Social Security has issued a
press release boasting about Commissioner Saul improving service by keeping the agency's field offices open all day on Wednesdays.
I think this decision by Saul qualifies as one of, if not the, most bone-headed actions I can ever remember a Commissioner taking. This isn't going to improve service. It's going to hurt service. I'm pretty sure Saul did this not merely because he lacks understanding about how Social Security's field offices work but because he was unwilling to listen to those who do. I'm pretty sure all of those who do know advised against this. It also comes from an unshakeable belief that federal employees are lazy and that if you just crack the whip, you'll get better work out of them. That's naive. Inevitably in a large organization there are a few bad eggs but Social Security's service delivery problems come almost 100% from not having enough employees.
If you're like Saul and don't have an understanding about how field offices work you probably think that almost all the work a field office does is done while a claimant is sitting across the desk from a Social Security employee. A lot of it is but certainly not all. Let me give a few examples:
- Claimant has been approved for Supplemental Security Income. Information is needed from a former employer or a family member in order to compute the benefits. A field office employee has to make some calls.
- A claimant who has been overpaid mails in a check to pay down the overpayment. Someone has to enter that information into the agency's computer system and forward the check on to another office that completes action on the payment.
- A woman contacts the field office wondering whether she can get benefits on the account of her husband. He disappeared for unknown reasons eight years ago. The Social Security employee who has the case remembers something from their training years ago about this sort of situation but has to spend time looking at the agency's manual to determine how to handle this sort of case.
These and a thousand other types of tasks some mundane, some unusual, some taking only a little time, some taking a lot of time aren't done while a claimant sitting across the desk from the field office employee. You can't find that time if you've got a waiting room full of people many of whom are visibly impatient from having waited a long time to talk with someone. Things pile up. They don't get done. You don't gain by having the office open more hours; service actually get worse.
As you can tell if you read this blog, I'm extremely interested in the Social Security Administration giving better service to the public. Unlike Andrew Saul I actually know something about how the agency functions and I know this isn't just counterproductive. It's dumb, dumb, dumb. It's OK that Saul doesn't know exactly how things work at Social Security. What's not OK is that he clearly didn't listen to experienced staff on this one.
