The Ohio Capital Journal has out a long article on service at the Social Security Administration. It mostly quotes former Commissioner Martin O'Malley. Here are a couple of very brief quotes from the piece:
... O’Malley, the former Democratic governor of Maryland, claimed that under its current management, the Social Security Administration is no longer reporting some metrics to Congress and manipulating others to gaslight the public. ...
O’Malley described one way he thinks the new administration is manipulating some of the metrics it does report.
At the start of 2024, the 8 million who called the agency’s 1-800 number each month had to wait 42.5 minutes on average to get through. After a vendor and technology change, the agency got the average wait down to 12.8 minutes before beneficiaries could get an answer, O’Malley said.
The Social Security Administration on Monday reported that it had gotten those wait times down even further, to eight minutes. But O’Malley said it appears to have simply changed the definition of “answer.”
“‘Answer’ would appear to be anytime a person calls and hangs up after hearing a recording, or calls and gets run around the barn three times by a chatbot and has their call dumped,” he said. “That’s what they call ‘answered.’ That’s what they call ‘served.’ None of it bears any reality to what people are experiencing.”
A call Wednesday to the Social Security Administration’s Georgesville Road field office in Columbus appeared to produce such a result. A caller was asked by a chatbot why he was calling. When he said he wanted to check his eligibility, the chatbot hung up. ...
It's much the same as in most aspects of the Trump Administration -- lies, exaggerations, and carefully plucked statistics that misrepresent the true situation. The experts know the truth but the public doesn't know who to believe so they believe what they want to believe until reality smacks them in the face.
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This about sums up our current administration.
O’Malley touted the same average speed of answer metric his entire tenure. The agency has been reporting the metric to Congress for at least a decade. Nothing about the metric has changed.
ReplyDeleteFrank is awful, but O’Malley was cooking the numbers too with the ASA. Call backs not being counted as “waiting” isn’t a new thing. That started under Martin.
DeleteIs that you Frank?
DeleteFrom the NYT…
ReplyDeleteMembers of the Department of Government Efficiency uploaded a copy of a crucial Social Security database in June to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk of being leaked or hacked, according to a whistle-blower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer.
The database contains records of all Social Security numbers issued by the federal government. It includes individuals’ full names, addresses and birth dates, among other details that could be used to steal their identities, making it one of the nation’s most sensitive repositories of personal information.
The account by the whistle-blower, Charles Borges, underscores concerns that have led to lawsuits seeking to block young software engineers at the agency built by Elon Musk from having access to confidential government data. In his complaint, Mr. Borges said DOGE members copied the data to an internal agency server that only DOGE could access, forgoing the type of “independent security monitoring” normally required under agency policy for such sensitive data and creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”
Social security has manipulated statistics for the last 40 years that I've worked there. Ridiculous goals required creative work arounds.
ReplyDeleteMy job was to move work, pay people and in such a way that the stats looked the best. It was easier to tweak the stats decades ago but someone could usually figure a way to process claims so they looked more timely than they could ever really be.
Anyone who thinks service is improving after massive staff cuts and a policy of rehiring no more than one of every four staff that leaves should crawl in a hole and die or self deport to Antarctica. Society has no need for people that incurably stupid.
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