Less Is More?

      From the Washington Post:

Democrats, after weeks of struggling to find a message that resonates with ordinary Americans while President Donald Trump dominates the news, are beginning to settle on one: the allegation that Trump and his allies are crippling Social Security. …

“For much of the country, Washington might as well be Mars for all the connection it has to them,” Sen. Ron Wyden (Oregon), the top Democrat on the committee that oversees Social Security, said in an interview. “But Social Security is something where there is connective tissue between the government and the people.” …

Michael Astrue, who led the Social Security Administration under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — and says he voted for Trump — sharply criticized cuts to the agency by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency.
“I think you have a group of very immature people coming out of Silicon Valley bro culture, and they have decided federal agencies are filled with bad people doing bad things, and if you go in and hack away, and you don’t have to know what you are doing, you can improve it because less is more,” Astrue said. …

The White House has shown uncharacteristic concern that the Democratic message on Social Security could resonate. The president has made clear to top aides that he does not like seeing the agency in the news so often and so negatively, one senior Social Security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about a sensitive issue. …

Former Associate Commissioner Speaks Out

      From NPR:

… Laura Haltzel was the former associate commissioner for the SSA's Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics in the agency's Maryland headquarters. Rather than volunteer for reassignment and face more uncertainty, she decided to take an offer of early retirement.

Haltzel said there are problems with the expectation that workers in roles like hers would be able to quickly jump in and replace the thousands of frontline workers that have left. She called the plan a "sort of mythical idea."

"We've lost an extreme amount of expertise and knowledge that we simply are not going to get back," she said. "Let's say somebody in my team, who is a statistician, [you] suddenly turn them into a claims processor. It takes two years of training for someone to become proficient at taking a Social Security claim because of the complexity of the law. That is not something that you can simply plug somebody into overnight and keep up at the same pace as it had been operating previously."

"People are taking reassignments out of fear that they will have no jobs because the entire economy in the D.C. area now is affected by a loss of employment across the federal landscape," she said. "And for all of these individuals to find new jobs in the private sector, that's simply not a reality, particularly from the Social Security Administration, for which there is no private equivalent."  …

Haltzel said she's deeply concerned about the loss of expertise that has left the SSA in recent weeks. She said her former team, which analyzed whether the agency was doing a good job serving beneficiaries, has been cut by more than half.

"I hope that we're able to sustain a basic minimum of knowledge in order to maintain the functioning of the agency," Haltzel said. "But frankly, given that they have no control over who takes the reassignments and who simply retires and leaves, they could lose individuals where we are one person deep in knowledge. And once that knowledge is gone, it is gone. These people will not come back." …

Lots Of Detail About What's Gone Down With DOGE at Social Security

     I'm not sure why but Social Security has posted in its Freedom of  Information Act (FOIA) Reading Room hundreds of pages of records it has filed with the U.S. District Court in the litigation over DOGE access to agency databases. If you want to delve into this in great detail, here you go.

You Knew It Was Coming: SSAB To Be Axed

     From U.S. News and World Report:

... The White House's Office of Management and Budget has notified staff at the Social Security Advisory Board that it plans to cut the board's annual budget from around $3 million to zero, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss non-public budgetary details. ...

    Note that this is completely illegal, at least if this is something to be done now instead of just a proposal for the next federal budget. Congress has appropriated money for SSAB. The President lacks the power to unilaterally withhold the money or terminate the agency.

What’s Going On With The Death Master File?

      SentiLink asks and to a large extent answers the question “What’s going on with SSA’s Death Master File?” The answer is that DOGE added millions of names of people who died a long time ago. These additions had no intended effect on benefit payments. Other systems already prevented benefit payments to those who would have been 120 years of age or older. The only effects were upon those who were included by mistake. We don’t know how many were added to the Death Master File by mistake but any number is too many since the whole exercise was pointless to begin with!

     An analysis by SentiLink suggests that those with the following surnames were most likely to have been added to the Death Master File even though they were alive:

• Rodriguez 
• Garcia 
• Perez 
• Perez Rodriguez 
• Harutunyan 

OIG Criticizes SSA Contract With Verizon

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has a good deal of criticism for the agency's $160 million contract with Verizon for an updated telephone system. Things worked out poorly and OIG blames the inability to get Verizon to make things work on lack of performance standards in the agency's contract with Verizon.

It Wasn’t Just Aliens Who Were Cut Off Benefits By DOGE — Plenty Of Citizens As Well

     From the Daily Beast:

What might be called Day of the Dead Living is being continually played out at a Social Security Administration (SSA) office in upstate New York, and likely across the country. 

“We have people who did not receive benefits come in every day with their ID and say, ‘I’m not dead, I’m alive!” says Rennie Glasgow, a claims technical analyst with 15 years of experience at the agency who handles the most challenging cases at the Schenectady office.

These supposed dead are not to be confused with more than 6,000 living immigrants the Trump administration moved to the SSA Death Master File (DMF) in an attempt to force them to self-deport by depriving them of the ability to work legally.

Many more American citizens were wrongly consigned to the DMF after Elon Musk’s DOGE goons bullied their way onto the SSA’s databases and mistakenly decided that “countless” people listed as 120 years old and older were receiving benefits.

“[DOGE staffers] went into the system and they killed off people,” Glasgow told the Daily Beast. “About 4 million people, they marked them as dead. But they’re not sure if those people were supposed to be marked as dead, so they’re sending us an email saying, ‘If these people come into the office with their identification, you can reinstate them.’” …

Follow Me On Bluesky

    I have been posting on Twitter, now "X", for some times. Unfortunately, "X" has become a cesspool. I don't want to keep posting on "X." Please follow me on my Bluesky account -- @socsecnews.bsky.social instead. I'll keep cross posting on "X" for a while but "X" ain't for me any more and, increasingly, it's not a place where my readers feel comfortable either. Bluesky is a sane platform which is not run by a nutjob. It's not full of crazy people. I'm happy to leave "X" for the wingnuts.

    I post some things on Bluesky that I don't post here. Often I post items on Bluesky before I post them here. Bluesky may be worth your time, especially if you're disgusted with what Twitter has become.