Here's a media account of yesterday's House Social Security Subcommittee hearing on overpayments. As I expected, GOP members beat up on the Acting Commissioner, whose name they seemed unable to pronounce, probably because they'd never seen her before. When there's a problem, it's far easier to blame someone than to examine the root causes of the problem. Democratic members, of course, defended Kijakazi and expressed outrage over the agency's funding, among other things.
8 comments:
Lets speak all the uncomfortable truths here:
- Kilolo is incompetent.
- Congress is clueless about how the SSA works.
- The SSA is woefully underfunded.
- If it were not, there would be way less work for Congressional staffers.
- IT infrastructure at the SSA is woeful, and that is mostly because of decades of bad decision-making.
- The Social Security Act as written forces the SSA to engage in ridiculous overpayment collection.
- Only Congress can change that.
Yesterday I checked on the status of a court remand ALJ case in PSC . The CS took their actions and routed ACR to Benefit Authorizer (BA) in March 2023, to input the award. Seven months later, it is still sitting in BA processing, unassigned.
ALJ's used to have to be processed within 60 days of the decision. . More staffing is sorely needed for PSC BA.
It has become evident that making SSA an independent agency was a disaster. The thought process was that SSA would become apolitical and detached from the annual fights surrounding HHS. Instead, SSA has been ignored because it has no cabinet level representation.
The lack of political leadership has allowed a cast of careerists to hang onto the upper echelons for years without repercussions for failure.
I have worked with every COSS staff going back to Kenneth Apfel, and this is by far the most unprepared group I have seen. It's sad, really. And I am gone by the end of the year - another talented person lost to the dysfunction.
On a related note, I regularly see answers being filed from SSA with their client named "Kilo Kijakazi."
Pretty sure it's an autocorrect thing, but you would really think someone would catch it before it's filed.
It’s not that they can’t pronounce her name. It’s that mispronouncing the names of minorities has become a way for certain politicians to subtly broadcast their racist bona fides to a certain group of voters.
1:25 pm: Too true.
I thought it was significant that, when asked about the status of automation projections, the Commissioner was clueless. Shouldn't that be a priority? Didn't the previous Commissioner (who was fired) make that a priority? I don't disagree the agency needs more funding but, I don't trust the current administration to do the right thing with it. We will likely get more diversity initiatives instead of upgrades to IT systems that are badly needed.
Nothing will improve at SSA…nothing.
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