I have finally watched the Bisignano confirmation hearing. I found it tedious. For the most part, it wasn't a job interview. It was a performance by all parties. I understand that there are private meetings between nominees and Senators. I hope those are more substantive.
Anyway, here are a few thoughts:
- Bisignano said he would improve Social Security's technology generally and telephone answering. How can he possibly do this without a substantially higher appropriation? He wasn't asked about this. I wish he had been.
- Bisignano said he was committed to a six year term. I don't know but I'll be surprised if he's still there in December 2028 much less December 2030.
- Bisignano and Committee members repeatedly likened the work of the Social Security Administration to the work of the companies Bisignano has led. I don't have experience in those businesses but I just can't imagine the work of those companies being that similar to what Social Security does. Social Security is unique. It's work is vastly more complicated than processing massive numbers of simple credit card charges. He said he had 13,000 IT professionals at Fiserv. He'll have a vastly lower number at Social Security and no funds to hire more.
- Nobody asked Bisignano where he will be working. Will he be engaging in much telework from his home in New York City? I think agency employees would be interested to know. If they're being forced back to the office so should the Commissioner
- Bisignano talked about reducing improper payments as if no one at Social Security has ever tried to reduce them. That's wrong. There have been extensive efforts by many people over many decades. I don't think there are any measures imaginable to substantially reduce them. Only incremental progress is possible.
- Bisignano added a useful note of reality to the discussion of COBOL programs at Social Security. He said that COBOL is still being used extensively not just at Social Security but in many, many businesses.
- I don’t think that anyone asked Bisignano about the Regional Office consolidations. This process couldn’t have advanced very far. I keep thinking that this bad idea will be quietly abandoned.
- I remain convinced that everybody in the Trump Administration thinks that federal employees are stupid and lazy and that simple measures can lead to dramatic improvements in government functioning even with fewer government employees. This is a fallacy.
- Bisignano testified that in his business experience he did not arbitrarily pick a number of employees to fire without analyzing how many employees were needed to get the work done. DOGE has not been following this obvious practice.
- By the way, it appears that Senator Warnock has a trigger finger -- his right pinkie. I'm mystifying many readers, I'm sure. I talking about something medical here. It’s what I do.
33 comments:
You are funny, Charles. Saul was rarely in Baltimore. There’s no way Frank will move to Maryland or rent a house there. Rules and policies do not apply to them.
I wish the regional consolidations would be abandoned but on the hearings side they already made announcements for the new judges and pushed out most of the sitting chief judges. I imagine operations will be the same. Hope you don’t have any fees pending there like our firm because you won’t be getting paid for maybe five years at this point.
regional office consolidation is happening now.
To the point about IT staff levels, Lee declared war on OCIO yesterday when being briefed on the recent efforts to reduce staffing through retirement, voluntary separations, and reassignment. He directed
that RIFs need to be initiated, with OCIO as the target.
Charles I think you underestimate the stupidity and inertia of some of the stuff that is done and more importantly not done within SSA. Basically standard bureaucratic stupidity, but it has grown unchecked for decades and decades. Many/most of the problems are essentially apolitical - they are not so much conservative or liberal as just stupid and unaddressed. Not everything is a matter of appropriations.
This is particularly true since SSA has utterly failed to create software tools for many of its very small, unglamorous everyday internal tasks. Very simple software tools like drop downs with some decision-pathing to get you from point A to B to C in resolving issues. Learning all the intricacies of, say, the re-entitlement period or in-kind income rules is daunting, but following a screen which presents issues sequentially with citations to relevant authorities and guidance is not some monumental software challenge. And, by the way, AI can be used to help create those kind of tools - both their design and the actual coding. So it can be done much cheaper and faster than in the past.
With such tools new employees (or old ones) can be guided step by step in carrying out tasks, as opposed to trying to remember some aspect of their weeks-long training from years before. That speeds things up and helps with accuracy. Many of Social Security’s obstacles are essentially similar software/ bureaucratic challenges.
Reforming a bureaucracy is probably one of the hardest things known to humankind. Between indifference and people‘s little domains and fiefdoms that they protect like family heirlooms it is a monumental battle to change. But at least on paper it is not complicated. His answer as to what is the most important thing to change was “will.“ That struck me as a very unorthodox answer but also at least potentially very insightful. Maybe he will turn out to be the maga-driven ogre that so many think he will, and maybe I’m a naïve and useful idiot, but he seems to have actual serious ideas about how to accomplish things. That is a dramatic change. It is worth waiting to see how it goes. The contrast with doge, or Leland, is striking.
