Trump Orders End To Treasury Issued Paper Checks

     I missed this one. Last week Trump ordered an end to Treasury issued paper checks as of September 30 of this year. 

    I think it's better than 95% of Social Security claimants who receive their benefits by direct deposit now but there are those who still need paper checks. One important group who still need paper checks are claimants who have lacked the funds to keep a bank account open while they wait months and years for their Social Security disability claims to be approved. They're only too happy to receive their payments by direct deposits once they have money to put in an account but not for that first check or two.

    Yes, I know there are benefit cards but the fees on those are ridiculous. More important, most folks still have a bank account when they file their Social Security disability claim but later have to close the bank account because they're broke so they won't be set up for a benefit card. 

    We'll see how this plays out. In theory, they aren't supposed to be paper checks even now but circumstances on the ground don't match up with what armchair theorists think possible. A little leeway is needed.

COBOL Isn’t The Problem

           Mar Hicks wrote a few years ago about an episode where Republican leaders tried to blame COBOL for basic governmental agency failings that had nothing to do with COBOL. As he writes:

… But despite [COBOL’s advantages], there’s a cottage industry devoted to making fun of COBOL precisely for its strengths. COBOL’s qualities of being relatively self-documenting, having a short onboarding period (though a long path to becoming an expert), and having been originally designed by committee for big, unglamorous, infrastructural business systems all count against it. So does the fact that it did not come out of a research-oriented context, like languages such as C, ALGOL, or FORTRAN.

In a broader sense, hating COBOL was—and is—part of a struggle between consolidating and protecting computer programmers’ professional prestige on the one hand, and making programming less opaque and more accessible on the other. There’s an old joke among programmers: “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.” In other words, if your code is easy to understand, maybe you and your skills aren’t all that unique or valuable. If management thinks the tools you use and the code you write could be easily learned by anyone, you are eminently replaceable. 

The fear of this existential threat to computing expertise has become so ingrained in the field that many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers. …

Bisignano Nomination Advancing

      The Senate Finance Committee has scheduled a meeting for 10:00 Eastern for April 1 to advance the Bisignano nomination to become Commissioner of Social Security.

Even AEI Thinks Social Security Was Well Run — Until January 20, 2025

      From the right wing think tank American Enterprise Institute:

Here in the DOGE era, the specter of inefficient bureaucracy haunts many government agencies. Yet the Social Security Administration (SSA) offers a surprising counter-narrative—at least in parts. As civil servants go, those administering retirement benefits are a relatively efficient bunch, according to AEI scholar Mark Warshawsky, who until 2021 served as the agency’s deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy. 

As he tells in a new podcast, “I would say, in terms of the retirement side, it is a well-run program.” The Internal Revenue Service efficiently collects payroll taxes and administers benefit taxation, while disbursements flow with minimal leakage through fraud or processing errors. This efficiency is all the more remarkable given the program’s gargantuan scale—some $1.3 trillion in annual benefits.

Less efficient, Warshawsky goes on to explain, is the Disability Insurance part of Social Security. It demands substantially more administrative resources, with means-testing, medical evaluations, and ongoing eligibility verification creating a bit of a bureaucratic morass. Likewise, the Supplemental Security Income program is also particularly cumbersome, requiring detailed scrutiny of both income and assets.

Recent criticisms of the agency seem overblown, however. Claims about payments to long-deceased beneficiaries are demonstrably false. The SSA employs robust verification mechanisms, including automatic investigation of nonagenarians without recent medical claims and outright benefit denial for anyone claiming to exceed 115 years of age. …

DOGE Strikes Again!

 

From the Washington Post

What Could Go Wrong?

     From Wired:

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months. ...

SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.

“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.

    You may recall that Frank Bisignano testified at his confirmation hearing that COBOL was still widely used in business and that its presence at Social Security was nothing to be too concerned about. 

Sure, No Problem

      From Forbes:

Elon Musk lauded his Department of Government Efficiency in a Thursday interview with Fox News, saying the work of the agency, which has drawn criticism over its sweeping and rapid layoffs to the federal workforce, will allow Social Security recipients to “receive more money.” …

Press Release Denying Field Office Closures

 

Press Release

Thursday, March 27, 2025

For Immediate Release

Mark Hinkle, Press Officer

press.office@ssa.gov

Correcting the Record about Social Security Office Closings

reports in the media that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is permanently closing local field offices are false. Since January 1, 2025, the agency has not permanently closed or announced the permanent closure of any local field office. From time to time, SSA must temporarily close a local field office for reasons such as weather, damage, or facilities issues, and it reopens when the issues are resolved. The agency has announced the permanent closure of one hearing office, in White Plains, NY.

SSA works closely with local congressional delegations before closing any office permanently. The agency also reassigns employees from an affected office to other locations to help communities access in-person services.

“SSA is committed to providing service where people need help and our local field offices are no exception,” said Lee Dudek, Acting Commissioner of Social Security. “We have not permanently closed any local field offices this year.”

SSA identified for the General Services Administration underutilized office space to ensure the government is spending taxpayer money as prudently as possible. The agency provided GSA a list of sites for termination. Most of these are small hearing rooms with no assigned employees. Since most hearings are held virtually, SSA no longer needs these underutilized rooms.