"Chaos Has Ensued"

     From the Washington Post:

...  The administration’s ongoing shake-ups of the workforce, from buyout offers to firings to sweeping reorganizations, are also undermining efficiency.

At the Social Security Administration, for example, Trump officials and DOGE pushed thousands of central-office workers to take lower-level positions answering phones in field offices, threatening to fire whoever did not make the jump, according to emails reviewed by The Post and interviews with a half dozen agency employees.

Chaos has ensued across field offices in the weeks since the reassignments took effect, staffers said. Claims processing has bogged down as regular field office staff — already overburdened because of widespread resignations and retirements — are pulled off their normal duties to train incoming administrators and analysts.

But the backlog means the trainings are being shortened and rushed through, employees said, so inexperienced, reassigned staffers start work unprepared. That leads to more mistakes, more requests for help and more backed-up claims — and more time wasted all around.

To sum it up, “you now have half the staff with very little knowledge of how to do the work,” one relocated staffer said. “And the other half of staff overwhelmed with work and unable to really train or mentor these new folks.”

Asked about the reassignments, Social Security provided an emailed statement from an unnamed official, whom it declined to identify. The statement said DOGE’s work at Social Security had charted a new, better course for the agency.

“The voluntary reassignment of approximately 2,000 employees to direct service positions has not caused disruptions at the agency,” the statement read. “As these employees complete their training and become fully proficient in their new positions, they will further accelerate the progress the agency is making.” ...

Palantir Sounds Scary

      From the New York Times:

In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.

Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm. …

Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions. …

Some current and former Palantir employees have been unnerved by the work. The company risks becoming the face of Mr. Trump’s political agenda, four employees said, and could be vulnerable if data on Americans is breached or hacked. Several tried to distance the company from the efforts, saying any decisions about a merged database of personal information rest with Mr. Trump and not the firm.

This month, 13 former employees signed a letter urging Palantir to stop its endeavors with Mr. Trump. Linda Xia, a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it. …

Palantir representatives have also held talks with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education to use the company’s technology to organize the agencies’ data, according to two Palantir employees and officials in those agencies.

The Social Security Administration and Education Department did not respond to requests for comment. …

     Really, what are the patterns that Palantir could legitimately seek to discover at Social Security? Claims for benefits such as Disabled Adult Child and Parents benefits that should have been taken but weren’t?  Do you really think that Social Security would do business with Palantir for this? The important  trends at Social Security aren’t hidden. They’re easy to spot.

Student Loan Collections Paused

      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. …   

$2.5 Trillion In Transactions A Day?

     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.

This Burden Falls Heavily On Trump Voters

      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.

 ...

Appendix: State Fact Sheets

• Alabama
• Alaska
• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• Delaware
• District of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Hawaii
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Mississippi
• Missouri
• Montana
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• South Carolina
• South Dakota
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Virgin Islands
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

Waiting In Schenectady

    People are waiting for service in Schenectady but, in truth, they're waiting everywhere.

Improving Service Easy For A Man Who Has Run A Much Bigger Organization

      From Federal News Network:

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. …

Finally

      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.