Pointless Delays Because Republicans Just KNOW There's Massive Fraud At Social Security

     From Nextgov/FCW:

After installing anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone early last month, the Social Security Administration is considering walking back the policy after finding only two cases that had a high probability of being fraudulent.

The anti-fraud tool set up last month after weeks of changes to the agency’s telephone policies has slowed retirement claim processing by 25% and led to a "degradation of public service,” according to an internal May document obtained by Nextgov/FCW that examined potentially cutting the anti-fraud tool for phone claims. 

Under the new policy, the agency found that only two benefit claims out of over 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent — and they aren’t guaranteed to be so. Less than 1% of claims were flagged as even potentially fraudulent at all. 

“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said. 

The attention to fraud, however, did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend.  ...

    Republicans know to a moral certainty that there is massive fraud at Social Security and they will stop at nothing to find it even though all their efforts keep producing nothing of consequence. Pointless delays to others are a small price to pay for one's ideological beliefs. Accepting the truth that fraud is relatively rare at Social Security and that there are well-tested systems in place to detect the fraud that does exist is unacceptable to them.

And We’re Back To Non-Acquisence

      From the New York Times live blog of today’s oral argument on the case presenting the issue of whether the 14th Amendment confers birthright citizenship on all born in the U.S, as well as an important issue on universal injunctions:

Sauer [the Solicitor General] says the administration would follow a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship. But he hedged on whether it would follow federal appeals court rulings within their geographic jurisdiction, saying the government “generally” would do so.

     This issue has quite a history at Social Security, although not a recent history because the government had completely given up on it.

Pathetic

      From HuffPost:

… In an internal memo to operations employees obtained by HuffPost, a Social Security official said the agency has received more retirement claims than in any previous year, thanks in part to the ongoing retirement of baby boomers.

The backlog has grown to 575,000 pending retirement claims, with more than 140,000 of those pending for more than 60 days. 

“I am calling for a sprint – a focused, concerted effort in all offices beginning today and lasting through the end of May – to address this growing backlog of pending retirement and survivor claims in our field offices and Workload Support Units,” Stephen Evangelista, deputy commissioner for operations, wrote in the email.

“I am calling for all offices to do their very best to increase their [Retirement, Survivors, Health Insurance] clearances by at least 10 percent daily through the end of May,” Evangelista wrote. …

HuffPost asked the Social Security press office if, in light of the retirement claims backlog and the request for SSA employees to work harder, laying off those employees might have been a mistake. The agency did not immediately respond. …

The Undead Problem

From CNN Politics: 

Spurred by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Social Security Administration is combing through its databases to check whether beneficiaries are alive or dead. It has already added dates of death to millions of people’s records, focusing on those who are implausibly old. The problem: Some people who have recently been declared dead are actually alive, forcing them to go to Social Security offices to be “resurrected” and stop the financial havoc that such a mistake can have on their lives. …   

Some managers received an email to remind their staff that “death correction cases” should be addressed that same day and don’t need to have appointments, unlike most people who need help. The agency also sent an email about dates of death being posted to 3.5 million records, with guidance on whom to report erroneous death listings. … 

Also showing up at Social Security offices are immigrants who are correcting their records after having been declared dead by the Department of Homeland Security, several employees told CNN. DHS requested that Social Security enter more than 6,000 names of immigrants into its database used to track dead people in hopes that they’ll leave the US, CNN reported last month. ....

Gotta Eliminate That Waste, Fraud And Abuse

     From the Washington Post:

... The $1 spending limit on government-issued credit cards has also caused chaos at several other agencies since February, when DOGE began enforcing it. A Feb. 26 executive order imposing a “freeze” on these cards, with exceptions for “critical services,” cast the measure as an effort to ensure that “employees are accountable to the American public.”

Within parts of the Social Security Administration, the spending limit has for months left staffers unable to pay for phone bills, foreign-language interpreters and basic office supplies, according to several employees and records reviewed by The Post. That’s because less than a dozen people are responsible for approving most new purchases made by 1,300 offices.

One employee in an Indiana field office said that basic office supplies are running low, and managers have instructed staffers to ration paper and to avoid printing unless necessary. Some staffers have begun buying their own pens, but toner cartridges, at $200, are too expensive, the employee said.

In an email, a Social Security spokesperson said that the agency “is committed to operating with the highest level of financial control and efficiency.”

“We have a process in place to review all spending and eliminate wasteful or duplicative expenditures,” the spokesperson added. “It is critical that we protect taxpayer dollars so that we can effectively serve all those who depend on us.” ...

Delusional?

      From The Hill:

The new head of the agency responsible for administering Social Security and Medicare said Sunday he plans to make sure the agency survives well into the 2100s.

