- June 2021 59,707
- March 2021 60,675
- December 2020 61,816
- September 2020 61,447
- June 2020 60,515
- March 2020 60,659
- December 2019 61,969
- December 2018 62,946
- December 2017 62,777
- September 2017 62,297
- June 2017 61,592
- March 2017 62,183
- December 2016 63,364
- December 2015 65,518
- December 2014 65,430
- December 2013 61,957
- December 2012 64,538
- September 2011 67,136
- December 2010 70,270
- December 2009 67,486
- December 2008 63,733
Aug 30, 2021
Social Security Headcount Declines To Lowest Level Since At Least 2008
Aug 29, 2021
Good Report From CBO While Social Security Actuary Points Finger At Treasury
From Marketwatch:
… According to the just-released analysis, Social Security’s Old Age and Survivor Insurance (OASI) trust fund will remain solvent a year longer than previously thought. This is the trust fund from which Social Security benefits are paid. …
This new analysis was produced by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the non-partisan agency that analyzes the budget impact of various legislative proposals. To put its findings in context, it’s helpful to remember that every year the office of Social Security’s chief actuary updates its assessment of the OASI trust fund’s solvency. Its annual report typically is released in the spring.
No such report has been forthcoming this year, however. In an email, the chief actuary’s office told me that the decision about when to release its annual report is not theirs to make but instead is made by the U.S. Treasury Department. An email earlier this summer to that department asking for when this report will be forthcoming went unanswered. …
Anyone want to speculate on why Treasury is holding this up?
Aug 28, 2021
What's Going On With The Delay In The Trustees Report?
Senator Mike Crapo, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee (which has jurisdiction over Social Security), is asking the Comptroller General of the United States and the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to look into the question of why the annual report of the Social Security trustees is so late.
If nothing else, I think that the public as well as Crapo deserve an explanation on why the trustees report is so late. It was due by April 1, 2021. Nobody gets excited if it's a little late (which it usually is) but a delay of nearly five months needs an explanation.
Aug 27, 2021
Silly Fibs Happen When SSA Employees Are Stretched Past Their Limits
Aug 26, 2021
Grim Numbers
From David Weaver writing for The Hill:
Last week, for the first time, the Social Security Administration (SSA) released information on the number of beneficiaries who died in 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic began. There were nearly 400,000 more beneficiary deaths in 2020 than the agency tabulated for 2019, representing a 17 percent year-over-year increase. ...
SSA’s statistics almost certainly reflect the concentration of COVID-19 deaths among the populations the agency serves. The CDC's death data, which includes all individuals and not just Social Security beneficiaries, indicates about 500,000 more deaths occurred in the United States in 2020 than in 2019. The CDC estimates that approximately 375,000 deaths in 2020 were due to COVID-19. ...
Aug 25, 2021
Republicans Raise Questions About Andrew Saul's Firing And About Acting Commissioner
Three Republican Senators and two Republican members of the House of Representatives have written the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to raise questions about the legality of the firing of Andrew Saul as Commissioner of Social Security and about Kilolo Kijakazi's tenure as Acting Commissioner.
I predict their effort is going nowhere. If the GOP really thought it had a case, it would be suing, not messing with GAO. The questions about Kijakazi are fairly ridiculous. They imply darkly that Kijakazi hadn't served long enough with Social Security to have been eligible to become Acting Commissioner. Leaving aside the question of whether the Vacancies Reform Act even applies in this situation since the Social Security Act itself says specifically that the President can designate anyone to be Acting Commissioner, Kijakazi started work at Social Security in January, 2021, in plenty of time to have been there 90 days, as required by the Vacancies Reform Act, before Saul was fired.
Aug 24, 2021
Getting A Bit Vicious
From a blog post by the Revolving Door Project, which is sponsored by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank:
HuffPost reported last week that the Biden administration is considering a few unusual names for the long-delayed nomination of Administrator of the Social Security Administration. On one hand, there’s Nancy Altman, the President of Social Security Works who has fought for the economic security of seniors and Social Security recipients for years. She has written three books on the history and economics of Social Security, and currently serves on the Social Security Advisory Board, which provides oversight of the program. In other words, she is eminently qualified for the job.
On the other hand are two well-connected political insiders, both of whom Revolving Door Project has a history with: Seth Harris and Donna Shalala.
Harris is the former Acting Labor Secretary under Obama who later turned to shadow lobbying and legal work for union-busting BigLaw firms. As I wrote for the American Prospect last October, Harris is one of the intellectual architects of Prop 22, the California law which protects companies like Uber and Lyft from having to recognize their workers as full employees entitled to the minimum wage and benefits. That’s actually a Social Security issue, too: now-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland championed a bill in 2019 to require gig economy companies to pay their workers’ Social Security and Medicare taxes, since firms don’t have to pay those taxes for independent contractors (which is how gig economy firms misclassify their workers.)
Harris’ work has rarely touched on Social Security directly, but in his own words, he believes the old retirement formula of Social Security and pensions “is largely gone,” and at least part of the solution involves simply having people work longer. As he said at a Brookings Institution panel in 2019, “we should be encouraging some people to work more unless we are going to really dramatically transform the system that we have. We have transformed it. But let me also say, we’ve transformed it to favor more work, not to favor less work.”
In 2020, notably, Harris was a founding member of a research program funded by the private annuities industry. He also wrote personal finance columns for an annuity company’s website.
For her part, Shalala was a first-term Representative from Florida when the Revolving Door Project helped expose that she hadn’t filed ethics paperwork regarding her personal stock holdings, just as she was appointed to a board overseeing CARES Act funding. That funding could have benefited firms in which Shalala was invested. She ultimately, predictably, lost reelection.
What makes an unremarkable one-time Congresswoman qualified to lead one of the largest and most popular benefit programs in the federal government? Shalala’s backers point to her eight years as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. But that’s an inauspicious credential for the would-be head of a benefits program: Clinton infamously campaigned to “end welfare as we know it,” a crusade against the poor and misfortuned which utterly failed to do anything but make the government less caring to the most vulnerable, as Bryce Covert documented at the New Republic.
Shalala’s HHS work touched Social Security most directly when she appointed the 1994 Advisory Council on Social Security. The Advisory Council originally was the body which provided oversight of Social Security, but was later replaced by today’s Social Security Advisory Board. The bipartisan board Shalala picked ultimately came back with three different recommendations for making Social Security less generous, in the name of balancing budgets. The proposals included taxing some benefits; investing Social Security in stocks and equities; and gradually moving the system over to a set of individual investment accounts, similar to switching out a pension for a 401(k). None of these proposals were ultimately adopted. ...
At least I'm glad there are people who care who becomes the Commissioner of Social Security. There's always great interest in the programs Social Security administers but usually great apathy about the agency itself.
Aug 23, 2021
No Longer Even Tracking 800 Number Service?
The published numbers on field office telephone service aren't so obviously fishy but they also seem way off from what I and my clients have been experiencing.