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For people not receiving Social Security benefits, SSA has long stated that its citizenship data are incomplete, can be outdated, and “do not provide definitive information on U.S. citizenship.”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.

 

Merry Christmas

 

Merry Christmas

 

Merry Christmas

 

Man Charged With Threatening To Blow Up Field Office

     From WWNY TV: 

A Watertown [NY] man is accused of threatening to blow up a government office in the city.

City police charged 32-year-old Edmanuel Rivero-Vazquez with making a threat of mass harm.

During a meeting with staff at the Social Security Administration office on Bellew Avenue on Wednesday, Rivero-Vazquez allegedly threatened to blow up the building. ...

Eye Rolling Comments From Trump

      Donald Trump is saying that he likes the idea of Australia’s defined contribution retirement program instead of U.S.’s defined benefits plan. Defined contribution means you have no guaranteed retirement income. Maybe you get more than a defined benefits plan. Maybe not. The risk is yours. Also, how does a defined contribution handle disability and survivor benefits? Maybe those contingencies never happen in Trumpworld. Oh, and there’s also the little problem of how we would transition from what we have now to a defined contribution plan, a problem that has no conceivable solution.

     Talking about the U.S. switching to a defined contribution plan is a sure sign that you know virtually nothing about Social Security.

     At least I’m talking about eye rolling comments from the President rather than the problem he has keeping his eyes open.

Let’s End Junk Science At Social Security

      David Weaver, a former Social Security official, has written a piece for LinkedIn echoing something I had written about recently, the need for Social Security to start using the updated occupational data it has collected in making disability determinations. I thought that Social Security had not released the data. Weaver says they have released the actual data.  They just haven’t released a front end for the data, making it useless as is. However, Weaver says that third party vendors have developed front ends making the data usable. Social Security may want to suppress this data but I don’t think this will be possible. The Courts don’t like “junk science.” Is there any “science” more junky than the Dictionary of Occupational Titles?

In Dubious Achievement News

      From Think Advisor:

The House passed legislation Monday to update the language used by the Social Security Administration to describe when American workers can claim their retirement benefits. …

The Claiming Age Clarity Act, sponsored by Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., changes the terminology in materials produced by the Social Security Administration. …

The bill, which passed the House Ways and Means Committee in September, states that the agency must use minimum monthly benefit age instead of early eligibility age. …

SSA must also use standard monthly benefit age instead of "full retirement age" and "normal retirement age." …

Some People Just Won’t Get Service

      From Biometric Update.com:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is remaking itself around a digital identity system that tens of millions of its beneficiaries cannot use – while simultaneously dismantling the in-person safety valve that has long allowed people to navigate the system when digital verification fails. …

But that digital system is built on identity-proofing mechanisms that millions of Social Security beneficiaries cannot satisfy. To access many of SSA’s online services – including creating a my Social Security account, resetting credentials, obtaining replacement documents, checking claims, or managing benefits – individuals must authenticate their identity using commercial data sources.

Those identity checks can include credit histories, mobile carrier records, address histories, and financial account data. They generate “soft inquiries” on credit files and hinge on the existence of a stable and verifiable financial footprint.

The problem is straightforward: millions of Social Security beneficiaries do not have the data these systems require. …

Numerous disability claimants operate with inconsistent documentation due to frequent address changes, medical crises, or disruptions tied to long periods out of the workforce. For these beneficiaries, digital identity verification is not simply difficult. It is often impossible.

Under SSA’s new operational model, that impossibility now carries far-reaching consequences. When digital verification fails, the fallback is a field office – but the agency is cutting field office traffic by 50 percent and reducing staffing across local offices. …

This dynamic recasts SSA’s modernization not as a technological upgrade but as the construction of a two-tiered system – one for beneficiaries with strong credit files, stable addresses, broadband access, and technological competence – and another for those without such resources, who will increasingly face longer waits, reduced access, and the escalating possibility of being unable to access benefits at all. …

Really? How Will You Achieve This Result?

      From NEXTGOV/FCW:

… The Social Security Administration wants to halve the number of people that go to its field offices in the 2026 fiscal year. 

More than 31 million people visited SSA field offices over the last fiscal year. Now, the agency aims to have 50% fewer visits — or no more than 15 million total — in fiscal 2026, which began in October, according to internal planning documents viewed by Nextgov/FCW. …

     I’d call this wishful thinking at best. 

Let’s Circle Back To This

      I want to circle back to something that was in the Washington Post article about Social Security’s decision to scrap their plan to reduce or eliminate the consideration of age in making disability determinations. There was this interesting sentence:

… Among the Trump administration’s concerns with using the new [occupational] data is that younger disabled people with cognitive and mental impairments would probably qualify for fewer jobs, potentially leading more of them to be awarded benefits, the former Social Security executive said. …

     OK, so it sounds like they collected data showing that more people with cognitive and mental impairments should be awarded disability benefits but they’re not going to act on that data or even release it to the public. Does that sound like the right thing to do? If the data is subpoenaed for an ALJ hearing shouldn’t it be produced?

     I recall a non-disability case where I asked the ALJ to obtain some information about the case from a field office. The field office sent back a memo literally asking “Don’t you understand that the attorney is only trying to get his client approved?” Would that be the agency’s response to a request for the occupational data that they spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars obtaining?

     You might think that an attorney raising a fuss over this might be endangering their older clients since the plan to reduce or eliminate consideration of age might come back. That sounds too speculative to me to take into consideration but if an attorney has clients with conflicting interests, you don’t solve the conflict by deciding which clients to not represent zealously. You solve it by withdrawing from cases. That’s non-negotiable.

Where’s The $1 Trillion In Savings Musk Promised?

      From Brett Arends writing for Morningstar:

… I'm not surprised that President Donald Trump and the Social Security Administration put out the latest inspector-general report the day before Thanksgiving, when nobody is paying attention. 

It's yet another embarrassment. 

The latest 57-page report to Congress details a variety of Social Security frauds that took place under Trump's first administration, only to be caught, stopped and prosecuted ... er ... under Joe Biden. 

And it confirms what has long been suspected, and which will come as no surprise to MarketWatch readers: namely that Elon Musk and Trump were talking total nonsense for the first six months of this year, when they were claiming that there was a "huge" amount of fraud in Social Security, including hundreds of thousands of dead people claiming benefits. …

Ho Hum

      Some former Social Security public trustees are out with a piece in The Hill arguing that it’s important that the Social Security public trustee positions, which are all vacant, be filled. 

     The problem with their argument is that the trustee positions hardly even qualify as ceremonial. None of the trustees have any power whatsoever. The trust funds are invested in U.S. bonds. The trustees have no discretion in this. Public trustees have put out statements in the past arguing for their favorite way to “save” Social Security and nobody cared. They certainly have no power to bring about any change.

     I wonder how much the public trustees are paid when those positions are filled.

Happy Thanksgiving!

No Timeline For New Occupational Data

     From NEXTGOV/FCW:

A long-planned refresh of the occupational data used in the disability adjudication process at the Social Security Administration was tucked inside a regulatory overhaul that the Trump administration abandoned last week. 

As a result, the agency now appears to be without a timeline for finalizing that years-in-the-making update, which SSA has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on, according to remarks made by the Social Security commissioner, Frank Bisignano, during a Monday meeting. …

The commissioner was asked multiple times about the future of the data project now that the regulatory changes have been abandoned. 

Bisignano acknowledged that lawmakers think the data needs to be updated, committed to looking into the issue and said that he hoped it could be updated in the future — emphasizing collaboration and consensus building as important for that process — but he didn't share any specific plan or timeline for doing so.  …