The principle thing that's happened this year has been the transition to a new Presidential Administration. The Trump Administration has prioritized reduction in the "bloated" federal bureaucracy. This has resulted in a reduction in Social Security's workforce. The agency has been coping with the reduction in staffing by allowing widespread overtime to its remaining employees. That's right. Get rid of employees so you can pay half again as much to the remaining employees to get the same amount of work done. Maybe that bureaucracy wasn't so "bloated" after all. In any case, the overtime doesn't come near replacing the lost employees. Backlogs are climbing throughout the agency. The agency lacks sufficient personnel to maintain crucial IT systems. This is going to cause more and more problems as time goes along.
Social Security maintains sensitive databases on most Americans. The Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE wanted full access to those databases since Day 1 of the Trump Administration. The Supreme Court gave them that access. DOGE is now combining the databases from Social Security and other agencies into a mammoth database. They say that they want to improve government efficiency but they've never explained how. It seems sinister to me and many other people. We know they're looking for undocumented aliens but Social Security has few records o them. They're not eligible for Social Security numbers and they're not receiving benefits. You'll hear people talking about millions of illegal aliens receiving Social Security benefits but it's all lies.
Social Security's databases have already been corrupted to some extent by DOGE. They misunderstood one of Social Security's databases to mean that huge numbers of dead people were receiving benefits. It wasn't true. They didn't admit their error even when it was pointed out to them. Instead, they started a process that included declaring a fair number of living people as dead, causing them enormous difficulty and they kept saying that there were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security benefits even though they knew this was false.
The agency has a new Commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who previously made tens of millions of dollars a year running a financial services company. The jury is out on Bisignano but so far he has displayed little knowledge of the agency he's running. He talks a lot about how Artificial Intelligence will solve Social Security's service problem. Maybe, but just about everyone reading this will have encountered what passes for AI today in dealing with some large institution, such as a bank or credit card company. How sophisticated did that AI system seem to you?
If you're in NC and want help with your Social Security disability claim, call Hall & Rouse, P.C. at 1-866-425-5347
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