House Republicans have proposed that appropriations for Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, which begins on October 1, 2023, be cut back to the FY 2022 levels. Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee asked heads of major agencies what that would mean for their agencies. Social Security responded that going back to FY 2022 numbers would mean they would have to:
- Close field offices and shorten hours we are open to the public, cutting off vital access to face-to-face service delivery.
- Increase the amount of time individuals wait for a decision on their initial disability claim, leading to an average wait time of 9 months, or up to 30 percent longer than today.
- Implement a hiring freeze for the agency and the DDS, which means a reduction of over 5,000 employees who are essential to processing retirement claims, making disability decisions, answering the National 800 Number, and issuing new and replacement Social Security cards.
- Furlough staff for over 4 weeks and lay off approximately 6,000 employees—producing even longer wait times than customers experience today on our National 800 Number and in our field offices, causing delays to decisions on retirement claims and delays in processing Social Security cards and verification of Social Security Numbers for individuals seeking employment.
- Eliminate overtime pay, reducing our ability to keep pace with claims and other service requests
22 comments:
What bureaucrat doesn't predict the end of the world when their budget is cut? Perhaps they could learn a thing or two from Mr. Musk.
If these cuts are implemented. republicans will say telework caused deteriorating service
@9:56
Yes, if there is one thing Musk's companies are known for its stability and customer support.
It probably did.
@956 Dire predictions are the rule but right now the agency is badly understaffed so there may be a bit of truth to some of the worst case scenarios.
SSA does its "Chicken Little" routine again. Budget cuts should mean trimming the fat in middle and upper management. But instead, they run around yelling the the sky is falling
Can you be a little more specific? This as generic and non-helpful of an answer as you can give. What is considered fat to you in the middle and upper management?
What do you mean by "trimming the fat in middle and upper management?" Do you mean laying them off/firing them? Because you can't do that.
Under federal law, RIFs are determined by tenure, so if the agency has to lay people off, it's gonna be all the front line folks who were hired in the past three years or so.
But just to ask - what fat would you cut from upper/middle management? Specifically which jobs are unnecessary? What do they do and how would the agency function without people in that role?
A. There won't be budget cuts.
B. SSA is already severely underfunded and cutting a couple hundred managers would be a drop in the bucket that would not avert disaster.
C. But wait, the agency is ALREADY a disaster. Cutting the budget would turn it into the biggest tire fire in US history.
I call BS. SSA has never implemented a RIF. It would not lay off 6000 employees. It may lose that to attrition, transfers, and retirement, but no way would they lay off 10% of the Agency. Personally, I think we use OT as a crutch because the Agency will not or cannot hire enough people to do the work. Although i do not want employees to feel the financial impact, I'd be fine with no OT. Then we'd really hear complaints as service would tank overnight.
Layoffs and not hiring directly affect front line services in 2 critical ways—employees don’t get proficient as quickly (layoffs) or at all (hiring freezes).
If telework is a success then close the massive Baltimore headquarters. Most of all those employees haven't been back to the office since Covid. There is the savings! However it isn't as dire as closing field offices or slashing front line employees.
Maybe a disaster is what is needed. Hear me out.
The system is broken, failing at absolutely every single level of operation, every single metric, every single task.
Sometimes you have to start over. You cant fix it because it is too broken. Each decade it has been patched, over the patch another patch with changing cultural beliefs and agendas each patch does and undoes something from before. Each patch covering a crack in the system, now there is no system left, just patches. Rules, stacked on rules, stacked on rules stacked on process.
SSA was not this complex when started, or even close, it has been abused to the point of failure and made so complex that even the people at SSA say they dont even know how to do it and it takes years to do. It simply shouldnt be that hard, it is hard because it is broken and broken beyond repair.
Cutting overtime would be a disaster. I've worked in the Office of Disability Operations (PC7) for 40 years and we've always needed overtime to keep up with the workloads.
