From the Washington Post:
Social Security has stopped publicly reporting its processing times for benefits, the 1-800 number’s current call wait time and numerous other performance metrics, which customers and advocates have used to track the agency’s struggling customer service programs.
The agency removed a menu of live phone and claims data from its website earlier this month, according to Internet Archive records. It put up a new page this week that offers a far more limited view of the agency’s customer service performance.
The website also now urges customers to use an online portal for services rather than calling the main phone line or visiting a field office — two options that many disabled and elderly people with limited mobility or computer skills rely on for help. The agency had previously considered cutting phone services and then scrapped those plans amid an uproar. …
11 comments:
I think this is a brilliant approach and could be used to solve a number of the other issues the agency is facing.
Consider this: What if SSA takes all the cases on backlog, loads them onto a flash drive, and then places the flash drive into a secure holding location? With no cases to work, you could justify letting go of more employees, thereby reducing costs to the American taxpayer.
Another potential idea: Shut off all power to field offices. Any time anyone walks up to the front door, hide under the desks and be really really quiet until they give up and walk away.
Frank, you know you've got 18 months until January 2027 and the grown-ups take back the gavel in Washington. There's going to be real oversight and unless you want to he exposed as the man who destroyed Social Security, you had better start acting independently and transparently. End the chaos. Hire back the critical resources the agency lost due to the idiotic Musk and Dudek. Demonstrate real leadership that doesn't consist solely of empty tech industry buzzwords.
Or are you merely a puppet?
Makes sense they would take that data down. Even the low-IQ MAGA rubes are harder to con when the agency’s own public data contradicts what their fat orange leader and his syncophants are telling them.
My money is on puppet.
I don’t believe this administration would manipulate any numbers… check that.
Every month, the federal government serves up a steady diet of economic reports on everything from the price of groceries to the unemployment rate. These reports are closely followed: They can move markets — and the president's approval rating.
Businesses and investors put a lot of stock in the numbers, which are rigorously vetted and free from political spin.
Now the Trump administration is calling that trust into question.
The government recently disbanded two outside advisory committees that used to consult on the numbers, offering suggestions on ways to improve the reliability of the government data.
At the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has suggested changing the way the broadest measure of the economy — gross domestic product — is calculated.
Those moves are raising concerns about whether economic data could be manipulated for political or other purposes.
Among those raising the alarm is Erica Groshen. She's one of the outside experts who received a terse email last week saying her services were no longer needed, because the committee she'd served on — the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee — had been folded.
Groshen cares deeply about the reliability of government data, having previously overseen the number crunching as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"Statistical agencies live and die by trust," she says. "If the numbers aren't trustworthy, people won't use them to make important decisions, and then you might as well not publish them."
Sleazy E's Peter Pan Posse continues to sabotage Social Security
https://www.rawstory.com/social-security-doge-2672410586/
Since Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) took effective control of the Social Security Administration, the agency that services the needs of the Americans who have paid into it throughout their lives has become such a mess that officials have started hiding unflattering metrics.
According to a report from the Washington Post, the purging of employees at Social Security along with a change in how the agency does business by DOGE has resulted in "website crashes, overloaded servers and long lines at field offices" due to cost-cutting.
The Saturday report by the Post's Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson notes that the agency has now "... stopped publicly reporting its processing times for benefits, the 1-800 number’s current call wait time and numerous other performance metrics, which customers and advocates have used to track the agency’s struggling customer service programs."
According to those advocates for the 74 million Americans who rely on Social Security, hiding the metrics is a betrayal of the public's trust.
Ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who served as a Social Security commissioner, pointed out, "It’s a shame that now they are trashing the trust that the public should have in numbers that are timely and accurate and real."
If they can’t further cripple Social Security, how would they be able to justify privatization and handing the trust fund over to the wolves of Wall Street to gamble with? Get with the program, people!
@8:51 you are not far off. We are told not to scan things into Work Track, especially something lower priority. We don’t want things to sit. It would look bad. Heaven forbid we have an accurate picture of what is actually pending. The RCs were told to clean up Work Track up by DCO. So apparently that was the solution. OIG should do another FO mail audit.
Just like how they kept changing the definition of recession.
I actually believe the changes have been helpful. Regional offices were overpopulated. Flattening the structure and putting more on the frontlines has worked wonders. Wait times are way down, as Frankie proudly proclaimed. SSA’s DEI branch is now servicing customers in field offices. That’s a game changer. Allowing people to retire early was smart, and now we will get fresh faces to take the job. Canceling telework took many off the couch and got them back to work.
What are you smoking? Must be good stuff since you are oblivious to what is happening to the internal workings, or now non-workings, of SSA. By what you are saying, you do not, or have not, worked in SSA.
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