Donald Trump’s Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, has rejected a bipartisan effort by Democratic Congressman George Latimer of the New York 16th Congressional District and Republican Mike Lawler of the 17th Congressional District to keep the Social Security Hearing Office in White Plains open.
In a letter to Latimer dated March 19, Dudek said that the people in Latimer’s district who need to go to a hearing office can travel to Lower Manhattan, New Haven in Connecticut, the Bronx or Goshen in Orange County for the Social Security services they are seeking. Dudek told Latimer that he would be telling Lawler the same thing in a separate letter to him.
The lease on the current Hearing Office at 75 S. Broadway in White Plains expires May 31. Latimer and Lawler emphasized to Dudek that it is the only Social Security Hearing Office in the Hudson Valley, and closing it would force some constituents to drive hours for hearings.
The move by Lawler and Latimer to try to keep the office open came one day after Latimer appeared with Westchester County Executive Ken Jenkins and others at the County Office Building in White Plains to announce that the county has space that SSA could use for its White Plains Hearing Office.
“According to the SSA’s Regional Public Affairs Office in New York, the White Plains office is closing because the landlord is not interested in renewing the lease, and SSA opted to close the office rather than find a suitable alternate location. This is a laughable course of action,” Lawler and Latimer said in their letter to Dudek.
Dudek told a slightly different story about the office’s closing in his letter to Latimer.
“The office has had long-term issues with mold over the past five to six years which the General Services Administration (GSA) has been unable to resolve,” Dudek said. “Because the majority of our claimants will not be affected by the office closure, we are not exploring an alternate location.”
In their letter to Dudek, Latimer and Lawler noted that the White Plains Hearing Office currently has a backlog of over 2,000 cases, and it conducts hundreds of in-person hearings each year.
“Social Security payments are lifelines for many of our constituents, and we unconditionally condemn any effort to make receiving these payments more difficult for the American people,” Lawler and Latimer wrote.
