on reliance.

Ironically, the activist “conservative” majority that, yet again, blithely ignored stare decisis and overturned another decades-long legal precedent based, presumably, on how John Adams and our other founders viewed regulation of overfishing — something no one, in 1787 when the Constitution was signed, remotely imagined could happen — may be a case of “Be careful what you wish.”

Justice Roberts and his Gang of Six may rue their judicial overreach if tens of millions of Social Security’s victims of the Agency’s decades of financial and legal abuse come knocking on their door for redress.

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