From a House Ways and Means Committee press release:
In response to a request from Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-MA) and Ranking Member Kevin Brady (R-TX), the Social Security Administration (SSA) has outlined the urgent action field offices have taken to protect visitors from the summer heat. …
In its response, SSA reports that it has already taken a number of steps to address Congress’s concerns about maintaining the health and safety of visitors waiting in lines outside Social Security offices, including:
- Increasing in-person staff and service options to reduce waiting times at the busiest offices;
- Assigning some workloads to other offices, to free up the busiest offices for in-person service;
- Reconfiguring waiting areas to allow more people to enter climate-conditioned waiting areas; and
- Providing outdoor canopies, fans, and access to bathrooms and water fountains for those waiting outside of offices in the heat.
All my life I have heard that actions speak louder than words. I believe this applies to SSA in particular. In my home area until a couple of years ago our SSA District Office was in a large free standing fairly new building that was dedicated for SSA and built for with the public in mind. It was large and designed pretty well to serve the public in a mid-sized American city. Just before COVID, under the art collector commish and with little publicity or fanfare, our SSA bugged out to a much smaller space at a large industrial mall which also holds our often bed bug infested SSA Hearing Office. No real explanations offered leaving us to assume it was done intentionally to di8scourage the public ever coming in and forcing the use of all of this wonderful SSA technology from your shack or homeless tent. Waiting for the next bed bug infestation. Things won't really change until the public gets pissed ijhn a big way which as with Rowe is often after the damage is done.
ReplyDelete@203 PM Was the lease up? Maybe they moved for cheaper rent.
ReplyDeleteIn my many years at SSA at quite a few offices, the ones that were hard to find were there because the rent was cheaper than a more prominent place. GAO or similar made the final decisions on where offices would be.
The rest of the world opened about a year ago... SSA might need to catch up... this is ridiculous!
ReplyDeleteDon’t hold your breath. Although I anticipate changes, the offices cannot operate at the levels of pre-Covid with telework in place as it is now.
DeleteThe agency should have it figured out in 10 or 12 years, maybe.
ReplyDelete