From Axios:
The Social Security Administration — under pressure from Senate Democrats —is on track to finish an internal audit of the agency's call wait times by year's end, Axios has learned. …
Remember that Social Security’s Office of Inspector General is no longer independent. This could easily be a whitewash.
The Social Security Administration has asked for White House approval of proposed changes to its cardiovascular listings. There’s no way of knowing what’s in the proposal.
The Federal Employees & Contractors Oral History Project (FECOHP) is “preserving the voices of those who’ve served the American people – before, during, and after January 2025.” Get in touch with them if you have a story that should be preserved.
Frank Bisignano is an "Executive Leader for Prayer" on "The Presidential Prayer Team."
I guess it's a coincidence this happened on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day. From the New York Times:
The Social Security Administration’s chief data officer, Charles Borges, has resigned, three days after submitting a whistle-blower complaint that alleged members of the Department of Government Efficiency had uploaded the confidential personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans to an insecure cloud server.
In his resignation letter, Borges said that he was quitting in part because he could not “verify that agency data is being used in accordance with legal agreements or in compliance with federal requirements.”
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The Commissioner of Social Security has appeared on Fox Business to claim that his agency is now providing the best service to the public that it has ever provided.
From the New York Times:
Members 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. …
See also an article in the Washington Post on the whistleblower complaint.
The biggest question in my mind is why? Getting a copy of this vital database out of Social Security seems to have been an overriding priority for the Trump Administration. They had to have known they were doing something dangerous and probably illegal. Why the urgency? What did they want to do with the data? What are they doing?
... 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.
From Yahoo!Finance:
The Social Security Administration has reported significant improvements in how it serves the public. According to its latest performance metrics Americans have collectively saved an estimated 43 million hours over the past year due to faster service and expanded access across online, phone, and in-person channels. …
From the Worcester [MA] Telegram & Gazette:
A former employee of the Gardner Social Security office, who prosecutors said solicited sex from a mother who came into his office crying after losing her job, was sentenced to six months in federal prison Aug. 22. …
From the Los Angeles Times:
John McGing couldn’t reach a human. That might be business-as-usual in this economy, but it wasn’t business; he had called the Social Security Administration, where the questions often aren’t generic and the callers tend to be older, disabled, or otherwise vulnerable Americans.
McGing, calling on behalf of his son, had an in-the-weeds question: how to prevent overpayments that the federal government might later claw back. His call was intercepted by an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.
No matter what he said, the bot parroted canned answers to generic questions, not McGing’s obscure query. “If you do a key press, it didn’t do anything,” he said. Eventually, the bot “glitched or whatever” and got him to an agent.
It was a small but revealing incident. Unbeknownst to McGing, a former Social Security employee in Maryland, he had encountered a technological tool recently introduced by the agency. Former officials and longtime observers of the agency say the Trump administration rolled out a product that was tested but deemed not yet ready during the Biden administration. …
In interviews with KFF Health News, people who left the agency — some speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Trump administration and its supporters — said they believe the new administration simply rushed out technologies developed, but deemed not yet ready, by the Biden administration. They also said the agency’s firing of thousands of employees resulted in the loss of experienced technologists who are best equipped to roll out these initiatives and address their weaknesses. …
Agency leaders and employees who first worked on the AI product during the Biden administration anticipated those types of difficulties. Escobar-Alava said they had worked on such a bot, but wanted to clean up the policy and regulation data it was relying on first.
“We wanted to ensure the automation produced consistent and accurate answers, which was going to take more time,” she said. Instead, it seems the Trump administration opted to introduce the bot first and troubleshoot later, Escobar-Alava said. …
… U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) hosted Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Frank Bisignano in Charleston, W.Va. to visit the social security field office. During the visit, Senator Capito and Commissioner Bisignano met with staff to discuss the improved customer service taking place. …
From the New York Times:
Nearly four decades ago, when the personal computer boom was in full swing, a phenomenon known as the “productivity paradox” emerged.
It was a reference to how, despite companies’ huge investments in new technology, there was scant evidence of a corresponding gain in workers’ efficiency.
Today, the same paradox is appearing, but with generative artificial intelligence. According to recent research from McKinsey & Company, nearly eight in 10 companies have reported using generative A.I., but just as many have reported “no significant bottom-line impact.”
A.I. technology has been racing ahead with chatbots like ChatGPT, fueled by a high-stakes arms race among tech giants and superrich start-ups and prompting an expectation that everything from back-office accounting to customer service will be revolutionized. But the payoff for businesses outside the tech sector is lagging behind, plagued by issues including an irritating tendency by chatbots to make stuff up. …
The Commissioner can stop worrying about the problem. It’s been solved. OPM has decided to stop doing the surveys.
From Plansponsor:
The Retirement and Disability Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is set to close this week following the Social Security Administration’s cuts to research funding that were announced in February.J. Michael Collins, who led the university’s research center, says the center “is making final close-out paperwork this week” and is “no longer operational.” Wisconsin’s research center was the second center in the retirement and disability research consortium to close in as many weeks, after the National Bureau of Economic Research Retirement and Disability Research Center shut down last week.The SSA cuts terminated 19 projects at the University of Wisconsin’s center, affecting 100 scholars. The cuts also led to cuts of 100 planned projects through 2029, mainly research that concerned people who rely on Social Security, such as children and people living with a disability, according to the university’s website. …
The RDRC at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which collaborates with Brandeis University and the University of Baltimore, lost funding for at least 13 projects as a result of the SSA’s funding cuts, according to Nancy Miller, the center’s co-director …
At Boston College’s RDRC, the center also had to cut projects that were about halfway completed, but it was able to secure independent funding for additional projects, according to Andrew Eschtruth, the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. The university continues to seek more funders to fill the gap created by the cuts …
To this day, Social Security is rooted in a simple promise: those who gave their careers to building our Nation will always have the support, stability, and relief they deserve. Thanks to my Administration's efforts, Social Security now stands stronger and more resilient than ever before. Following the passage of the historic One Big Beautiful Bill last month, the vast majority of seniors who receive Social Security will pay zero tax on their Social Security benefits -- the largest tax break for seniors in the history of our country.
To further strengthen Social Security, my Administration is aggressively rooting out all fraud, waste, and abuse that rob our Federal programs of resources -- including stopping payments to the deceased and eliminating benefits for those who do not legally qualify. These measures will save American taxpayers billions of dollars every year and ensure that future generations receive the benefits they spent their lives paying into. At the same time, I am making the Social Security Administration more efficient, more responsive, and more effective than ever before -- reducing wait times and delivering the payments the American people worked hard to earn. I am also proudly restoring strong border security policies to ensure that Medicare and Social Security are preserved for the citizens who paid into them -- not abused by illegal aliens who have no right to be here.
On this 90th anniversary of the Social Security Act, we recognize the countless contributions of every American senior who has invested their time, talent, and resources into our Nation's future. On this momentous milestone, we recommit to strengthening our retirement system, protecting programs like Social Security and Medicare against fraud and abuse, and ensuring that every future generation of American citizens has the income security they need and earned.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim August 14, 2025, as the 90th Anniversary of the Social Security Act.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourteenth day of August, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.
DONALD J. TRUMP
