From the Washington Post:
Democrats, after weeks of struggling to find a message that resonates with ordinary Americans while President Donald Trump dominates the news, are beginning to settle on one: the allegation that Trump and his allies are crippling Social Security. …
“For much of the country, Washington might as well be Mars for all the connection it has to them,” Sen. Ron Wyden (Oregon), the top Democrat on the committee that oversees Social Security, said in an interview. “But Social Security is something where there is connective tissue between the government and the people.” …
Michael Astrue, who led the Social Security Administration under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — and says he voted for Trump — sharply criticized cuts to the agency by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency. “I think you have a group of very immature people coming out of Silicon Valley bro culture, and they have decided federal agencies are filled with bad people doing bad things, and if you go in and hack away, and you don’t have to know what you are doing, you can improve it because less is more,” Astrue said. …
The White House has shown uncharacteristic concern that the Democratic message on Social Security could resonate. The president has made clear to top aides that he does not like seeing the agency in the news so often and so negatively, one senior Social Security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about a sensitive issue. …
8 comments:
Yes, POTUS should be extremely concerned about SSA in the news every day. People need to know of the great destruction of the internal workings of the SSA. Its not only Musk, but also the acting CoSSA, that have done this destruction. The employees and systems have been treated like dirt and scattered to the wind. Threatening them with forced reassignments, terminations and no clear directions or work plans every day. Morale is completely shot and will take years to recover, if at all. Employees, as well as computer systems, have no support. No one would treat employees so badly, especially when less than 50,000 of them across the nation, serve a beneficiary population of more than 70 million. Such a low employee to customer ratio is unheard of in private industry. If conditions don't improve this week, the processing of claimants, and payments, will eventually stop and POTUS will get the blame.
When attorneys aren't getting paid... Or when they do, are getting overpaid.... Enmass due to the new rules, that's when there will be enough outcry heard in DC that something has to happen. FO's across the US are sitting on attorney payments because no one knows how to pay them anymore. Talking hundreds of millions in payments due.
Chaos is going to hit when FOs can't get anything done because they no longer have any support from their regions. I give it 90 days.
The president has made clear to top aides that he does not like seeing the agency in the news so often and so negatively,
The uproar if Social Security payments are missed due to DOGE will be off the charts. Buckle up!
If that! Support already is non-existent and FOs can't hold out much longer.
What happened to the the two trillion in taxpayer savings that DOGE promised? What DOGE did accomplish is destroy agencies such as SSA.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, says it has saved $160 billion through its push to root out wasteful or fraudulent government spending. But that effort may also have come at a cost for taxpayers, with a new analysis from a nonpartisan research and advocacy group estimating that DOGE's actions will cost $135 billion this fiscal year.
The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce.
PSP's estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE's actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn't include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS.
DOGE has sought to slash federal spending by urging government workers to accept a deferred resignation plan, which allowed many employees to retain full pay and benefits through September without working. Another 24,000 government employees who were fired as part of the reform effort have since been rehired after a court ruling.
Your hand-picked team is in the middle of wrecking an agency that millions of citizens rely on for their livelihoods. You've left them in there to keep breaking things. Yeah, that's going to stay in the news often and negatively, and keep resonating.
If that were the case, the staff wouldn't be going scorched earth right now. The amount of high quality IT staff that are leaving is shocking. Some of the teams responsible for maintaining mission critical systems are decimated. More front line staff is worthless if the IT can't be enhanced or is crashing because of lack of proper and highly skilled staff.
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