In a Sunday interview, Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano said the Trump administration and lawmakers plan to make major changes focused on cutting waste and fraud with the goal of keeping the trust funds behind Social Security and Medicare solvent. …

     There are at least three ways of looking at this. Maybe he really thinks he can “save” Social Security by cutting “waste, fraud and abuse.” That would  simply be delusional. There are no significant savings available. Any minor savings would require upfront funding which is out of the question and would be completely inadequate anyway. Still, I think the theory that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about is most likely.  A second possibility is that he plans to cut benefits in some way inconsistent with the law. That would have to be a huge illegal cut and extremely controversial, probably suicidally so. I’m not even entertaining the possibility that he thinks he’ll steer cuts in Social Security through Congress. The third possibility is that he’s simply spouting bull. Maybe, but Bisignano comes from the reality based world so I doubt that.

ALJs Available Dropping Rapidly

 

From Social Security. Click on image to view full size

Mass Layoffs Enjoined At Social Security

      A federal judge in California has enjoined the Trump Administration from mass layoffs and program closures at a couple dozen federal agencies including the Social Security Administration. The extent to which this may affect Social Security is unclear. Were mass layoffs in the cards anyway?

Most Popular Names For Babies In 2024

     From Social Security, the most popular names for boys and girls from 2024:

Boys	Girls
1. Liam	1. Olivia
2. Noah	2. Emma
3. Oliver	3. Amelia
4. Theodore	4. Charlotte
5. James	5. Mia
6. Henry	6. Sophia
7. Mateo	7. Isabella
8. Elijah	8. Evelyn
9. Lucas	9. Ava
10. William	10. Sofia

What Do You Think?

      From Michigan Live:

BAY CITY, MI — A Midland County man and self-described “patriot” is facing a federal felony for allegedly threatening to kill Social Security Administration employees.

Zachary Brown, 40 of Coleman, on Monday, May 5, appeared before U.S. District Judge Patricia T. Morris, who informed him he was charged with one count of threatening to assault, kidnap, or murder a U.S. official. The charge is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. …

      I can’t copy the whole article here. Read it for yourself. I doubt that this is a case for prosecution. It’s an IVC case — involuntary commitment.  

Who Needs A Guy Like This?

     From the Washington Post:

Edwin Jackson’s government work was finding jobs for military veterans and then making sure those vets succeeded. Like this:

Representing the Social Security Administration at a job fair in Maryland, Jackson meets a paralegal and steers her toward a position at his agency. Then she asks, “Can you help my husband, who’s active-duty military?”

Sure, Jackson says. The woman brings over her husband, whose body language reads, “This is pointless.”

“I can’t work for Social Security,” the man says. “You can’t give me work in my field.”

“What’s your field?”

“I’m a sniper.”

Jackson replies immediately: “Okay, I got a job for you.”

“You didn’t hear me; I’m a sniper.”

Jackson tells the man about his own Army service during the Vietnam War, when Jackson met sniper school graduates and saw how effective they were at designing and planning missions in intricate detail.

“You’re a project manager,” he tells the sniper. “You know the mission and lay it out in every detail needed to succeed.”

Jackson got the man a project manager position at a federal agency. And the government got itself an efficient worker even as it repaid its debt to the sniper for risking his life.

“He was going to count himself out,” Jackson told me. “Sometimes vets need an extra layer of help. You have to help them look at life through a different lens. We owe them that.” ...

 

It's About A Different Agency But You May Still Find It Interesting

     From Fast Company:

Sahil Lavingia has had just three jobs over a 15-year career in tech.

The first was as the second employee of Pinterest. The second was by founding the startup Gumroad, a successful, famously lean company that makes it easy for content creators to sell digital goods. The third? As an unpaid contractor supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs in a role facilitated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ...

“The reason I [Lavingia] did it is, I think, the impact I can have,” he explains. Lavingia says that in the private sector, technical employees can have between six and seven figures of financial impact over their lifetime. If they’re a successful startup founder like he is, maybe that number is larger. “But in the government, I really believe that I can have billions of dollars of positive impact just by being technically minded.” ...

Now that he’s there, he says he finds himself surrounded by people who “love their jobs,” who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work.

“In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [a buyout offer], then we wouldn’t have to do much more,” he says, implying software can replace departing employees. “We’d just basically use software to plug holes. But that’s not what’s happening.”

Lavingia’s skills with automation, which have helped keep Gumroad lean, are what he hopes to bring to the VA. But when it comes down to it, what he’s found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesn’t make decisions as fast as a startup might.

 “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” he says. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” ...

Ways And Means Republicans Want To Hear From Bisignano

     House Ways and Means Republicans are inviting the new Social Security Commissioner to testify before the Committee -- apparently the whole Committee. This is normal when a new Commissioner comes into office. 

