The Odd Couple

      From a piece in Business Insider on Leland Dudek and Frank Bisignano:

… Bisignano's confirmation is awaiting a full Senate vote, which is expected after the chamber votes on nominees for multiple diplomatic positions.  …

Some who spoke with BI expressed surprise that he would join the Trump administration. An archived biography from First Data, where he served as chair and CEO, said he's "a strong supporter of diversity" and helped create affinity groups for women and LGBTQ+ employees at the company. He's donated to candidates on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, records show. In May 2019, Bisignano gave $125,000 to the Trump Victory PAC and another $83,900 to the Republican National Committee. …

A person who has spoken with Dudek said they believed some of his bluster might be a smoke screen. They said Dudek, like previous commissioners, said he feared that the system was on the brink of collapse and worried about people not receiving their benefits — a similar sentiment to what Dudek expressed in a recording obtained by ProPublica. They feel that he thinks he's doing damage control and running interference between DOGE and everyone else.

"It felt like a bunch of 6-year-olds with too much sugar had been put in charge of the agency and were just kind of running all over the place, randomly disconnecting and reconnecting things in different ways," the former SSA manager said.

Some of the decisions at Fiserv that played out on Bisignano's watch appear to have rankled some of his employees. A former Fiserv client project manager said that return-to-office policies rolled out late last year under Bisignano contributed to his decision to leave. The former manager described the culture as "a bit of a sweatshop." …

Bisignano "loves his reputation for fixing things," said one person who worked closely with him, "not for burning things down." …

     I’m pretty sure that if he knew now what’s he’s going to learn in the next few months that Bisignano would not want to be Commissioner of Social Security. The impressive knowledge and skill which he has demonstrated in his previous career will be completely inadequate to the task because he’s faced with a truly impossible task. 

Default Overpayment Recovery Rate To Be 50%

      Newly issued Social Security Emergency Message EM 25029 indicates that the default overpayment recovery rate will be 50%, not 100% as feared. It had been 10% for about the last year. Also, those already told they had a 10% recovery rate won’t see that rate rise.

Stephen Evangelista Appointed Social Security’s Deputy Commissioner for Operations

      According to a Social Security Administration blog.

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