• Case completion targets that measure speed but not thoroughness — and a Seventh Circuit concurrence warning that even well-intentioned production pressure "can alter the essential function of adjudication"
• Quality review rubrics that aren't published, shift with administrations, and can't be appealed — but feed into performance evaluations that have real career consequences
• Social Security Rulings that describe themselves as not having "the force and effect of law" and in the same sentence say they are "binding on all components" — binding policy issued without notice and comment
• The 1984 case that saw it coming: Association of Administrative Law Judges v. Heckler, where the court found outcome-based targeting of ALJs "violated the spirit of the APA, if no specific provision thereof"
• Immigration as the amplified version: 700-case-per-year quotas for judges without APA independence protections, deciding cases where the stakes are deportation
Somewhere out there is a claimant with the same diagnosis as someone approved three years ago by the same ALJ in the same office. That claimant gets denied — not because the case changed, but because the system around the judge changed. And nobody outside the agency can see why.