The Associated Press is reporting that a "group" of Republican Senators is planning to hold up Carolyn Colvin's nomination for a term as Commissioner of Social Security while they seek more information about Social Security's troubled $300 DCPS computer project. The article doesn't say who is part of this "group" or how big it is. However, it hardly takes more than one Senator to block a nomination. Holding up the nomination over this sounds preposterous to me. This was former Commissioner Michael Astrue's project. Colvin merely inherited it. It's a necessary project and one that everybody knew was bound to be messy. However, if you're looking for a pretext to block a nomination of an otherwise non-controversial nominee, I guess this will do.
Update: It's all Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee. This nomination is dead at last for for this session of Congress.
Update: It's all Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee. This nomination is dead at last for for this session of Congress.
6 comments:
I love it when folks blame the prior management for the current mistakes. She has been in charge of SSA for the past 21 months. I would have thought that it would have started backed in Febraury of 2013. She could have corrected the DCPS issue already. When does she start to take responsibility as a leader of the agency?
DCPS is absolutely not a "necessary project". The current DDS systems are mature, highly functional, work extremely well, and run on hardware that offers almost unlimited growth potential. SSA's goals for DCPS functionality have been to merely reproduce the functionality which exists in the current DDS systems. SSA's motivation in building DCPS is largely political and is about increasing their control over the DDS operations.
@ Anon 10:41
A certain degree of control, and integrity in the flow of information back and forth, is needed. Too often one hand does not know what other one is doing between DDS and SSA, and within different sections at SSA. I've seen that result in misadjudications and delays. Those problems are real and they need addressing, one way or another.
Im interested to see what happens here..
Will she be confirmed..this is the question I think everyone is wondering?
I have to agree with the first poster; not only has she had time to look into the project since she became acting, as Deputy Commissioner she could very well have looked into it, barring Astrue somehow blocking her from doing so. Time for this administration to yank this nomination and sit down with the new Republican Senate next year and work out a quality, mutually agreeable candidate for the job.
This is Astrue's mess. It is ridiculous to blame Colvin for this overbloated computer problem.
Republicans are great at this passing the blame. As neither a Republican or Democrat, I do admire how the Republicans play politics well. It seems like the same way they are blaming Obama for the torture done to prisoners under Bush. It is what the Republicans do best - spin.
That being said, this is just a ploy to delay the nomination of Colvin so they can get a Republican in there again.
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