Not Social Security But Still Interesting

      From NPR:

A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were "relatively nonexistent" during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was," Sahil Lavingia told NPR's Juana Summers. …

"Elon [Musk] was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent," Lavingia said. "That's something he said a lot in private. And publicly. And so I thought, OK, cool, I'll take him at his word. I will be transparent."

Shortly after the interview was published online, Lavingia got an email. Just 55 days into his work at DOGE, his access had been revoked.

From The Commissioner's Written Testimony

     From Commissioner Bisignano's written testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee:

 

Some Questions For The Commissioner

     Frank Bisignano's hearing before two subcommittees of the House Ways and Means Committee is Wednesday at 2:00. Here are some questions I'd like to hear answered:

• What has surprised you about Social Security since becoming Commissioner?
• Your agency has recently stopped posting processing time information. Why? 
• There are reports that you ordered Payment Center employees to stop all regular work in order to complete the WEP/GPO workload by the end of this month -- which happens to nearly coincide with the date of this hearing. Is that accurate? If so, why should the people with WEP/GPO cases take precedence over those of people who have been waiting years to receive any money from Social Security? 
• Is it true that Social Security is making widespread use of overtime to do the work of employees who have been induced to leave the agency since Inauguration Day? Why pay time and a half for work when it could have been done for regular pay by those employees who have since departed?
• There has been talk of a goal to get Social Security down to 50,000 employees. Is that a current goal?
• When would you anticipate resuming hiring new employees on a regular basis to replace departing employees?
• Could you provide us with data comparing employee productivity for in office work versus remote work? 
• How much of your time is spent working in Woodlawn or Washington as opposed to working from home or from the special office set up for you in New York?
• Does Palantir now have access to any Social Security data? If so, have they been allowed to copy the data to other government computers or their own computers? 
• Could you provide us with Full Time Equivalent (FTE) numbers for the Social Security Administration for each month since the beginning of calendar year 2024? 
• What is Lee Dudek's employment status at the moment? 
• Social Security will turn 90 years old in August. Is that an occasion to celebrate? 

Brilliant Management

      Let me see if I have this right. The Trump Administration induces thousands of Social Security employees to resign their jobs. Their only replacement, if there is one, is reassigned employees who are untrained on their new jobs and who are almost worse than useless for now because of the mistakes they make. The only solution, other than pointless exhortations to work harder, is to give the remaining employees lots of overtime. So, you pay employees 150% of their regular wages to do the work, or some of it, instead of paying the employees you got rid of 100% of their regular wages to do the same work.

     I’m glad we’ve got great managers running Social Security like a business.

The Problem Doesn’t Go Away If You Stop Talking About It

      From the Washington Post:

Social Security has stopped publicly reporting its processing times for benefits, the 1-800 number’s current call wait time and numerous other performance metrics, which customers and advocates have used to track the agency’s struggling customer service programs.
 

The agency removed a menu of live phone and claims data from its website earlier this month, according to Internet Archive records. It put up a new page this week that offers a far more limited view of the agency’s customer service performance. 


The website also now urges customers to use an online portal for services rather than calling the main phone line or visiting a field office — two options that many disabled and elderly people with limited mobility or computer skills rely on for help. The agency had previously considered cutting phone services and then scrapped those plans amid an uproar. …

Ways And Means Committee Schedules Hearing With Commissioner

      The House Ways and Means Committee has scheduled a hearing with Commissioner Frank Bisignano for 2:00 on June 25th. This will not be a full Committee hearing. It’s a joint hearing between the Social Security and Work and Welfare Subcommittees. The Work and Welfare Subcommittee has jurisdiction over SSI.

Retirement Trust Fund Depletion Date Advanced By Three Calendar Quarters

    From the report by Social Security's Trustees on the state of the trust funds:

• ... The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund will be able to pay 100 percent of total scheduled benefits until 2033, unchanged from last year’s report. At that time, the fund’s reserves will become depleted and continuing program income will be sufficient to pay 77 percent of total scheduled benefits.
• The Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Fund is projected to be able to pay 100 percent of total scheduled benefits through at least 2099, the last year of this report’s projection period. Last year’s report projected that the DI Trust Fund would be able to pay scheduled benefits through at least 2098, the last year of that report’s projection period.
• If the OASI Trust Fund and the DI Trust Fund projections were combined, the resulting projected fund (designated OASDI) would be able to pay 100 percent of total scheduled benefits until 2034, one year earlier than reported last year. At that time, the projected fund’s reserves would become depleted, and continuing total fund income would be sufficient to pay 81 percent of scheduled benefits. (The two funds could not actually be combined unless there were a change in the law, but the combined projection of the two funds is frequently used to indicate the overall status of the Social Security program.)
• Although the OASI Trust Fund depletion year remains the same, both the OASI and OASDI depletion dates advanced by about 3 calendar quarters, relative to last year’s projection. ...

    The change in the depletion date is because of the effects of the WEP/GPO repeal. 

Social Security To Turn 90 On August 14

     In less than two months Social Security will celebrate its 90th birthday. When it celebrated its 80th birthday in 2015 there was a ceremony at Social Security headquarters. I wonder what will be done this year? Anything? Does Commissioner Bisignano regard the 90th birthday as an event to be celebrated?