Barbarians At The Gates

      From the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare:

Laura Haltzel is the first former Social Security Administration (SSA) official who was present for the Trump administration’s takeover of the agency to speak out publicly in an on the record interview. In her first interview since leaving SSA, Haltzel told Entitled to Know that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “traumatized” SSA employees — and created “gross inefficiencies” in the system. Haltzel resigned her post as Associate Commissioner Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics on February 28, accepting an early retirement offer that the administration extended to all SSA employees.

Haltzel describes an atmosphere of chaos and fear at SSA headquarters, based on her own experience and communications with colleagues in other departments. (Haltzel was based at the agency’s DC office while the headquarters is in Baltimore.)  She had worked at SSA for a cumulative 15 years when she exited her job.

     And there’s much, much more. Give it a read.

No Government Shutdown

      There won’t be a government shutdown because Senate Democrats are craven cowards.

We’re In Crisis

      Read this thread on the National Academy of Social Insurance panel on the emergency at Social Security. Just read it.

Field Office Loses 7 Of 26 Employees To DOGE Buyouts

      Social Security field office loses 7 of its 26 employees to DOGE buyouts. You think service won’t suffer?

OHO Caseload Analysis Report

     From Social Security. Note they still refer to it as ODAR. How many years has it been since that name was changed? Has the overtime now ended at OHO?:

Click on image to view full size

 

Change Of Plans

      From the Washington Post:

The Social Security Administration late Wednesday abandoned plans it was considering to end phone service for millions of Americans filing retirement and disability claims after The Washington Post reported that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team was weighing the change to root out alleged fraud.
The shift would have directed elderly and disabled people to rely on the internet and in-person field offices to process their claims, curtailing a service that 73 million Americans have relied on for decades to access earned government benefits.
However, Social Security and White House officials said the administration will still move ahead with another far more limited element of the original proposal: Customers will no longer be able to change a direct deposit routing number or other bank information by phone.

Disability Determination Backlogs To Soar

    From David Weaver, a retired Social Security employee, writing for The Hill:

Projections indicate that, in less than two years, there will be a staggering 2.5 million people in Social Security’s disability backlog. That figure is higher than the population of 20 U.S. states and territories. Thus, as we look to the midterm elections next year, President Trump will be dealing with a very large group of Americans who aren’t receiving timely decisions on their benefit applications.

About 70 percent of the projected backlog at the end of fiscal 2026 will be at the initial level of determination. ...

The backlog could easily turn out to be well above 2.5 million cases if current levels of government staffing decline, assumed productivity gains among government workers fail to materialize, or the country experiences a recession and displaced workers with health problems turn to Social Security for help. ...

The large backlog will be a national driver of homelessness, a situation that occurs with some frequency among disability applicants.  ...

Trump’s first instinct may be to look for a technological fix. His executive order creating DOGE stated its purpose as “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” In practice, however, DOGE has become focused on personnel policy and cost cutting, rather than bleeding-edge technology. 

Social Security recently summarized its DOGE-related activities. If members of the public thought the young engineers of DOGE were going to revolutionize technology in the government, they will be disappointed. The Social Security list is basically composed of budget cuts, including two big items: a reduction in the agency’s technology budget and a hiring freeze applied to federal employees and state workers who help process disability claims.  ...

    I am pessimistic about the situation. The present course can lead only to disaster but this will not be apparent to the Trump Administration until the disaster is well upon us. They will then try desperately to turn the spigot back on only to find out that there's only so much that can be done until new personnel are hired and trained and that takes quite some time. And, of course, Weaver is only writing here about impending backlogs of disability determinations and that's only one part of the problem. Addressing field office, teleservice center and payment center backlogs, which will also mushroom, will be even more difficult, especially with a gutted management structure.

Tough Questions

     Two Senators have some tough questions for Social Security Commissioner nominee Bisignano.