"A Lot Of Us Are Medicated"

     The New York Times has a long piece on service delivery problems at the Social Security Administration. Below are some excerpts. Note that I haven't included excerpts talking about the experiences of actual people although those are quite interesting.

... Frontline workers, whose morale had already been low for years, say they are asked on a daily basis to do more with less.

“In my 24 years, I have never seen it so bad to the point that a lot of us are medicated,” said one Social Security technical expert who works in a field office in the Midwest and takes an anti-anxiety medication daily. She asked not to be identified because she didn’t want to jeopardize her position and scheduled early retirement. “We openly talk about it,” she said. “We joke about it, because what else can you do?”

The agency’s recent effort to reduce wait times for callers to the national 800 number has worsened their plight. ...

 “There is a tipping point, where you can’t do more unless you are going to cut corners and not do the work properly,” said Heather Hughes, a local union president in Raleigh, N.C. “We don’t want to do that. We know these are people and these are people’s lives and livelihoods.” ...

“The process to get a digital S.S.N. into the phone is one of my No. 1 priorities,” Andy Sriubas, who was recently appointed to lead the agency’s vast field operations, said on an internal call with agency staffers also reviewed by The Times. Mr. Sriubas was most recently an executive at Outfront Media, a billboard company, but said he worked with Mr. Bisignano at JPMorgan during the financial crisis. ...

Preliminary findings from a study by a group of academic researchers to be released in October said that access to services — while never easy — had worsened since early 2025, especially for that population.

“Respondents overwhelmingly reported that compounding administrative breakdowns — loss of staff with specialized knowledge, rapidly changing policies, significantly worse processing delays, more frequent errors with emails and faxes routinely lost — have made even basic tasks impossible,” said Katie Savin, the lead author and assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento. The results are “devastating consequences to claimants who’ve experienced hunger, eviction, and loss of health care as a result.” ...

Commissioner Bisignano has said the average wait time on the national 800 number had already been reduced to single digits during his first 100 days, down from 30 minutes last year.

But the metric being cited is actually the “average speed of answer,” which doesn’t include the time customers wait for a callback, an option the vast majority of callers use and that took roughly an hour, on average, in August. That statistic is no longer on the website, but it reflected improvements in July and August, just as more field workers were asked to work the phones.

Call wait times have been removed from the agency website, but internal agency logs reviewed by The Times show many callers are still lingering.

On Sept. 3, for example, the only time callers had a single-digit wait time was at 8 a.m. Later, by 5 p.m., the average wait had stretched to an hour and 18 minutes, and the longest a caller waited that day was more than three hours, according to internal agency data. ...

OK, Mr. Bisignano, You Want To Reduce Payment Errors, What Are You Going To Do About This?

      From Follow-up on Dually Entitled Beneficiaries and Family Maximum Provisions, a report by Social Security’s Inspector General:

 … This is a follow up to our 2014 audit of the Adjustment of Monthly Benefits Under the Family Maximum Provisions. For our current audit, we identified 23,603 Social Security records with dually entitled beneficiaries and at least 2 other beneficiaries who had a date of entitlement of May 2013 or later and were in current pay status as of May 2023. We selected a random sample of 225 records for review.  …

We estimate SSA correctly adjusted benefits in accordance with the family maximum provisions for 15,211 of the 23,603 wage earners’ records in our population (64 percent); however, SSA improperly paid approximately $114 million to spouses and children on 8,392 wage earners’ records (36 percent). …

Percentage Of Population On Social Security

From Visual Capitalist

Chief of Disability Adjudication Position Advertised

    Here are the job duties for the position of Chief of Disability Adjudication currently being advertised by Social Security:

The Chief of Disability Adjudication (DA) oversees an organization responsible for providing the basic framework and mechanisms through which individuals and organizations file for disability under Titles II, VIII, and XVI of the Social Security Act as amended, which includes initial applications and reconsideration requests whose decisions are rendered by the State Disability Determination Services (DDS). DA also provides the basic framework and mechanisms through which individuals and organizations who are dissatisfied with determinations affecting their rights to and amounts of benefits, or their participation in benefit Programs administered by the Agency under the Social Security Act, including initial disability determinations made by State agencies when requested by the claimant, may administratively appeal such determinations in accordance with the requirements of the Administrative Procedure and Social Security Acts.

The Chief is responsible for the following:

• Managing reviews and disability decisions on applications for disability under title II and title XVI on initial applications and reconsideration requests.
• Managing and administering the nationwide hearings process of SSA.
• Managing the Appeals Council (the final level of administrative review under the Administrative Procedure Act for claims filed under titles II, VIII, and XVI of the Social Security Act).
• Developing and implementing comprehensive workload management strategies for initial and reconsideration claims, hearings, and appeals filed under the Social Security Act.
• Managing employee services, performance management, and labor management and employee relations activities for DA nationwide.

Bad News Coming?

      From the Urban Institute:

SSA’s forthcoming regulation includes three major components:

• Replacing outdated occupational data: SSA plans to adopt the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Requirements Survey (ORS) to replace the obsolete Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), a move with bipartisan support.
• Implementing data from ORS: SSA must make many decisions on how best to implement and interpret ORS data, such as determining whether sufficient jobs exist at various skill and exertional levels that will directly affect eligibility outcomes.
• Age as a Factor: SSA is considering changes to how age, education, and past work experience influence disability determinations. These changes would disproportionately affect older workers.

Estimated Impact:

• The anticipated regulation could reduce eligibility for new applicants to the SSDI program by as much as 20 percent overall, and up to 30 percent among older workers. The potential impact on the SSI program is unclear.
• A 10% reduction in SSDI eligibility could result in 500,000 people losing access over 10 years including 80,000 widows and children. An additional 250,000 beneficiaries could lose eligibility for part of the period. 

• A 10% reduction would reduce benefits by $82 billion, with ripple effects on Medicare and Medicaid eligibility. 

• Many denied older workers may claim early retirement benefits, reducing their lifetime income by up to 30%. …

OHO Operating Stats

 

From Social Security -- Click on image to view full size

 

Where The Cuts Have Come

      From a paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

A Response

     The Social Security Administration has responded to a letter from the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee concerning the whistleblower complaint of Charles Borges concerning DOGE usage of sensitive Social Security databases. Here are a couple of key quotes and my response:

… The location referred to in the whistleblower allegation is actually a secured server in the agency’s cloud infrastructure which historically has housed this data and is continuously monitored and overseen—SSA’s standard practice. … What would have been the point of making a copy of Social Security’s databases elsewhere within Social Security’s own cloud if you weren’t doing something sneaky? Who had access to this copy of the databases? Why were multiple Social Security employees, not just Borges, going to DEFCON 1 over this if it was innocuous?

All employees are required to go through a vetting process prior to being granted access to SSA information systems. Based on their job functions, employees are granted the appropriately permissions to perform their work. Access to resources within the AWS environment is governed by the agency’s established Systems Access Management protocols. … Sure, that’s what’s supposed to happen but we know that DOGE employees were given access to sensitive Social Security databases long before they could have completed training.

     You can get by with half truths and fibs as long as the Committee Chairman doesn’t really care to delve into the matter and you’re only looking to survive the day. This isn’t a great long term plan but long term planning isn’t something the Trump Administration even tries to do.