SOCIAL SECURITY: WILL INDEPENDENCE SAVE IT?

Last week President Clinton signed a bill that will makes the Social Security Administration an independent agency. For many Americans -- well, let's face it This may have been one you didn't exactly follow from the edge of your seat.

The proposal has been around for more than a decade and had earlier passed the House three times, only to die in the Senate on each occasion. Essentially, the idea is to remove the Social Security from the Department of Health and Human Services, its home for many years. The Social Security commissioner has long been subordinate to the secretary and deputy secretary of Health and Human Services.

Under the new law, effective next March 31 an independent Social Security will be headed by a commissioner and deputy commissioner appointed by the president for six-year terms subject to Senate confirmation. The agency will also have a seven-member, bipartisan advisory board, with four members chosen by Congress and three by the president.

The rationale for the change is explained by the law's chief sponsor, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. Sen. Moynihan said making Social Security an independent agency gives it more visibility, more accountability, insulates it from politics and ensures that it will always have an appointed commissioner with full authority. In recent years, the Social Security has often been headed by acting commissioners.

Sen. Moynihan's case for the bill sounds all right, as far as it goes, although you may be pardoned for detecting in it the air of rearranging the chairs on the bureaucratic deck. Buried in the law, however, is one reform measure whose enactment commends the entire bill. Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine, succeeded in attaching the most praiseworthy amendment. The Cohen amendment restricts unsupervised payments to drug addicts and alcoholics who use the money to support their habits.

Such chemically dependent recipients will be limited to no more than three years of benefits. Even after the expiration of these benefits, recipients remain eligible for Medicaid and Medicare. Also, additional sanctions will apply to addicts who don't comply with the terms of their treatment programs.

One of the many largely unknown scandals of the federal government is that we have been spending $1.4 billion a year on cash benefits to 250,000 drug addicts and alcoholics under the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs. Officials can verify only 3 percent of these recipients whom they know to be undergoing treatment. With Sen. Cohen's amendment, which as originally drafted sought to cut them off entirely, there is at least have a chance to begin to rein in this outrage. Hooray for Sen. Cohen.

The new law also makes Suplemental Security Income fraud a felony. Such offenses have long been misdemeanors. This sounds good as well.

Social Security is huge. With 65,000 employees, 1,300 field offices and a budget of more than $300 billion, it is far larger than most cabinet departments. The new, bipartisan advisory board holds the promise of independent oversight. It can be hoped all this turns out as Sen. Moynihan and other supporters have planned.

The new members of the advisory board could begin by offering all Americans some straight talk about what lies ahead for Social Security with the aging of the baby boomer generation, the first of whose members will begin retiring early in the 21st century. Social Security has long been a politically volatile subject, often called the third rail of American politics. If members of this board can cut through overheated political rhetoric and talk sense to the American people about this granddaddy of federal entitlements, this legislation will have been well worth the effort.