From a press release:
U.S. Senators Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), Mike Crapo (R-ID), and Senate Finance Committee Republicans sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) requesting the agency monitor the Managing Trustee’s flagrant disregard for statutory deadlines. Required by law, the Medicare and Social Security Trustees reports are to be issued no later than April 1, yet the 2021 and 2022 reports were issued August 31 and June 2, respectively. ...
The Biden Administration has repeatedly ignored Congressional inquiries as to why the trustees reports have not been submitted in a timely manner. Neither Treasury Secretary Yellen nor the Board of Trustees have signaled any intent to modify internal procedure regulating management of the report schedule, nor have they adopted previous GAO recommendations to improve communication with Congress. It is the responsibility of the Treasury Secretary to provide these reports to Congress in a timely manner, as required by law, or provide Congress and the American people with explanations for late work. ...
These delays are annoying but it's not like the Trustees Reports have arrived on time during Republican administrations. I suspect the delays have to do with staffing at Social Security's Office of Chief Actuary but I don't know. The delay certainly isn't a major problem.
5 comments:
Congress doesn't seem to concerned about ignoring their obligations to have a budget by October 1 every year!
It would be nice to see them complain about applications and appeals sitting in local offices for a year without being processed.
9:50 - Well the GAO does report to congress, not the other way around, and the reports are not a partisan political process. If Congress doesn't do their job they stand to be voted out of office. These bureaucrats at the GAO aren't accountable to the public. It's not a serious comparison.
They've been late for a long time now, sometimes very late, but the 2019 and 2020 came out April 22, so it is possible to at least be close. I always thought it was the Trustees that held it up, not the actuaries, since I thought the Trustees wrote some of the verbiage. I think the law just requires a report to Congress on the state of the programs and Trust Funds. If so, maybe they could just report the minimum the law requires by the deadline, and the full report later.
Like anyone reads it anyway.
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