From CNBC:
Social Security has never missed a benefit payment since the program first began sending individuals monthly benefits more than eight decades ago.
But the recent actions at the U.S. Social Security Administration by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are putting monthly benefit checks for more than 72.5 million Americans at risk, former commissioner and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley told CNBC.com.
“Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits,” O’Malley said. “I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.”
For the record, I’m pretty sure that O’Malley is wrong on the threat of interrupted benefits. Social Security does not initiate payment of benefits nor does it even maintain the database of those who should be paid. The Department of the Treasury does that. Social Security just gives Treasury new info — people to be added or subtracted from the list. Treasury does the rest. So unless Treasury is itself terribly affected they will continue to make the payments. It’s just that they may be making less accurate payments including, ironically, paying some dead people who should have been cut off benefits.
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copy/past from AARP:
The acting head of the Social Security Administration (SSA) reassured Americans 65-plus that payments will continue as usual and that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has limited access to SSA systems. Many Americans have expressed concerns that rapid changes at SSA could disrupt payments or put sensitive data unnecessarily at risk.
AARP will always work tirelessly to protect the Social Security payments received by the 67 million Americans who have earned them. AARP will continue to provide this community with important, timely updates about the Social Security Administration.
I don't necessarily think O'Malley is talking about the on/of switch of Treasury. I think he is clear in indicating that benefits will be interrupted due to losses within SSA's components and staffing. Many systems are reliant on proper upkeep. When VIPr goes down, it's a setback. When CCE begins glitching, there are times when no one is getting in for updates. Offsets will be impacted greatly. UPX payments needing distributed will be delayed further. Missing checks will take longer to reissue. Complex issues reliant on regional and central office components will take longer to get a response. Allowances, already suffering from delays in adjudication will now take longer. Address changes that rely on FO's to update will be delayed. The list goes on and on. So yes, payments will be interrupted. March 14th will be a good indicator of just how badly, once we see the damage of losses. Remember, the VERA was opened up to ALL components, even Frontline. Services WILL be negatively Impacted.
DDS here. Any thoughts as to how we may be affected, or how quickly?
They have access to Treasury.
Disruption in benefit payments will be the excuse they use to "modernize the SSA payment systems" and begin privitization.
Just a coincidence that the incoming COSS is from Fiserve and Musk is working on Visa X, a new credit card processing payment system.
DDS employees are state employees and will not be directly affected.
Charles - you are misinformed about how SSA and Treasury work together to make benefit payments. Every SSA payment is initiated by SSA, transmitted in a payment file to the Treasury, certified by SSA, and then the actual payment is made by the Treasury.
Treasury does not maintain a database of who is due what payments from SSA. Those databases are SSA’s Master Beneficiary Record (MBR) for Title 2 benefits and Supplemental Security Record (SSR) for Title 16 payments.
Lee, I hope you are reading this. I always admired your work and the work OPI did. I always wanted to work there but never got picked. I understand the need to consolidate operations across the agency. A lot of that makes sense. But I have two things to ask of you: 1) you know this isn’t about fraud, waste, and abuse. SSA and your team did a great job preventing it and getting the message out to us in operations. And those of us in operations are being villainized by the public for letting this fraud exist. Help us there. The reorg can be about efficiency, so make the case that way instead of waste and abuse. 2) Operational realignment can always bring great efficiency. But what I don’t understand is losing staff. Why do you or the admin think that will promote efficiency? We’ve been in SecurityStat. We know the challenges the agency is facing. We know the RTO was pushed to help increase service. But now we are at appointment only models, the phone lines and dib time are large, and pushing our frontline staff out and re-training existing staff to move to the frontline will only increase the backlog until the learning curve is over. Especially if the training team (OTT and OSLWD) are non-essential and gone and mission support is learning its new roles. So why the goal for 7,000 cut? Offer VERA and VISP and leave it at that. It will give people who aren’t performing and are ready to end their career a chance to leave who wernt eligible for the DRP, and that will give a boost to productivity. Let the new hires finish training and get up to speed and then reassess. But when you force people out the door with institutional knowledge the performance will suffer, just like when we lost so much HR staff to the VA. Go back over the STAT data. Make the case that we have a strong anti-fraud program and info sec program. Argue we can modernize IT with help and funding. Argue that we do our jobs but can be more efficient and that’s the goal. O’Malley is claiming we will have an interruption to benefits for the first time ever. I don’t think it has to be that way. But we need staff to do so. Point blank.
My prediction: They‘re going to force even more impossible production metrics on DDS to try and make up for having about 1/10 of the staff needed to run things, and no one will be left within a year or so at most.
> "Social Security does not initiate payment of benefits nor does it even maintain the database of those who should be paid. The Department of the Treasury does that. Social Security just gives Treasury new info — people to be added or subtracted from the list. "
This isn't accurate. SSA maintains the database of those who should be paid and submits a payment file to Treasury for processing. https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202401001
Time will tell if O'Malley's prognostications will materialize. But thousands of years of collective institutional knowledge walked out the door over the last few weeks at SSA, including specialized and arcane knowledge of SSA's core systems and processes. So the risk is real, but I suppose that's what the public wanted when it voted for this.
I guess I might be out soon too. News says we got another “five things” email from the drug addict last night, but I won’t be around next week to answer it.
Let’s be real. The public voted for lower grocery bills and whomever made the funniest memes. The public had no idea that the system was going to be gutted so billionaires could get larger payouts at the expense of the working class.