Also, there is a difference between RIF’ing employees versus reassigning them in a more efficient way. Moving people from mid management positions in regional offices to public facing field office work is not outlandish. Reducing middle-management was part of Al Gore‘s (failed) reinventing government crusade. It is much more improbable that you can sensibly allocate resources in the same unchanging positions/locations for decades as opposed to adjusting to changing times and tools and challenges by moving them around as needed to accomplish the organization’s mission. Hopefully that will be done with compassion for the realities of employees’ personal lives, and every effort will be made to preserve jobs and let attrition do the dirty work, but ultimately we are supposed to be focused on the good of the public rather than just what’s best for employees personally. Change is not a four letter word, especially when it hasn’t happened for a quarter century or more.
Why ask for more appropriations? He can just take all the agency's IT budget and use it to force his own software down the agency's throat.
The Regional Offices have been reduced from 10 to 4. Most of the Regional Commissioners, "retired," and most of their staff are being or have been reassigned. Any excess that would even question Frank's decisions are gone.
The administration thinks federal employees are lazy, or the administration is selling that story because federal employees cost money, which means less money flowing in the direction of certain other people's pockets. I kinda wish they had strong feelings towards us. Complete indifference somehow feels worse.
Frank basically admitted what he was going to do. "There are no one-off. My, my lifetime of experience shows there's pattern recognition." What's Frank's pattern?
This worked out better than Frank could have expected, get rid of anyone who doesn't jump when he says jump, put an agency patsy in place to take the fall for all the bad decisions, then swoop in and be the "hero saving the agency," from all the chaos that you orchestrated in the first place.
Excellent analysis Charles. Spot on. Yes Frank needs to be asked if he is teleworking and why ALJs are not forced back in when everyone else is. So if only Frank and ALJs get fulltime telework that means only the highest paid and most privileged employees get full time telework and never have to come back in.
He could have come in wearing a chicken suit and clucking his answers and would be given the position. Honestly I dont care anymore. I have a retirement countdown, I built my retirement based on not getting a penny from SSA. I served my country in the military, as a SSA employee and as an advocate for the aging, disabled and low income populations. I am done. Dont care who is in charge, dont care what they change, dont care who gets hurt. I am DONE. I check in with my coffee before my morning calls and laugh now. Y'all have fun with this good old fashion cluster f*&^ cause it aint my problem anymore.
One thing I constantly hear is that the systems are so complicated that it takes years to be reasonably competent on the systems at the SSA.
Did you ever think that it could be way too complex? In people's careers, they gate keep their processes to protect their employment.
Implement modern processing operations to reduce complexity. That seems to be what he plans to do, and that sounds reasonable.
You missed the point. Its not the systems (software and such) but the system (ie the programs like SSI SDDI Medicare Entitlement, Enumeration, Wage Reporting etc) that are complicated. Look at POMS, its the SSA processing manual, it tells you how, where, what has to be done. It is more complicated than the tax code. You have to take time to learn it you cant speed that up you can only absorb so much.
Telework for ALJs (and OHO generally) was explicitly discussed in the video of the weekly operations meeting at the 23:00 mark.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mvlWfnwZxgI&list=PLGSYaZN04xzETftLrA-J4jEiWG6h1IctP&index=2
On it's face, it does sound reasonable to do. However, legacy IT systems built on COBOL are beyond complex. There's a reason so many companies (by Bisignano's own statement) still use legacy systems even in the environment of new and better tech. If you're starting from scratch the new stuff is great. I'll bet in 25 years though some IT guy will be grousing about programs that still run on Python as it will be a dinosaur language then. But it will still be humming along. Stuff won't get replaced. Systems will be built on top of. It'll be another ring around the tree trunk getting bigger and more complex. Ai isn't a silver bullet and likely is many years off from being able to do what they're selling us.
ALJs and other OHO staff have not been on full-time telework in recent years. Please quit spreading falsehoods, and shut your mouth until you’ve learned what it is you’re talking about.
Regional consolidation is happening and it’s the one thing I’m grateful for. Is it good for the agency? Probably not. But combining regions seems to be creating an opportunity to reveal and review some of the antagonistic policy interpretations certain regions had developed towards its employees.
11:14 the ACOSS himself sent an email stating ALJs and OHO have full time telework. Every writer I know has full time telework. You’re saying this is false?
Bisignano should be in the office 5 days a week, as Commissioner O'Malley was when he served.
Also, the Republicans claimed many of the problems at SSA were caused by teleworking employees who were not working hard at home. Now that there has been RTO, if the problems don't improve, they and the new commissioner should admit they were wrong, and resume telework privileges for SSA employees.
Whatever platform, environment or programming language you use, the moment it is put in production it becomes legacy.
