Man Bites Dog Story

      From NBC Miami:

A security guard accused of attacking an elderly man at a Social Security office in Miami-Dade was arrested on Monday, police said.

Peter Vegliante was charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and battery of a person 65 or older.

According to police, the 44-year-old Vegliante works for BTI Security, which is a contractor that provides services at federal buildings. …

Police said that surveillance video captured the moment when Vegliante placed the 86-year-old man in a headlock and then forced him to the ground.

The elderly man suffered injuries and it's not clear what sparked the incident.

“Big Balls” Looked “Nervous, Almost Embarrassed”

“Big Balls”

      From Wired:

… “Edward [“Big Balls”] Coristine joined the Social Security Administration this week as a special government employee,” Stephen McGraw, an SSA spokesperson, tells WIRED. “His work will be focused on improving the functionality of the Social Security website and advancing our mission of delivering more efficient service to the American people.” …

Multiple sources at the SSA tell WIRED that Coristine has appeared in person to work on-site at the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland headquarters. One SSA employee says they saw Coristine with DOGE engineer Aram Moghaddassi, a current X and former Neuralink employee deployed at the agency. The pair was spotted at the SSA cafeteria as recently as Monday, although it’s unclear what day this week Coristine’s employment officially began. “Coristine looked nervous, almost embarrassed,” the SSA source says. “Aram was on the phone with someone … then said ‘Yes I’m with him right now,’ gesturing to Big Balls.’” …

"Big Balls" Now A Social Security Employee

     There have been reports that Edward "Big Balls" Coristine, who had been employed by DOGE, had left employment with the federal government. Those reports turned out to be false. He only left DOGE. He's now a "special government employee" with Social Security. 

    It must be purely coincidental that this was announced the day after the Ways and Means Committee hearing with Commissioner Bisignano. 

Not Social Security But Still Interesting

      From NPR:

A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were "relatively nonexistent" during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was," Sahil Lavingia told NPR's Juana Summers. …

"Elon [Musk] was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent," Lavingia said. "That's something he said a lot in private. And publicly. And so I thought, OK, cool, I'll take him at his word. I will be transparent."

Shortly after the interview was published online, Lavingia got an email. Just 55 days into his work at DOGE, his access had been revoked.

From The Commissioner's Written Testimony

     From Commissioner Bisignano's written testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee:

 

Some Questions For The Commissioner

     Frank Bisignano's hearing before two subcommittees of the House Ways and Means Committee is Wednesday at 2:00. Here are some questions I'd like to hear answered:

• What has surprised you about Social Security since becoming Commissioner?
• Your agency has recently stopped posting processing time information. Why? 
• There are reports that you ordered Payment Center employees to stop all regular work in order to complete the WEP/GPO workload by the end of this month -- which happens to nearly coincide with the date of this hearing. Is that accurate? If so, why should the people with WEP/GPO cases take precedence over those of people who have been waiting years to receive any money from Social Security? 
• Is it true that Social Security is making widespread use of overtime to do the work of employees who have been induced to leave the agency since Inauguration Day? Why pay time and a half for work when it could have been done for regular pay by those employees who have since departed?
• There has been talk of a goal to get Social Security down to 50,000 employees. Is that a current goal?
• When would you anticipate resuming hiring new employees on a regular basis to replace departing employees?
• Could you provide us with data comparing employee productivity for in office work versus remote work? 
• How much of your time is spent working in Woodlawn or Washington as opposed to working from home or from the special office set up for you in New York?
• Does Palantir now have access to any Social Security data? If so, have they been allowed to copy the data to other government computers or their own computers? 
• Could you provide us with Full Time Equivalent (FTE) numbers for the Social Security Administration for each month since the beginning of calendar year 2024? 
• What is Lee Dudek's employment status at the moment? 
• Social Security will turn 90 years old in August. Is that an occasion to celebrate? 

Brilliant Management

      Let me see if I have this right. The Trump Administration induces thousands of Social Security employees to resign their jobs. Their only replacement, if there is one, is reassigned employees who are untrained on their new jobs and who are almost worse than useless for now because of the mistakes they make. The only solution, other than pointless exhortations to work harder, is to give the remaining employees lots of overtime. So, you pay employees 150% of their regular wages to do the work, or some of it, instead of paying the employees you got rid of 100% of their regular wages to do the same work.

     I’m glad we’ve got great managers running Social Security like a business.

The Problem Doesn’t Go Away If You Stop Talking About It

      From the Washington Post:

Social Security has stopped publicly reporting its processing times for benefits, the 1-800 number’s current call wait time and numerous other performance metrics, which customers and advocates have used to track the agency’s struggling customer service programs.
 

The agency removed a menu of live phone and claims data from its website earlier this month, according to Internet Archive records. It put up a new page this week that offers a far more limited view of the agency’s customer service performance. 


The website also now urges customers to use an online portal for services rather than calling the main phone line or visiting a field office — two options that many disabled and elderly people with limited mobility or computer skills rely on for help. The agency had previously considered cutting phone services and then scrapped those plans amid an uproar. …