@2:20. No. You be real. The public had every reason to know what would happen, his campaign published the agenda to decimate the "deep state" before the election. His acolytes pledged before the election to "create trauma" for the federal workforce. Now they are.
Maybe YOU should go to work and watch a colleague die of a heart attack. Maybe YOU read hear about your colleagues lost to suicide, watch dozens of your peers be fired with a press release, witness coworkers with decades of committed service thrown to the curb for fabricated "performance reasons" with a single email. The weekend OPM emails. The daily trauma and employee lists and threats of RIFs. The abject cruelty from the White House and vilification of the civil service on mainstream news. The DOGE kids tampering with master data files at SSA and throughout the government. The mass email gloating about "terminating 14 employees" and Dudek's press releases -- dripping with viciousness -- calling the victims of this purge "shameful" and "wasteful" for, well, doing the jobs their supervisors directed them to do at the direction of elected leadership. It is an outrage, and honestly, if the public is harmed by it in the end by an interruption in payments, well, elections have consequences for them too.
@2:20 if only this same doofus had been in office previously to show everyone what he was going to do. The problem wasn't lack of public information to tell us what would happen, the problem was lack of caring. Thanks to those who decided to FA, we are knee deep in the FO phase and the excrement is rising.
Not just interruptions in your retirement/disability benefits, but cuts to benefits are coming. Deep ones. Trump said it that we will all need to feel pain. They will shift your money to Wall Street and financial institutions who have never had waste, fraud or abuse of their clients funds. Your hard earned tax dollars and benefits, your parents, your children, your siblings and your friends will suffer from what they will take from you. This affects every American. Their goal is to hamstring the agency's capabilities and than say they cannot fix it. At that point they will outsource it to Wall Street and the Big Banks. By the way, they have taken your protections away as they decimate other agency's that protect your finances.
@4:34 @4:59 You’re missing my point. Half the population was hoodwinked and should be angry about it.
@2:20. Too many lazy, uninformed people and an inept, spineless Democratic "opposition" are a bad combination.
Lee, I hope you read this post! You are a very smart man. Many people in the agency respect your work ethic and analytical skills. Please fight for SSA. Don't let them cut 7,000 employees. Our agency will collapse with this reduction. OPM will make an exception for us. Since, we are experiencing a 50-year staffing low and our services are critical to the American public.
O’Malley is wrong as usual. Heck his video budget alone would save social security.
Email today from ACOSS states “ Elections have consequences. President Biden dismissed Andrew Saul, fundamentally altering the independence of the Social Security Administration. With that decision, the autonomy our employees once enjoyed changed.
Now, under President Trump, we follow established precedent: we serve at the pleasure and direction of the President. Only the Courts or Congress can intervene.”
Where are the lawyers? This is clearly false. The civil service act protects federal employees and not agency heads. Am I missing something?
The “elections have consequences “ email post has to be a troll. There is no way an agency head would reasonably use that language.
Welcome to Musk‘s America, courtesy of the lazy orange r***ard.
Today on Joe Rogan, Elon called Social Security a Ponzi scheme
For years folks at the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and other right wing think tanks have been pushing for full privatization of Social Security. They keep pointing out how "great" the Chilean privatized system designed by Milton Friedman's Chicago Boys worked.
Do a Google search about that Chilean fiasco and see how it failed to the point that Chile went back to the old system after Pinochet got the boot!
Semantics. The changes to correct records and fix payments is at tsc, fo, psc level which is supported by the work the so called “nonessentials” do (I dont support doge at all). I can cite several times policies took forever to come out/fixes. It isnt going to affect the majority but like covid well see cases fall into the cracks. Triage choices will have to be made of priorities.
10:35, the email is legit. It reads like a wacko manifesto.
Oh, it’s real.
Seat belts, airbags, and bumpers are not essential to the operation of a car, but without them drivers and passengers will get hurt. These cuts appear to get rid of SSA's seat belts, airbags, and bumpers, so to speak. It also looks like they are considering throwing out the transmission and the brakes. Will SSA resemble the car from the Flintstones before this is all done?
It is
While SSA still have a significant initial claims pending backlog
Gauleiter Dudek doesn't care about you or the agency. Everything he has done has shown he will look out for himself alone and that's it.
Again, were they hoodwinked or do they just not care? He did the same thing the first time around. There are no guardrails now, so the actions are more severe. But it's the same playbook. So even if they were hoodwinked, the old truism applies: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The people who got hoodwinked have nobody to blame but themselves.
10:35 -- maybe now you'll understand why virtually all the correspondence from OPM and new leadership has been problematic... the unprofessional language, lack of clarity, and (for OPM items) typically no signage from specific individuals to provide responsibility for the language has contributed to this chaos and uncertainty over who is making these decisions.
--
Meanwhile, yeah, getting rid of the "bad apples" by using an abusive sledgehammer approach that actually drives away more of the really good ones instead...? Oh, that sounds legit and sensible...
Unsurprisingly terrible take from the lunatic AC. Someone needs a reminder that we are public servants, not president servants. Courts and congress cannot intervene soon enough.
Guess it is time to take away retirement benefits from your parents. Elon is not offering ways to fix anything. Just tear it down. Retirement benefits gone, disability benefits gone, Medicare gone, Medicaid gone, Veterans health benefits gone, Tricare for our Service members gone. That totals about $3T annually. There you have it. Everybody is on their own from now on.
How come no one is talking about the unhinged manifesto the ACOSS emailed to all of social security on Saturday night where he all but admits he has gone rogue and expects to be fired?
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