President Fires Saul And Black

      With no fanfare, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice issued an opinion yesterday that the President may remove the Commissioner of Social Security from office notwithstanding the statutory provisions limiting removal from office. An opinion had been requested by the Deputy Counsel for the President.

     Update: Senator Grassley has tweeted that he's hearing that the President may oust Andrew Saul from his position as Commissioner. Senator McConnell has retweeted this saying "httI agree with @ChuckGrassley. This removal would be an unprecedented and dangerous politicization of the Social Security Administration."

     Further update: I've received several reports that there was a blast e-mail to Social Security employees at 4:30 today from an Acting Commissioner of Social Security indicating that Saul and Black are gone.

     And another update: The Washington Post reports that Saul still believes he’s Commissioner and plans to report for work on Monday — remotely from his home in New York city. Who’s going to break it to him?

ps://twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell/status/1413584718684168197?s=20

Paycheck Problem Affects 922 Social Security Employees.

      From Government Executive:

More than 900 Security Administration employees were left wondering Thursday how much of their regular paycheck they would receive at the end of the week, after a mishap caused their internal payroll software to report they would receive deposits of $0.00 for the pay period that ended July 2. ...

On Thursday, Social Security Administration spokesman Darren Lutz said the agency were still working with the Interior Business Center, which provides payroll services to around 150 federal agencies, on determining the cause, but that all 922 affected employees would receive at least a partial paycheck by Tuesday, SSA’s “official” pay day. ...

Not Such A Good Place To Work

     The Partnership for Public Service does an annual survey to determine the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government. The 2020 results are out and Social Security didn't do well at all. The agency came in as the 15th best place to work out of 17 large agencies.

    They also rated agency components.  Here are the rankings for Social Security's components, out of 411 total agency components:

• Deputy Commissioner for Analytics Review and Oversight -- 290

• Deputy Commissioner for Budget, Finance, Quality, Management -- 135

• Deputy Commissioner for Communications -- 256

• Deputy Commissioner for Hearing Operations -- 389

• Deputy Commissioner for Human Resources -- 252

• Deputy Commissioner for Operations -- 318

• Deputy Commissioner for Retirement & Disability Policy -- 267

• Deputy Commissioner for Systems -- 192

• Office of the General Counsel -- 101

• Office of the Inspector General -- 382
  

Tomorrow Is Deadline For Preliminary Reopening Plans

 

     I had earlier cited a Government Executive article saying that federal agencies were supposed to submit draft plans for return to new normal post-pandemic operations to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) by June 18 with final plans due by July 19. I had wondered why we had heard nothing about those draft plans. Now, there's a new Fedweek article saying the draft plans are actually due by tomorrow, July 9, with the final plans still due by July 19. Apparently, the deadline for draft plans was extended.

Balance Needed

      From Nancy Altman writing for The Hill:

“Program integrity” is the sort of technical term that sounds good. Who wouldn’t want to run Social Security with integrity? But unfortunately, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Washington-speak, the phrase doesn’t mean what you think.

Administering Social Security with integrity sounds as if it means ensuring that the right payments go to the right people in the right amounts. You would think it means that the Social Security Administration (SSA) helps working families get the benefits that they have earned. Instead, it means the opposite.

“Program integrity” is insider-code for saving money. How is money saved? By going after people who have done nothing wrong. By going after people with serious disabilities who must prove over and over again that they are unable to support themselves. By going after people whose benefits SSA claims were wrongly paid out, often because of mistakes made by SSA itself. ...

SSA must return to its roots, to its core mission of helping everyone get the benefits for which they are eligible. It should devote at least as much effort to underpayments as it does to overpayments. It should focus more on educating the public about the benefits for which they are eligible and less on challenging previously-awarded benefits. ...

     It has become clear that Social Security advocates are working to improve Social Security's administrative budget difficulties by liberalizing what "program integrity" funds can be used for. At the moment, Social Security doesn't have enough money to answer its phones or to put people on benefits in a timely manner but it has abundant funding to cut people off benefits. We need balance.

Social Security Helps With Disaster Relief In Miami

      From a television station in Miami:

One of the agencies on site helping families affected by the condo collapse in Surfside is the Social Security Administration. ...

The agency is working with more than a dozen others to help families reestablish documents that they lost in last week’s collapse of the 12-story building. ...

I’ve spoken with the families while I do their paperwork and it’s awful,” said Maria Del Carmen Ortega with the Social Security Administration. “I get goosebumps. The stories are terrible, very sad, and these people have a very long road to recovery because the emotions are unbearable.” ...

Democratic Member Of Congress Calls For Field Offices To Reopen

      From some newspaper in Maine:

Social Security offices in Maine have been closed since the start of the pandemic in March 2020 ...

U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine 2nd District, is calling for the SSA to open its doors.

“The current unavailability of most in-person services at SSA field offices … creates difficulty for people who lack broadband access, have certain disabilities, or are otherwise more comfortable with in-person service,” wrote Golden in a recent letter to the administration.

“In light of the public’s need to access SSA services in a timely and convenient way, I request that SSA expedite its OMB-mandated reentry planning to increase staffing at field offices to enable a wider set of in-person services, and to end the requirement for people to part with their original identification documents.” ...

     Social Security employees should not think that because the Democratic Party is friendly with their union that there will be no pressure to reopen the field offices from Democrats in Congress. There's going to be increasing bipartisan pressure to reopen. Representative Golden is just one of the early ones to chime in.

Who Could Have Predicted?

     From CBS Chicago:

Imagine this – you’re unemployed and you get a letter saying you owe thousands of dollars in back Social Security taxes.

That is the reality for some local U.S. Census managers. CBS 2’s Suzanne Le Mignot spoke to one of them, who said the news was a shock. ...

In August of last year, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum allowing employers to defer certain workers’ Social Security taxes during the COVID-19 pandemic.  ...

“I never received any documentation – any communication – from my former employer indicating that my payroll, Social Security taxes would be deferred while I was working,” the Census manager said. ...