Filing Early Due To Fear

      From the New York Times:

The morning after his 67th birthday, Marty McGowan filed for Social Security. That wasn’t his original plan. He had intended to wait until he was 70 to claim benefits, in exchange for a heftier payment that would have yielded an extra $800 a month.

But like other retirees in recent months, he was watching the Trump administration’s shake-up at the Social Security Administration during a time when the broader economic outlook appeared increasingly uncertain. Concerns about the economy and access to benefits nudged him to file earlier than he had anticipated, even if it might cost him over the long run.

He wasn’t the only one: An additional 276,000 retirees claimed benefits on their earnings record this fiscal year through April, according to the Urban Institute, a research group, a 13 percent jump from the same period a year ago. Officials inside the Social Security Administration called the rise “dramatic,” and though there were some other reasons for the surge, program experts say anxiety appeared to play a meaningful role. …

Social Security Organizational Chart

 

Click on image to view full size or go to this site to view it in a more readable format that I can't reproduce here

O’Malley Cited For Hatch Act Violation

      From The Hill:

Former Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Martin O’Malley violated the Hatch Act during an interview with a local news outlet in North Carolina last year, a U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) investigation found Friday.  …

The complaint pointed to O’Malley’s seven-minute interview with WPTF Morning News based in Raleigh, N.C.  …

The former Maryland governor then claimed he “certainly can’t tell anybody who to vote for, but I can tell you that the proposals that are coming from Donald Trump would quickly deplete Social Security, and we wouldn’t be able to pass it on to our kids as our grandparents passed it on to us.”  …

The Office of Special Counsel wrote that the “only plausible conclusion to draw from Mr. O’Malley’s comments is that, while speaking in his capacity as SSA Commissioner, he explicitly told listeners that they must vote against President Trump to satisfy their responsibility to preserve Social Security.”  …

     This seems almost quaint considering what’s happened since but he wasn’t supposed to do it. 

LOL: “Bisignano Coming To Dislike DOGE.” AI Not Ready For Prime Time. Who Could Have Predicted?

       From the Washington Post:

The U.S. DOGE Service arrived at the Social Security Administration this year determined to slash staff and root out what it claimed was widespread fraud and wasteful spending — a mission Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team has pursued across the government.
But as of this week, many of the major changes DOGE pushed at Social Security have been abandoned or are being reversed after proving ineffective, while others are yielding unintended consequences and badly damaging customer service and satisfaction. The problems come as the agency struggles to cope with a record surge of hundreds of thousands of retirement claims in recent months. …

Social Security is poorly positioned to handle the influx [of new retirement claims], according to several staffers, as well as records obtained by The Post. Thousands of employees have taken the Trump administration’s early resignation offer or its early retirement offer, depleting the workforce and leaving some offices wholly bereft of staff, emails show. A DOGE-led move to slash staffing levels spurred many senior administrators scared of getting fired to accept reassignment to lower-level field office positions, slowing claims processing further as those employees are trained, according to employees and records. …

Bisignano is coming to dislike DOGE and hopes to minimize the team’s influence, the officials said. Another official, however, said Bisignano wants to “partner” with DOGE. …

DOGE staffers came to Social Security vowing to end fraudulent claims filed by scammers and grifters, and convinced that much of that activity was perpetrated over the phone, The Post previously reported. Career staff attempted to explain that wasn’t true, but to no avail, according to three current and former employees familiar with the matter. DOGE proposed ending phone service for retirement and disability claims, then narrowed its proposal after backlash from older claims recipients, advocates and lawmakers — then abandoned the idea.
Staff on the IT side developed a solution they hoped would pacify DOGE: A three-day hold on phone calls to allow extra checking for fraud, the employees said. Everyone, from rank-and-file career staff up to Dudek, knew the phone fraud check was not needed, the employees said. But they did it anyway.
“People lacked the fortitude to tell DOGE there was no fraud because they were afraid to lose their jobs,” one former high-ranking official said, referring specifically to claims filed by telephone. “They knew there was no fraud.” …

When a Post reporter called the [agency]phone line Friday afternoon, it took eight attempts to get transferred to an agent. The AI bot asked the reporter several times to end the call and gave unrelated information about a cost-of-living adjustment, Medicare Part B’s premium and benefits available to people after the retirement age.

Pointless Delays Because Republicans Just KNOW There's Massive Fraud At Social Security

     From Nextgov/FCW:

After installing anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone early last month, the Social Security Administration is considering walking back the policy after finding only two cases that had a high probability of being fraudulent.

The anti-fraud tool set up last month after weeks of changes to the agency’s telephone policies has slowed retirement claim processing by 25% and led to a "degradation of public service,” according to an internal May document obtained by Nextgov/FCW that examined potentially cutting the anti-fraud tool for phone claims. 

Under the new policy, the agency found that only two benefit claims out of over 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent — and they aren’t guaranteed to be so. Less than 1% of claims were flagged as even potentially fraudulent at all. 

“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said. 

The attention to fraud, however, did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend.  ...

    Republicans know to a moral certainty that there is massive fraud at Social Security and they will stop at nothing to find it even though all their efforts keep producing nothing of consequence. Pointless delays to others are a small price to pay for one's ideological beliefs. Accepting the truth that fraud is relatively rare at Social Security and that there are well-tested systems in place to detect the fraud that does exist is unacceptable to them.

And We’re Back To Non-Acquisence

      From the New York Times live blog of today’s oral argument on the case presenting the issue of whether the 14th Amendment confers birthright citizenship on all born in the U.S, as well as an important issue on universal injunctions:

Sauer [the Solicitor General] says the administration would follow a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship. But he hedged on whether it would follow federal appeals court rulings within their geographic jurisdiction, saying the government “generally” would do so.

     This issue has quite a history at Social Security, although not a recent history because the government had completely given up on it.

Pathetic

      From HuffPost:

… In an internal memo to operations employees obtained by HuffPost, a Social Security official said the agency has received more retirement claims than in any previous year, thanks in part to the ongoing retirement of baby boomers.

The backlog has grown to 575,000 pending retirement claims, with more than 140,000 of those pending for more than 60 days. 

“I am calling for a sprint – a focused, concerted effort in all offices beginning today and lasting through the end of May – to address this growing backlog of pending retirement and survivor claims in our field offices and Workload Support Units,” Stephen Evangelista, deputy commissioner for operations, wrote in the email.

“I am calling for all offices to do their very best to increase their [Retirement, Survivors, Health Insurance] clearances by at least 10 percent daily through the end of May,” Evangelista wrote. …

HuffPost asked the Social Security press office if, in light of the retirement claims backlog and the request for SSA employees to work harder, laying off those employees might have been a mistake. The agency did not immediately respond. …

The Undead Problem

From CNN Politics: 

Spurred by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Social Security Administration is combing through its databases to check whether beneficiaries are alive or dead. It has already added dates of death to millions of people’s records, focusing on those who are implausibly old. The problem: Some people who have recently been declared dead are actually alive, forcing them to go to Social Security offices to be “resurrected” and stop the financial havoc that such a mistake can have on their lives. …   

Some managers received an email to remind their staff that “death correction cases” should be addressed that same day and don’t need to have appointments, unlike most people who need help. The agency also sent an email about dates of death being posted to 3.5 million records, with guidance on whom to report erroneous death listings. … 

Also showing up at Social Security offices are immigrants who are correcting their records after having been declared dead by the Department of Homeland Security, several employees told CNN. DHS requested that Social Security enter more than 6,000 names of immigrants into its database used to track dead people in hopes that they’ll leave the US, CNN reported last month. ....