Struggling In Rhinelander

      From WORT in Madison, WI:

The Social Security Administration office in Rhinelander, Wisconsin has recently cut their hours in half due to a severe staffing shortage. This is happening in other locations around the country as the agency has been truncated and starved of operating funds. Labor Radio spoke with Jessica LaPointe, President of both the American Federation of Government Employees, or AFGE, Council 220 and Local 1346.

REPORTER: What is going on with the Social Security Administration in Rhinelander?

JESSICA LAPOINTE: Rhinelander has a field office up there that serves about 35 people a day plus another 40 people that are looking to get a temporary work visa for summer camps and ski resorts and agricultural work visas.

Basically, that field office has reduced their service hours from 9 to 4 to 9 to 12:30 due to under staffing.

REPORTER: What is full staffing there?

JESSICA LAPOINTE: About 12. They were reduced to about 7 over the years and then in the last two years they’ve been reduced to 2.

REPORTER: Why did this happen?

JESSICA LAPOINTE: The 12 to 7 (cut of employees) is a result of budget cuts and limited hiring over the last decade and a half. And then, in January 2025, the Trump administration sent the Department of Government Efficiency to incentivize workers to leave, paid workers about $25,000 to leave. That reduced staff and then that had a snowball effect on attrition where workloads became unmanageable and workers began to burn out and become very stressed.

And then our rights began to get stripped as workers, our workplace flexibilities, our ability to get time off and care for ourselves and our family. That caused more people to leave as pressures began to mount so now they’re down to 2 and now they have to reduce the service hours in the office.

REPORTER: Who does this affect?

JESSICA LAPOINTE: This affects the community of Rhinelander.  The closest field office is about an hour away in Wausau. And then it affects the businesses that now don’t have that office to go to to get their worker visas taken care of, to get replacement social security cards timely.

Now there’s one remaining front desk worker, one remaining claim specialist. They’re also at risk of burnout. …

Wouldn’t There Have Been A Smell Problem?

      From WKRC:

A Colorado couple was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to concealing a man’s body for more than a year and using his identity to access his Social Security benefits, prosecutors said.

James Agnew, 58, and Suzanne Agnew, 57, each pleaded guilty to tampering with a deceased human body and identity theft in connection with the death of James O’Neill. …

O’Neill died in December 2023 at the Lakewood home he shared with the Agnews. Prosecutors said the couple did not report his death and concealed his body inside a plastic mattress secured with tape. Investigators found his remains beneath a deflated air mattress during a search of the home on July 3, 2025.

Prosecutors said the couple impersonated O’Neill in phone calls and emails, accessed Social Security payments deposited into his account and used his debit card to make purchases. …

Dudek Won’t Shut Up

    Leland Dudek continues to talk with news media outlets trying to tell his story of how things went during his brief tenure as Acting Social Security Commissioner at the beginning of the current Trump Administration. Here’s his latest. 

     He needs to move on. He’s not going to convince the people interested in the story.

     Has the guy found a new job?

Resumption Of Wage Garnishment

      From an update to POMS, Social Security’s main manual:

The Debt Collection Improvement Act (DCIA) of 1996 authorizes federal agencies to administratively garnish up to 15 percent of a delinquent debtor’s disposable pay without obtaining a court order. In March 2020, the Social Security Administration (SSA) suspended administrative wage garnishment (AWG) because of the economic hardships associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

With this release, SSA will resume issuing AWG packages to the employers of eligible debtors. These packages direct employers to withhold a portion of an employee’s wages to recover delinquent debts. The release also includes system and program enhancements that require corresponding updates to SSA policies and procedures. 

This notice is for SSI.  There’s a corresponding update for Title II benefits. 

     These also remove a ten year limitation on AWG.

      Interesting that this comes out just after the election. Must be a coincidence.

“Page Count”?

      I have heard something about a “page count” limit on scheduling hearings, as in, I think, an ALJ is expected to schedule hearings files encompassing so many pages of records per month rather than a simple number of hearings.

     Can anyone enlighten me on how long this has been around and how it’s working? Also, what’s the “page count” quota per month?

     By the way, shouldn’t page count figure into fees for representing claimants? They have to trudge through those same huge files.

     One thing not appreciated by those who don’t have recent hands on experience with Social Security disability files is just how much medical records have metastasized over the last ten years or so due to medical record-keeping programs and increased specialist referrals, among other things. This has dramatically increased the size of Social Security disability claim files. They’re out of hand. 

A Poll

 

NPRM On Requesting Hearings May Be Coming

     The Social Security Administration has submitted a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) concerning requesting hearings. The full text is not released at this point. Here’s the agency’s summary:

Current regulations allow a claimant to request a hearing before an administrative law judge (ALJ) by filing a written request (20 CFR 404.933(a) and 416.1433(a)). Claimants overwhelmingly use form HA-501 to request a hearing, but can also submit a letter or other written document (HALLEX I-2-0-40). We propose to revise our regulations to make form HA-501 (Request for Hearing by Administrative Law Judge) mandatory to request a hearing before an ALJ. We also propose to consolidate form HA-501 with form HA-55, Notice of Ways to Attend a Hearing, and form HA-56, Agreement to Appearing by Online Video form (HA-56). This proposal will reduce processing time for each case, improve customer service, and streamline our process for scheduling hearings.

     This is a long way from finalization. It takes months, sometimes many months, for OMB to consider the NPRM. If they approve it the agency can publish it in the Federal Register and the public can comment on it. The agency has to consider the comments and write up a final version to again submit to OMB for approval of the final rule. OMB can once again take many months to act. Only then can it be published in the Federal Register as a final rule. I’ll make a guess that the Trump Administration finishes this one as they’re leaving office. 

Trump Induced Jump In Retirement Claims

      From the New York Times:

Until recently, economic researchers were cheering an encouraging trend: Older Americans were staying in the labor force longer and waiting longer to claim their Social Security benefits, aiming to enhance their financial stability in retirement. …

Economists had documented that Americans were both retiring later and claiming their benefits later — until last year, when “all hell broke loose,” said Alicia Munnell, former director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. In an unprecedented surge, hundreds of thousands more people than usual suddenly filed for retirement benefits. …

From October 2024 to April 2025, [researchers] found, claims jumped by 267,000 compared with the previous year, a 13 percent surge. Typically, “the fluctuations were more in the 2 to 3 percent range,” [said a researcher]. …

In a 2021 study by the Boston College center, researchers showed more than 3,100 participants headlines about Social Security. One referred fairly neutrally to “a long-term financing shortfall,” while others used scarier phrases like “deplete its reserves” and “headed toward insolvency.” The accompanying short text stayed the same.

“With the headlines that were more fear-inducing, people tended to say they would claim earlier, about a year earlier,” than the control group reading the neutral headline, said Gal Wettstein, associate director of health and insurance at the center and the study co-author.

By 2025, this was no longer an academic experiment. Negative media coverage was “overwhelming,” he said. “People saw it every day.” …

A year later, claiming has reverted to more normal levels. From October 2025 to April 2026, new Social Security claims fell by 235,000, about a 10 percent drop. … The decline “effectively canceled out the surge.” …