They did try to cut OT a couple of times, but backlogs skyrocketed and they had to bring it back. Then it took many months just to get back to where we were before OT was cut. .
I think there should be one point of clarity. Everyone says “ssa is a disaster” or “this is the worst ssa has ever been” but what you need to clarify is “ssa is lacking in the area you interact with, aka disability” everyone seems to forget dib isn’t the vast majority of SSA work. Millions of retirement and Medicare claims, enumerations, earnings records updates, treasury enforcements, data exchanges, etc all are processed with no issues. Give credit where it’s due. Yes disability operations are struggling but it isn’t fair to say “the whole agency is failing in everything”..that is the biggest “the sky is falling” dramatic overstatement in this whole thread. Lol.
I’m also intrigued to see that poster explain what the middle level fat is that needs to be cut. I think we are all waiting for an explanation on that. Haha.
9:56 it is broken at every level, from issuing new numbers to retirement filings, from getting Part B started after retirement to original Medicare enrollment. Every single day our office has two full time people that do nothing but help people with those types of problems. They have appointments every single day. Every Single Day! We have checks stopped for "fraud" going to the exact same account used for two decades, we have people that are declared dead but are quite alive, so we had to hire an ambulance to take them and a certified medical records to the office (because a 94 year old man with dementia doesnt have a drivers license or ID having been in a skilled care community for four and a half years. You are delusional if you think it is all cream and strawberries out here, in reality it is, as we used to say in the military a Cluster %$#@
@7:12: That would be the rational thing to do. But those invertebrates are anything but rational.
Its 11:13 again
Dont get me wrong, I understand people are doing the best they can, but because they are under so much stress, because things are so bad, things are getting missed, mistakes are being made. It isnt the fault of the staff that nobody can answer a phone or a fax or that appointments are weeks and weeks out. You can only do so much and I get it, but to act like it is only a few areas of the agency that are feeling the impact is completely and totally wrong. I get it, but the agency is in really bad shape and quite frankly there is nothing that can fix it this year, or next or even the year after, it is going to take a decade or more, if it ever gets better.
If it worked like it was supposed too, we wouldnt have to have the employees we have, the state and federal funds that pays part of those salaries through the Older Americans Act. When you have to have federal funds, to pay to help people manage and get through a federal program ropes and hoops, it shows that things are just out of control. It quite simply shouldnt be this hard.
The extreme right wing of the Republican party is the disaster here. A party of conspiracy kooks, insurrectionists, secessionists, Birchers, and fascists. The American people need to take the car keys away from this party of nuttery for about fifty years just like after the Great Depression.
It wouldn't be as bad as it is, but every time management "improves" SSA IT infrastructure they make it less and less and less productive. On average, my DIB appointments take 15-20 minutes longer now than they used to due to the medical and SSI systems "improvements". They call the new SSI system "Consolidated Claims Experience" or CCE. It ought to to be called "Consolidated Claims Nightmare" (which is what it is to anyone who actually has to try to use it more than once every few years like management). And don't get me started on that Worktrack boondoogle (I frequently wake up from nightmares at night that involve spinning circles waiting for images to display in the worthless piece of crap).
The agency is projecting employee losses this year of between 4k to 5k more employees. Those "8000 new hires" they are so high on aren't going to amount to squat, especially when 3/4 of them quit within a year of "training" once they realize what they've gotten themselves into (or, for the younger ones, when they come to understand that, yes, the agency actually expects them to show up for work by 9am and that no, it isn't a joke).
@6:50AM: Right on. These fools invariably think new tech means improved efficiency, even when anyone with a shred of common sense would clearly see otherwise. For example, these morons actually thought it would make medical files easier to review by automatically ordering badly-formatted duplicate copies of claimants’ medical records at every level of the process. It’s a sad but fairly ubiquitous symptom of oldness/boomerism.
Lol not “probably” - telework is actively deteriorating service
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