10:11am that’s the truth
Would have been nice to see Democrats dive deeper on his actual subject matter expertise on the software side of things. Bisignano should have sway to recruit his own FISERV engineers with COBOL experience and IT security expertise, which is far more preferable than having the DOGE kids rooting around code with no apparent oversight. His responses were a bit too shallow for me. And I am tired of hearing the AI buzzword being thrown around without any use case specifics.
Bisignano also did not engage with the source of payment errors at SSA. There is no magic bullet to solving overpayment/underpayment issues related to wage and Workers Comp changes. SSA relies on external data sources and manual reporting. Regulation changes would be required to dramatically reduce errors. As Charles stated, credit card charges and retail transactions are far simpler.
I doubt he understands the source of those errors. They range from information as to work activity not being reported or not connected to files because the reporting is sent by mail and the mail is not timely associated with any file. There are mistakes because representatives give bad information to callers, not distinguishing between SS or SSI claims, not understanding the TWP rules, or not understanding options as to WC or something called the RIB/DIB election. And, yes, sometimes people lie.
In Bisignano's world, the actual payment errors are extremely low. But that is also true in Social Security where if the inputs are correct, the payments will virtually always be correct. The problem is getting the inputs correct. Comparing error rates in this environment, either 1% or 0.0001% are comparing apples to kumquats. They are just not the same.
Can't understand the opposition to regional office consolidation. SSA having ten regions predated computers.
Having four is crazy….the new Midwest region literally spans from Michigan to Alaska. How do you have meetings with such a huge swing in time zones.
That ALJs don’t telework full-time is false. We only come in if we have in person hearings which for most is rare. I am far more productive at home and can watch my grandchildren.
The link that used to allow you to start the basic information for SSI Aged Benefits and provided protective filing is no longer active. The webpage says "We're sorry, this program terminated unexpectedly" as of 4:42pm Central. New verb, this has been doged.
What the average person that has never worked for SSA doesn't understand is that the specific institutional knowledge required to do the work is great. When the DOGE-boys first came to SSA, SSA attempted to give them the same basic training the give to OIG and other agencies that are reviewing SSA work. DOGE blew it off, because they weren't interested in learning about things like PIAs, family maximums, auxiliary benefits, combined family maximums, simultaneous and multiple entitlements, Parisi adjustments, etc. As a result, they simply don't know about how Title II of the Act actually works in real life. Thus, they made ridiculous claims about fraud that any veteran claims specialist, claims authorizer, or benefit authorizer at SSA knows are patently false.
To improve something, you first have to understand it. And, those idiots don't understand squat.
See, I found "will" to be as ridiculous as if he suggested we reform the agency through the power of friendship. That answer was asinine, and nobody called him out for it. We don't live in a fantasy land, and the power of positive thinking isn't a strategy. I trust him as far as I can throw the bloated carcass of a moderately-sized beached whale.
No that was taken down during O'Malley's tenure.
Why, if he was hired for being a truly insightful and effective leader, would DOGE be slashing and burning the place at such a pace, BEFORE he takes office?
The operating system that runs the agency is the law, which requires a complex set of rules to implement. Anytime Congress wants to radically simplify the program, you can radically simplify the IT systems.
You and I have different conceptions of “will.” Will meaning you actually follow up on problems. You don’t keep punting year after year, surrendering to whatever ingrained bureaucratic practices and culture keep you from achieving change and improvements. That’s been the history of SSA, especially in the realm of software for frontline workers. There’s nothing particularly unique about SSA’s software challenges, yet for some reason we have inferior software whereas a couple dozen committed people in private industry can create world-changing software. Will meaning you ignore attitudes like that displayed in your comment, and find the creative determined SSA employees who believe that they can achieve objective improvement in our tools that lead to faster, better service. There are tons of highly intelligent, creative individuals willing to work their tails off to improve our processes if only they weren’t chained to their PD’s and mindless PACS ratings.
To me the fantasy-land is believing you can provide great service in 2025 without making software the center of your enterprise, and exercising the willpower to accomplish that. There is a reason that SSA finished dead last in the FEVS ratings, and operations and hearings finished below 400 out of 430+ sub-components. SSA employees have spoken pretty clearly regarding our current culture and practices.
What do you mean by this?
@11:39 DOGE was acting on a higher, government-wide mandate from the administration, whereas the new commissioner (who has yet to work a single day) has to actually make the agency work.DOGE/Leland have been recklessly bludgeoning, whereas IMO Bisignano actually said some things that make sense, based on my very frustrating firsthand experience in SSA. Anyway, time will tell.
Just got an email today from the new team leading our new region. Sigh
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