Regular readers of this blog have probably noticed fewer posts in recent months and that some of what has been posted is a bit lightweight. I don’t think it’s because of me being less diligent. I think it’s because of changes at Social Security related to the current Presidential Administration.
The Trump Administration apparently came into office with only a few ideas for Social Security. They wanted access to its databases for other purposes — immigration enforcement and their obsession with controlling who votes. They succeeded in this endeavor early on but violated the law. It’s not clear that access to those databases actually helps them anyway so there now seems to be little activity on this front. They also wanted to prove that there was massive fraud at Social Security. It turns out that this massive fraud didn’t remotely exist so apart from still lying about it there’s no fraud news to report. The Administration had a spiteful desire to trash prior Democratic Administrations, particularly those of Obama and Biden. The only things they could find to undo were some policies instituted by former Commissioner O’Malley. I doubt they got much satisfaction out of this but they’ve already done it so there’s nothing to report on that front now.
The biggest change that was under consideration was a plan promoted by Mark Warshawsky to make it much harder to qualify for disability benefits by changing the age categories used in disability determination. It turned out that there was stiff resistance to the plan and it seemed there was no one backing it other than Warshawsky so the plan was ditched and Warshawsky left the agency. There’s nothing to write about this anymore.
In other Administrations there have been slow moving streams of more technical advances or claimed advances but there’s been little of that in the Trump Administration. I think there are three reasons for this. First, the people who came into the Agency during this Administration were quite inexperienced apart from Warshawsky. If a party trashes government and government employees for decades it turns out that they lack experienced operatives they can plug into government agencies when they come into power. The Trump operatives at Social Security had no ideas about what to address beyond mushy notions that there must be a lot of fraud or mismanagement at Social Security because it’s a “Democrat” program. They discovered sooner or later that their prior notions were nonsense so there’s been little they’re interested in addressing. Second, even if they had some general ambitions for Social Security they soon discovered that things were much more complicated than they imagined. Coming up with new ideas, even bad ones, is hard to do. Third, even if they do have some ideas, they have gotten rid of so many experienced people that it is almost impossible to turn their ideas into Notices of Proposed Rule-Making or Emergency Messages or POMS issuances, if they even know what I’m talking about. They couldn’t write them and the people who could aren’t around anymore or are overwhelmed trying to keep the agency from falling apart.
Commissioner Bisignano isn’t making Social Security news. It looks like he found the agency really boring and has made SSA his side hustle.
By this point I think that the Trump Administration really wants to suppress news coming out of Social Security because they know that having taken a meat axe to the agency’s work force means that there aren’t enough employees to get the work done. It’s inevitable that things will fall apart in a very public way. They want to delay the reckoning until after the midterm elections. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who is highly responsible for the staffing cuts at Social Security and other agencies, may be quite satisfied that this is coming, since he’s only interested in a fulfilling his belief that most of our government is an abomination which must be torn apart, but Vought is a crazy anti-government zealot who cares little for what the public thinks. Few others in this Administration are so unconcerned with the backlash.
Congress is usually a source of Social Security news but this Republican led Congress is holding almost no hearings on Social Security and seems generally interested in tamping down any Social Security news. I think there just isn’t anything that’s going to help their party.
I’ll post what news comes up but I suspect there will be limited Social Security news until at least next year when there’s a new Congress in town.
