From The Hill:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday announced the head of the Social Security Administration (SSA) would also serve as CEO of the IRS after the tax agency’s previous, Senate-confirmed leader was ousted.
Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano will take on the additional role of CEO of the IRS, where he will oversee day-to-day operations. But Bessent will continue to serve as the acting IRS commissioner, giving him autonomy over the agency. …
From the Washington Post:
The Trump administration is preparing a plan that will make it harder for older Americans to qualify for Social Security disability payments, part of an overhaul of the federal safety net for poor, older and disabled people that could result in hundreds of thousands of people losing benefits, according to people familiar with the plans.
Currently, the Social Security Administration evaluates disability claims by considering age, work experience and education to determine if a person can adjust to other types of work. Older applicants, typically over 50, have a better chance of qualifying because age is treated as a limitation in adapting to many jobs.
But now officials are considering eliminating age as a factor entirely or raising the threshold to age 60, according to three people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions. They also plan to modernize labor market data used to judge whether claimants can work, replacing an outdated jobs database that includes obsolete occupations like nut sorters and telephone quotation clerks, following a Washington Post investigation in 2022. …
“We felt that so many more jobs are now available to disabled people,” said Mark Warshawsky, who led work on the earlier proposed rule as the SSA’s deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy during the first Trump administration. “The nature of work has changed.”
Warshawsky, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, predicted that while the new rule under consideration would allow the agency to turn away more older people, more people with mental disabilities are likely to be approved. …
According to two former officials, starting next year the agency plans to develop a computer-generated database using the modern jobs data to determine which jobs, if any, someone seeking benefits could perform. Disability advocates say they worry that the database will be programmed to come up with a vast array of jobs, particularly if advancing age is no longer a limiting factor, and will end up denying benefits to tens of thousands of claimants every year. …
As I’ve said recently, doing anything like this would be disastrous for its authors. The people planning this have no idea how radical it is.
The first paycheck that federal employees will miss due to the shutdown is apparently October 10. Will that be the whole check missing or just part of it?
From CBS News:
… In Atlanta, some residents who tried to file critical paperwork at the Social Security office downtown say they're having a hard time ensuring they get their payments.
CBS News Atlanta saw countless people turned away by security on Thursday. A federal worker said the office is severely understaffed since employees aren't being paid to come to work. …
The office isn't closed, but a Social Security Administration spokesperson said they have reduced services. A federal worker said that only five out of 30 people who were supposed to be in the office came to work on Thursday. …
From a recent report by Social Security’s Office of Inspector General:
The Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program provides monthly benefits to retired and disabled workers and their dependents as well as the survivors of deceased workers. In general, to be entitled to benefits, a child of a retired, disabled, or deceased worker must: 1) be unmarried; 2) be under age 18, a full-time elementary or secondary school student under age 19, or have become disabled before age 22; and 3) meet certain relationship and dependency requirements. Generally, an SSA employee may appropriately deny a claim when the employee properly completes all necessary actions and determines the applicant has not established the claimant meets the requirements to be entitled to child’s insurance benefits.
We reviewed a random sample of 100 claims from a population of 21,533 claims filed from January 2019 through July 2023 that SSA employees approved for benefits in July 2023 or earlier and a random sample of 100 claims from a population of 75,424 claims filed from January 2019 through July 2023 SSA employees did not approve for benefits as of July 2023.
Of the 96,957 claims in our review, we estimate SSA employees correctly denied 37,712 (39 percent) and incorrectly denied 24,555 (25 percent). As a result of employee errors, SSA did not pay these beneficiaries approximately $92.2 million in benefits and delayed paying these beneficiaries approximately $87.7 million in benefits to which they were entitled.
We could not conclude whether employees correctly denied the remaining 34,690 claims (36 percent). This includes an estimated 28,661 claims SSA employees denied before they appropriately completed all required actions; therefore, there was not enough information in SSA’s records to determine whether Agency employees appropriately denied the claims. …
This might be tough for the Commissioner. I don’t think it can be solved by laying off employees or intimidating them or demanding they work harder. It will take analysis of the difficulties in doing this work accurately, coming up with better workflow processes, coming up with better quality control processes and being honest with everyone about the workforce needed to do the job properly. The honesty part will be the hardest thing for this Administration. It’s easier to blame the “deep state” than to do the difficult work of governing.
I am hearing reports that some Social Security field offices in at least two states are refusing to deal with attorneys and others during the government shutdown. Of course, I’ve heard nothing suggesting this is authorized. I have a vague recollection that this happened in an earlier shutdown before field offices were told to knock it off.
From the New York Times:
… The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the monthly jobs data, will “suspend all operations” if Congress and the president fail to reach a deal to extend funding for the federal government before a Tuesday midnight deadline, according to a contingency plan released by the Department of Labor. Data releases scheduled during a government shutdown “will not be released,” and data collection for future reports will cease, the memo said. …
So, why does this matter for Social Security? The annual Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) for Social Security would ordinarily be announced soon after the BLS report due this week. That will have to be delayed. We have until December for this, so there’s time. However, future COLAs could become unreliable due to the gap in BLS data collection. Is it even possible for them to ever catch up? Their staffing levels have also been cut. I don’t think BLS was affected like this in prior government shutdowns.
Best wishes to all affected. This is awful for everyone.