    Note that I said it was the Republicans issuing the invitation. You would think that in normal times the invitation would come from the entire Committee, rather than just the majority party. Will such "normal" times ever return?

The Database Threat

      From the Washington Post:

The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say. ...

 At several agencies, DOGE officials have sought to merge databases that had long been kept separate, federal workers said. For example, longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis told staffers at the Social Security Administration that they would soon start linking various sources of Social Security data for access and analysis, according to a person briefed on the conversations, with a goal of “joining all data across government.” ...

 But DOGE has also sometimes removed protections around sensitive information — on Social Security numbers, birth dates, employment history, disability records, medical documentation and more. ...

 “Separation and segmentation is one of the core principles in sound cybersecurity,” said Charles Henderson of security company Coalfire. “Putting all your eggs in one basket means I don’t need to go hunting for them — I can just steal the basket.” ...

 The current administration and DOGE are bypassing many normal data-sharing processes, according to staffers across 10 federal agencies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. For instance, many agencies are no longer creating records of who accessed or changed information while granting some individuals broader authority over computer systems. DOGE staffers can add new accounts and disable automated tracking logs at several Cabinet departments, employees said. Officials who objected were fired, placed on leave or sidelined. .

..

A First Message To Staff From The New Commissioner

From: ^Commissioner Broadcast <Commissioner.Broadcast@ssa.gov>
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2025 12:55 AM
Subject: A Message from Commissioner Frank Bisignano

A Message to All SSA and DDS Employees

Subject: A Message from Commissioner Frank Bisignano 

Humble are those who serve. Social Security fundamentally serves every American household. I am humbled to have been nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as the 18th Commissioner of Social Security. 

The President has been clear: we will protect Social Security. Through the advice and consent process, the U.S. Senate has been clear: we will provide the best possible service to beneficiaries. Together, we will strengthen Social Security and make the Social Security Administration a premier organization. We will lead with the highest level of service, financial control, increased teamwork, and greater efficiency. People will want to come to work, and we will do good work.

As Commissioner, I will travel to our offices in the field, visit phone centers, and ensure we have the right systems in place for every Social Security staff member to be successful.

My father was a 46-year Department of Treasury employee. He was the hardest working person I’ve ever known. I see the federal workforce from that vantage point.  

I’ve seen a horrific terrorist attack, a financial crisis, and a mortgage crisis first-hand. In each case, we made a plan, executed with excellence, and delivered the best possible outcome.  

For us at Social Security, our opportunity to touch every American household and deliver the best possible outcome is fully in our control. 

I can’t wait to get to work with all of you.

Frank Bisignano

Commissioner

Fifteen House Republicans Express Concern Over Further Cuts At Social Security

      From Politico:

A group of House Republicans is sounding the alarm over recent staffing cuts and plans for more cut-backs across the Social Security Administration — a target of the Department of Government Efficiency’s rampage across the federal bureaucracy.

In a new letter to President Donald Trump’s newly-confirmed social security chief, Rep. Nicole Malliotokis of New York and 14 other House Republicans are pressing Frank Bisignano to hold off on any further agency cuts that could “further deteriorate customer service that has been subpar in recent years.”  ...

Republicans who signed the letter to Bisignano include Reps. Jeff Hurd of Colorado, Don Bacon of Nebraska, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, Gabe Evans of Colorado, David Valadao of California, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Mike Ezell of Mississippi, Mike Turner of Ohio, Zack Nunn of Iowa and Mike Lawler of New York. Three Pennsylvanians were also among the Republicans who added their names to the missive: Reps. Ryan Mackenzie, Brian Fitzpatrick and Rob Bresnahan.

 

Bisignano Confirmed

      Frank Bisignano has been confirmed as Commissioner of Social Security,

Dudek Op Ed

      Social Security’s Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek has penned (or more likely someone penned for him) an Op Ed in the right wing NY Post. Warning: You may find it infuriating.

     I think we can now say that the Social Security Administration is thoroughly politicized.

Profile In Courage

      Ms. magazine has a nice piece out titled “Profiles in Courage: Michelle King Refused to Hand Over Your Data to DOGE. Then She Lost Her Job.” It’s worth a read.

What Do You Expect From Frank Bisignano?

      Frank Bisignano is likely to be confirmed as Social Security Commissioner tomorrow. What do you expect from him?

     More than anything else I’m expecting harshness towards the public and Social Security employees. We may see novel interpretations of the Social Security Act to end benefits for whole categories of people. We may see basic refusal to provide categories of service to the public. We may see targeted firings of employees on the theory that doing so will somehow increase the productivity of those not fired — the “pour encourager les autres” theory. I’m almost certain there will be a lot of thrashing about attempting to look audacious. Those are my very general guesses. What are yours?