From the Washington Post:
The Social Security Administration — the sprawling federal agency that delivers retirement, disability and survivor benefits to 74 million Americans — began the second Trump administration with a hostile takeover. It ends the year in turmoil. A diminished workforce has struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices — record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews. Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit and hasty policy changes and reassignments left inexperienced staff to handle the aftermath. …
At the start of September, one benefits authorizer in a processing center was called into an all-staff meeting with her colleagues, she said. There, management explained that the backlog at the time — 6 million cases — was unacceptable and that everyone would have to work overtime in an attempt to drive it down to 2 million by Christmas.
“When they told us that, everybody started laughing,” she said. “Because there is just absolutely no way to get it down in that short period of time.” …
There is so much more to this piece. Read it all. It’s just the start as people start realizing there’s so much more to Social Security than answering the phones — not that the phones are answered well.
32 comments:
I wonder if the staff met the goal of two million backlogs? I guess this falls into the category of bringing down prices from day one.
A conman who seems to have dementia was elected, and installed a conman with no knowledge of SSA and who seems to have failed upward in life despite having a relatively low IQ and no real leadership skills (I guess because he wears expensive clothes?) to lead the agency. Of course the agency is imploding.
Congrats, MAGAs! You’re getting exactly what you voted for!
Funny how SSA has gotten worse under Trump. I guess running the government like a business wasn’t the answer to our problems after all!
Things were so great before - there was no backlog, phone were answered right away, morale was great, everyone was happy - nothing but rainbows. All of the problems started with this administration, right?
Leland! Have you been hitting the eggnog extra hard this Christmas?
Frank is a crook who scammed his way throughout life. He destroyed his own companies shareholder value. His -#1 job as ceo was to create shareholder value and his results were 70% decrease in value at Fiserv while netting hundreds of millions of the shareholders money. He is well on his way to destroying the Social Security Administration. He manipulates statistics, fabricates data and lies while claiming to be a devout Catholic. If President Trump wants to save SSA he must replace the commissioner and the chiefs he installed. Frank is destroying shareholder (taxpayers) value again. He should also be fired as the CEO of the IRS.
No, things were just really, really bad before January 20th.
This administration took the agency, beat it up with a baseball bat, threw it in a box, and kicked it off a cliff. Then, they installed a pathetic, mealy mouthed, incompetent, moronic thief of a commissioner whose life to date sums up to "steal it, hide it, lie about it, and then try to browbeat exhausted employees into making the lie true".
Full article is on Yahoo https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/social-security-gotten-worse-under-135406355.html
Are you really, really serious? Perfect example of “alternative” facts.
When the goal is to put fed employees through a trauma, this is what you get.
Even the best commissioner will struggle unless Congress gives SSA more administrative funding for staff and IT maintenance/modernization (and ideally changes the law to simplify administration of the benefit programs). But a bad commissioner is going to make things worse than a good commissioner would, and a bad commissioner won't ask Congress for the money needed to make things better.
Been studying the Charlie Kirk method of debate, eh?
this.
I wholeheartedly agree. Frank has visited so many offices and mine was very impressed. He ran a wildly successful Fortune 100 company. He’s cut wait times in half and done more with less.
329 Frank destroyed most of the shareholder value in FiSERV. I don’t believe he knows anything about efficiency. He knows how to distort data and pass it off as facts.
Francis splitting time with the IRS. Real effective leadership!
The phones get answered! No problems are solved, but the phones get answered.
If he’s such a great leader then why is SSA in such disarray? No one knows who to report to or who to go to for information. You would think a wildly successful leader would know how to reorganize an agency and disseminate information about that reorganization. The scant info we do have just seems like he went into a room and pointed to people deeming them chiefs then walked out like “my work here is done”.
Sainthood for Leland?
That former analyst, Leland Dudek, insists that he saved Social Security from a worse fate under Musk’s cost-cutting team. “I flipped the switch,” he said in a recent interview, referring to his disruptive four-month tenure as acting commissioner. “The casualty of that is a smaller SSA, an SSA that is being, for the first time, subject to the whims of being a political organization, which it was never intended to be.”
Meanwhile, Dudek’s workforce cuts led field offices to shed 9 percent of their employees by spring due to early retirement and deferred resignation offers. Overtime was restricted and hiring was frozen, even as customer visits continued to climb.
Morale is nonexistent at SSA.
Bisignano also said he is working to improve morale and “have the right level of staffing to operate at peak efficiency and deliver best-in-class customer service to the American people.”
The first day soliloquy of the sink or swim training at SSA.
Today a majority of Social Security staffers who accepted reassignments have not been fully or properly trained, according to several employees with direct knowledge of the initiative. Instruction is often truncated so the staff can respond to customers. Officials said they provide training based on the employee’s level of experience and review the reassigned employees’ work.
“They offered minimal training and basically threw them in to sink or swim,” one veteran employee said of their transferred colleagues.
The backlog is way worse. We are told not to scan things into WorkTrack and we cannot have items in there more than 30-days so we are told to just clear the things but not actually make the input. Just make yourself a reminder and do it someday.
We are seeing rampant evidence of this. Answering phones for other offices. People checking the status of documents or cases. No where to be found. Probably sitting on someone’s desk. But you can’t tabulate what is just on a desk. You cannot track. It’s is terrible customer service and is further evidence of fudging the numbers to look good.
Today is my last day after a 24+ year career. This past year has been the hardest with all the abuse and the unrelenting workload demands. I am a true generalist CTE and bilingual. The agency cares little about us and will just be happy to be rid of another “useless bureaucrat” the public will continue to suffer along with the staff that remains. Good luck to all who are still left and care about this Agency. PEACE OUT!
✌️
The grass is greener on the other side.
Many of the employees who took the FORK are regretting it and would love to come back to help the agency. Frank needs to come up with some type of program to rehire all the experts back and waive any OPM provisions. I guarantee most would come back to help. SSA employees have always been loyal and do the right thing.
Ah so mostly like training prior to all the reassignments. It was always sink or swim in my parts. We've been short forever.
No way would I even think of ever coming back to receive more abuse from folks like Vought.
Dumb take. The agency has wasted more than enough billions of dollars paying ignorant tech-bros to create useless software that only makes the work even more cumbersome to complete. You can’t code your way out of decades of inadequate staffing and setting of absurd arbitrary quotas that make it impossible to do the job properly more than about 10% of the time.
IT on its own is insufficient--there needs to be sufficient staff and they need to be properly trained and supervised. But you can't tell me that the current IT systems at SSA are perfect and there's no room for improvement. If there were better systems, people could be trained faster and make fewer errors. You'd still need more staff than SSA currently has. But it would help.
Just wait until the National Appointment Scheduling Calendar and the National Workload Management System launches in March . We will never have time be able to catch up on pending items.
Nonsense, everyone suggests this is the savior for all things. Employee calls in - magic, you won't have to worry about it. Short staffed in general - bam - no problem. Need to make time for unaddressed workloads? No problem - covered. That's what they are saying. I've always believed in fantasies though, so I'm believing it.
@10:37: Nice job beating that strawman, but I never said SSA’s systems are perfect.
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