From CNBC:
The U.S. Department of Education is pausing its plan to garnish people’s Social Security benefits if they have defaulted on their student loans, a spokesperson for the agency tells CNBC.
“The Trump Administration is committed to protecting Social Security recipients who oftentimes rely on a fixed income,” said Ellen Keast, an Education Department spokesperson.
The development is an abrupt change in policy by the administration. …
Frank Bisignano has said that his old employer, Fiserv, handled $2.5 trillion a day in transactions. There are about 8.2 billion people on the planet. If I remember correctly a trillion is a thousand billion. If my math is correct that means that Fiserv handled about $3,000 in transactions per day for each man, woman and child on the planet. Does that sound plausible? What basis would that be for big-timing Social Security employees even if it's true? Fiserv wasn’t trying to determine disability or administer a needs based benefits program, among other things. For that matter, even if Bisignano had some reasonable claim to big-time Social Security employees, is that a smart thing to do as a manager even if it does fit in with the Trump Administration ethos.
If Bisignano really wants to impress me and others with Social Security experience he should use Elon Musk’s all stars to solve Social Security’s problem with the windfall offset. Great gobs of time are now wasted on manual, yes manual, calculations. There’s got to be a better way. How complicated could it possibly be? It’s only Social Security. However, the odds are that Bisignano won’t even understand the problem by the time he leaves office.
From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
The Trump Administration and DOGE have implemented new phone service restrictions that the Social Security Administration (SSA) estimates will require people to make over 1.93 million additional trips to understaffed Social Security field offices each year. Even without any traffic, these additional trips will lead to over a million hours wasted on unnecessary travel each year.
Nationally, assuming no traffic, half of all seniors must drive at least 33 minutes for a field office visit, and nearly a quarter of seniors (13.5 million) live more than an hour’s drive roundtrip from their nearest field office.
...
People are waiting for service in Schenectady but, in truth, they're waiting everywhere.
The new head of the Social Security Administration is looking to get call wait times down to “single digits,” as part of this strategy to make the agency a “digital-first organization.”
An SSA official told Federal News Network that the agency’s monthly average call wait time dropped from 30 minutes in January to just about 12 minutes in May, when including callers who were given a “callback” option and didn’t have to remain on hold.
SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano told employees in an all-hands meeting on Thursday that was agency’s “best performance” since it started tracking these metrics. But said he plans to cut call wait times to a fraction of that using artificial intelligence tools.
“We’re going to get that thing down to single digits,” he said.
Bisignano, a former Wall Street executive who led a financial tech company before joining the Trump administration, told employees he was “using AI before it was AI,” and oversaw financial organizations that processed a higher volume of payments than SSA does.
“Much bigger orgs, much bigger problems — but not as important. Can you see the difference? Here we do $1.5 trillion a year. In my last job, we did $2.5 trillion a day. This is more important than that, though,” he said. …
Social Security can cut off disability benefits if there is medical improvement. However, claimants can ask that their disability benefits continue while they appeal. More than 40 years after benefit continuation came into being Social Security has finally created a form for claimants to use to request benefit continuation.
Federal job applicants will soon be quizzed on their favorite Trump administration policy as part of the hiring process, according to the Office of Personnel Management’s new “merit hiring plan.”
“How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role?” asks one of four essay questions that job seekers must answer if they are seeking any federal position GS-5 or above. “Identify one or two relevant executive orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired. …
From CBS:
Frank Bisignano, commissioner of the Social Security Administration, told CBS News that he believes technology, and specifically artificial intelligence, could be the key to improving his agency's customer service, despite recent changes that have prompted concern among some of the nearly 69 million Americans that receive Social Security each month.
"We're bringing a massive technology effort to transform the servicing agenda," Bisignano said. "We're gonna bring AI into the phone system...I intend it to be completed this year." …
From the New York Times:
… “The technology we’re building today is not sufficient to get [to Artificial General Intelligence or A.G.I. which would be needed to switch Social Security phone service mostly to A.I.]”, said Nick Frosst, a founder of the A.I. start-up Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered A.I. researcher of the last 50 years. “What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That’s very different from what you and I do.”
In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of respondents said the methods used to build today’s technology were unlikely to lead to A.G.I. …
The AI phone system that Social Security has tried to implement has been a complete failure so far. I’m not aware of any institution that has an AI phone system that would come close to what Social Security needs. There is good reason to believe that no such system will be in the offing any time soon, if ever. My question is, what’s your backup plan, Mr. Bisignano?
