From the right wing think tank American Enterprise Institute:
Here in the DOGE era, the specter of inefficient bureaucracy haunts many government agencies. Yet the Social Security Administration (SSA) offers a surprising counter-narrative—at least in parts. As civil servants go, those administering retirement benefits are a relatively efficient bunch, according to AEI scholar Mark Warshawsky, who until 2021 served as the agency’s deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy.
As he tells in a new podcast, “I would say, in terms of the retirement side, it is a well-run program.” The Internal Revenue Service efficiently collects payroll taxes and administers benefit taxation, while disbursements flow with minimal leakage through fraud or processing errors. This efficiency is all the more remarkable given the program’s gargantuan scale—some $1.3 trillion in annual benefits.
Less efficient, Warshawsky goes on to explain, is the Disability Insurance part of Social Security. It demands substantially more administrative resources, with means-testing, medical evaluations, and ongoing eligibility verification creating a bit of a bureaucratic morass. Likewise, the Supplemental Security Income program is also particularly cumbersome, requiring detailed scrutiny of both income and assets.
Recent criticisms of the agency seem overblown, however. Claims about payments to long-deceased beneficiaries are demonstrably false. The SSA employs robust verification mechanisms, including automatic investigation of nonagenarians without recent medical claims and outright benefit denial for anyone claiming to exceed 115 years of age. …
9 comments:
AEI needs to take a course on bias. Wow, the guy who worked there thinks things are efficiently run? Does the local chef believe he has the best burger in the world? Journalism these days is sickening.
Warshawsky has long been opposed to the disability program as it exists today. He has been the source of proposals to modify/eliminate the grid rules and believe that far too many people get found disabled with the assistance of attorneys who he considers to be overpaid.
he fact that he at least acknowledges that the retirement side of the program is pretty well run, given that it is but also given that it does not require very many, if any, policy choices. The mistakes that occur happen, for example, when undertrained staff fail to investigate possible alternative claims on other wage records or entitlements for step-children.
But, yes, as we all know, in terms of administering the disability programs and SSI, the SSA is far from a model of competent administration. Partly, but not completely, lacking staff is an issue. If the new COSS can fix even some of the communication problems, I will be cheering him onward. At the least, I would like phones to be answered by people competent enough to recognize the problem and with the ability to rectify obvious errors. Just not the case now.
AEI is a right-wing think-tank. Their bias is well-known and put forward in any publication you ever read.
The gist of the article, once you understand that single fact, is that "hey, even this right-wing think tank who is pre-disposed to hate government agencies thinks that the RSI program is well-run."
Your ignorance is amazing. Warshawsky is not a shill for SSA. He was part of the first trump administration.
The overhead to run SSA without privatization is far cheaper than the overhead with privatization. Fraud and error rates are lower too. Privately run comparable insurance companies and financial institutions cannot compete because they have those always hungry shareholders to satisfy. The next battle will be fending off the greedy private industry profiteers swarming in to “save” SSA from its DOGE inflicted wounds.
Comparatively efficient? Yes. Decades of dysfunctional management? Yes.
Everyone complains about Social Security until you are eligible to collect 👀
Anecdotal: SSA processed my WEP and GPO by early this month (March) following the SSFAct, and they processed my request to deduct income tax in about a week from mailing. I haven't had time to check their math for my WEP/GPO, complicated by Medicare premium issues, but I'm still impressed, given the stress on the agency.
Let’s see how Frank the payments maestro will straighten things out quickly as he thinks SSA is just a small payment processing organization compared to what he has done in his past. Hey Frank, SSA does not transact payments, nor a lockbox system. SSA administrators various benefit and enrollment programs . US Treasury actually handles the payment processing. Sorry, Frank. Trump placed you at the wrong agency.
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