ALJs Available Dropping Rapidly

 

From Social Security. Click on image to view full size

Mass Layoffs Enjoined At Social Security

      A federal judge in California has enjoined the Trump Administration from mass layoffs and program closures at a couple dozen federal agencies including the Social Security Administration. The extent to which this may affect Social Security is unclear. Were mass layoffs in the cards anyway?

Most Popular Names For Babies In 2024

     From Social Security, the most popular names for boys and girls from 2024:

Boys	Girls
1. Liam	1. Olivia
2. Noah	2. Emma
3. Oliver	3. Amelia
4. Theodore	4. Charlotte
5. James	5. Mia
6. Henry	6. Sophia
7. Mateo	7. Isabella
8. Elijah	8. Evelyn
9. Lucas	9. Ava
10. William	10. Sofia

What Do You Think?

      From Michigan Live:

BAY CITY, MI — A Midland County man and self-described “patriot” is facing a federal felony for allegedly threatening to kill Social Security Administration employees.

Zachary Brown, 40 of Coleman, on Monday, May 5, appeared before U.S. District Judge Patricia T. Morris, who informed him he was charged with one count of threatening to assault, kidnap, or murder a U.S. official. The charge is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. …

      I can’t copy the whole article here. Read it for yourself. I doubt that this is a case for prosecution. It’s an IVC case — involuntary commitment.  

Who Needs A Guy Like This?

     From the Washington Post:

Edwin Jackson’s government work was finding jobs for military veterans and then making sure those vets succeeded. Like this:

Representing the Social Security Administration at a job fair in Maryland, Jackson meets a paralegal and steers her toward a position at his agency. Then she asks, “Can you help my husband, who’s active-duty military?”

Sure, Jackson says. The woman brings over her husband, whose body language reads, “This is pointless.”

“I can’t work for Social Security,” the man says. “You can’t give me work in my field.”

“What’s your field?”

“I’m a sniper.”

Jackson replies immediately: “Okay, I got a job for you.”

“You didn’t hear me; I’m a sniper.”

Jackson tells the man about his own Army service during the Vietnam War, when Jackson met sniper school graduates and saw how effective they were at designing and planning missions in intricate detail.

“You’re a project manager,” he tells the sniper. “You know the mission and lay it out in every detail needed to succeed.”

Jackson got the man a project manager position at a federal agency. And the government got itself an efficient worker even as it repaid its debt to the sniper for risking his life.

“He was going to count himself out,” Jackson told me. “Sometimes vets need an extra layer of help. You have to help them look at life through a different lens. We owe them that.” ...

 

It's About A Different Agency But You May Still Find It Interesting

     From Fast Company:

Sahil Lavingia has had just three jobs over a 15-year career in tech.

The first was as the second employee of Pinterest. The second was by founding the startup Gumroad, a successful, famously lean company that makes it easy for content creators to sell digital goods. The third? As an unpaid contractor supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs in a role facilitated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ...

“The reason I [Lavingia] did it is, I think, the impact I can have,” he explains. Lavingia says that in the private sector, technical employees can have between six and seven figures of financial impact over their lifetime. If they’re a successful startup founder like he is, maybe that number is larger. “But in the government, I really believe that I can have billions of dollars of positive impact just by being technically minded.” ...

Now that he’s there, he says he finds himself surrounded by people who “love their jobs,” who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work.

“In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [a buyout offer], then we wouldn’t have to do much more,” he says, implying software can replace departing employees. “We’d just basically use software to plug holes. But that’s not what’s happening.”

Lavingia’s skills with automation, which have helped keep Gumroad lean, are what he hopes to bring to the VA. But when it comes down to it, what he’s found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesn’t make decisions as fast as a startup might.

 “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” he says. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” ...

Ways And Means Republicans Want To Hear From Bisignano

     House Ways and Means Republicans are inviting the new Social Security Commissioner to testify before the Committee -- apparently the whole Committee. This is normal when a new Commissioner comes into office. 

    Note that I said it was the Republicans issuing the invitation. You would think that in normal times the invitation would come from the entire Committee, rather than just the majority party. Will such "normal" times ever return?

The Database Threat

      From the Washington Post:

The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say. ...

 At several agencies, DOGE officials have sought to merge databases that had long been kept separate, federal workers said. For example, longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis told staffers at the Social Security Administration that they would soon start linking various sources of Social Security data for access and analysis, according to a person briefed on the conversations, with a goal of “joining all data across government.” ...

 But DOGE has also sometimes removed protections around sensitive information — on Social Security numbers, birth dates, employment history, disability records, medical documentation and more. ...

 “Separation and segmentation is one of the core principles in sound cybersecurity,” said Charles Henderson of security company Coalfire. “Putting all your eggs in one basket means I don’t need to go hunting for them — I can just steal the basket.” ...

 The current administration and DOGE are bypassing many normal data-sharing processes, according to staffers across 10 federal agencies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. For instance, many agencies are no longer creating records of who accessed or changed information while granting some individuals broader authority over computer systems. DOGE staffers can add new accounts and disable automated tracking logs at several Cabinet departments, employees said. Officials who objected were fired, placed on leave or sidelined. .

..