THE GENESIS AND NEAR-ARMAGEDDON OF PASS
In 1984, Congress created PASS. Consumers and advocates looked upon what Congress had done, and said it was
good.
For the next ten years, everyone rested. Only a fraction of a fraction of a per cent of those eligible for PASS actually
got one, since SSA did little to publicize or promote it. SSA claims representatives didn’t understand it, and most
consumers didn’t know about it.
Then the Information Superhighway happened. Consumers and advocates communicated, and PASS became more
widely used. People with disabilities bought cars, vans, and computers using money generated by PASS’s. They went
to college and started businesses. These people with disabilities using PASS money made the decisions themselves
of what to buy, and when and where to buy it, and once Social Security approved the PASS, the PASS money was
under the direct control of the PASS participant. The newly elected conservative right Congress looked upon even a
tiny fraction of people with disabilities controlling money, and making decisions for themselves without the
intervention of rehab counselors, psychotherapists, or social workers, and saw that it was frightening. Congress
turned to the General Accountability Office, and demanded an investigation of the federal decimal dust under
consumer control through the PASS provision.
On Jan. 1, 1996, President Bill (Bubba) Clinton appointed a new Social Security Commissioner, called Chater, sister
to the Wicked Witch of the West. She remained in power for a year as Acting Commissioner, never getting confirmed.
In that year, she managed to alienate everybody, from conservative Western senators to wildly liberal Eastern
disability rights lawyers. In February of her reign, GAO produced the report Congress had demanded, and turned it
over to Bill (The Impaler) Bunning, of the House Ways and Means Committee. He brought Chater before the
Committee to interrogate and chastise her concerning SSA’s abysmally poor management of the PASS.
Chater, reacting in a typically bureaucratic manner (with mindless fear), called a moratorium on PASS the next day.
Based on the only answer to the PASS problem that she considered possible - not that SSA had mismanaged it, but
that consumers had abused it, she organized the infamous "Baltimore cadre" to review PASS’s in in the central holy
city of Baltimore. She had the POMS rewritten to insure "consumer accountability." The use of installment payments
to purchase vehicles, and any vocational goals over entry level were forbidden. People already on PASS’s were
supposed to be "grandfathered in," but were, instead, thrown out - their PASS’s terminated and the rug pulled out
from under them. Many had to quit school, and lost jobs, cars, and credit when the PASS was pulled.. In 1996, SSA
killed off 7,000 of the 10,000 PASS’s active in March of 1996. Getting a new PASS approved was as rare as
eyebrows on eggs.
The advocates looked upon Chater and her cadre, and the destruction they had caused, and saw that it was cause
for civil disobedience. The civil disobedience shut down SSA offices in 6 major cities, and forced SSA to go to
regional review, and send the Baltimore cadre home, leaving behind boxes of PASS’s unseen by reviewers’ eyes.
Hearings were held, and great kahunas listened, and saw that what they had created was chaos.
On Dec. 1, 1997, SSA issued a policy statement taking back many of their ill advised decisions and policies of 1996.
Federal SSA officials ventured out from the holy city of Baltimore into the rest of the country to see what was
happening with PASS. In St. Paul, they found growth, and saw that it was good. But in Dallas they found famine, and
in Denver, pestilence, and war in Cincinnati. And in Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies, they found that the PASS
was believed to be dead.
It was in this time and on this wreckage that Social Security began to rebuild the PASS program in its present form,
with regional PASS review cadres. While much remains to be done, much progress has been made, and PASS is
rising like a Phoenix from the ashes to become the program Congress originally created it to be.
In the same years PASS was nearly destroyed, some disability rights activists, and concerned civil servants and
service providers were brought together in working conferences by the National Council on Disability to examine work
incentives. Their work produced the Ticket to Work/Work Incentives Improvement Act, signed into law in Dec. 1999 -
the last bill tto be signed into law in the past millennium. It also created the Office of Employment Support Programs
within Social Security, which includes personnel accountable for making PASS work.
Now, what is left for us in the new millennium is to use PASS.