Lawmakers and others have Golden Political Rule….
“Do NOT Fuck with Social Security’…..
The Rule Still STANDS…..
DOGE had to cancel a plan to cut phone service for retirement and disability claims after drawing outrage from lawmakers, seniors and advocates. Staff reductions and reassignments led by DOGE are slowing the pace of claims processing as field offices lose longtime staff and gain a smaller number of inexperienced replacements. DOGE-driven changes to the agency’s website are causing crashes almost every day, and phone customers complain about dropped calls and long wait times. A DOGE-imposed spending freeze is leading to shortages of basic office supplies, from printer cartridges to the phone headsets staff need to do their jobs.
And on Friday, Social Security leaders told employees that the agency was ending a security check, developed at DOGE’s request, that was meant to root out allegedly fraudulent claims filed over the phone, according to three employees familiar with the situation and an email obtained by The Washington Post. But the measure — which involved placing a three-day hold on all phone claims as other staffers checked into the caller’s background — had only identified a couple of potential fraud cases while causing significant delays in claims processing, two employees said….
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Social Security is fielding an unprecedented number of retirement claims, with 575,000 pending, including 430,000 that have arrived in the past 60 days, according to an email sent to staff this week and reviewed by The Post. Stephen Evangelista, the agency’s deputy commissioner for operations, wrote in the email that employees must work 10 percent harder in “a sprint … through the end of May” to address “this growing backlog.” Calls to the agency’s processing centers are also spiking from seniors who complain that the main 1-800 hotline is going unanswered and who fear their checks will stop because of the Trump administration’s changes to Social Security, employees said.
Social Security is poorly positioned to handle the influx, according to several staffers, as well as records obtained by The Post. Thousands of employees have taken the Trump administration’s early resignation offer or its early retirement offer, depleting the workforce and leaving some offices wholly bereft of staff, emails show. A DOGE-led move to slash staffing levels spurred many senior administrators scared of getting fired to accept reassignment to lower-level field office positions, slowing claims processing further as those employees are trained, according to employees and records.
The tumult comes as Frank Bisignano finishes his first week as Social Security’s Senate-confirmed commissioner. After getting a chance to see agency operations up front, Bisignano has grown alarmed by the drastic downsizing ordered by DOGE and carried out by a mid-level employee, Leland Dudek, who led the agency in an acting role for four months, according to one current senior official and one former senior official briefed on Bisignano’s thinking. Bisignano is coming to dislike DOGE and hopes to minimize the team’s influence, the officials said….
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