Trump Administration Does Something Sort Of Normal

      From Newsweek:

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent letters to 39 governors on Thursday calling for an end to the diversion of foster youths’ earned Social Security survivor benefits.  

The ACF said in a press release that state welfare agencies often intercept federal benefits, such as Social Security survivor benefits earned through a deceased parent’s lifetime contributions, that are intended for a child in foster care. The welfare agencies reimburse their own costs using these funds. 

The ACF sent letters to governors who allow this practice and said it plans to work with states to end it.  …

Merry Christmas

 

And We're Back To This

      The New York Post is running an article in which Senator Joni Ernst criticizes Social Security for making payments to dead people. The tone of the article suggests there's some awful scandal going on. However, it doesn't give the entire context showing that payments to dead people are a tiny portion of benefits paid and that Social Security makes extensive efforts to prevent the overpayments. Social Security's efforts to identify dead beneficiaries are so successful that the agency's Death Master File is widely used in the financial industry to prevent fraud. They use it because they can't do better. Most notably the article includes no suggestion on how the agency could do a better job of identifying dead people.

    I sometimes think that if Republican leaders had their way the Social Security Administration would spend as much money trying to find fraud as it does to make benefit payments. Why are they so obsessed with fraud? Because they hate the very existence of Social Security and want proof that it's fatally flawed.

Merry Christmas

 

Afraid Of Voters

      From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP):

Friday, December 12 is the deadline for public comments on a policy the Trump Administration secretly adopted in May, giving the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) access to personal data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) on nearly every U.S. resident. DHS has been encouraging states to use this data to reverify the citizenship of voters, and DHS says state voting officials have already queried these data tens of millions of times. A court order recently forced the Administration to disclose the arrangement and allow public input.

The Administration policy raises significant legal, privacy, and other concerns. One of the most serious is that Social Security data don’t have complete or up-to-date citizenship information, so using them to verify citizenship will almost inevitably lead to errors — potentially disenfranchising U.S. citizen voters ahead of the midterm elections. …

For people not receiving Social Security benefits, SSA has long stated that its citizenship data are incomplete, can be outdated, and “do not provide definitive information on U.S. citizenship.” While SSA data can be helpful in proving that someone is a citizen — for example, to meet Medicaid’s citizenship requirements — the data have several well-known shortcomings in proving that someone isn’t a citizen. …

Merry Christmas

 

Representation Rates At Initial, Reconsideration and Hearing

     From Social Security. As always, click on the image to view full size.

Disparities In Disability Determination

      Social Security has posted numbers on initial allowance rates by state and region on disability claims for the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2025. As always, click on the image to view full size. Note the disparities between and within regions. You were much better off filing a disability claim in the Kansas City region than the San Francisco region.