This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on the
continuing chaos at Social Security caused by Trump/Musk/DOGE, and how
it's still putting seniors at risk. As always there may have been
minor wording variations from this script as I presented this report
live on air.
- - -
So yeah, there have indeed been major developments and there is still
enormous confusion. You'll recall DOGE moved in on Social Security,
ordered closing of about 50 of their offices, firing many thousands of
employees, a major percentage. It was already challenging to get
appointments and you apparently no longer can just walk in for help
without one.
Then DOGE announced the ending of essentially all phone based support,
saying you'd have to use the website or go to those remaining always
overloaded Social Security offices. This created quite a blowback.
Because something over 70 million people, mostly seniors, depend on
Social Security payments every month. They need to be able to quickly
contact Social Security to make changes so that they keep getting
payments, or call when there are problems with payments, or even just
to get started with Social Security payments. Many people especially
seniors have great difficulty or find it completely impossible to
physically get to Social Security offices and don't use the Internet
or are otherwise unable to use the Social Security website.
We even saw seniors lining up in the sun trying to get into social
security offices afraid that they were no longer going to get their
payments. Then new Commerce secretary, billionaire Lutnick, made the
incredibly tone deaf statement that his elderly mother-in-law wouldn't
mind if she missed a Social Security payment. Well, a large percentage
of Social Security recipients depend on Social Security for all or
most of their income that keeps them alive month to month, with no
billionaire sons-in-law to help them.
With all the controversy, around April 7th Social Security said that
Medicare and some other programs other than regular Social Security
retirement payments could still be claimed by phone, and changes were
pushed back to today, April 14th. But that would still leave the vast
majority of seniors who are on regular Social Security without phone
support. Then as concerns continued, last Thursday Social Security
announced more reversals and that the phone support for many routine
calls for all Social Security related programs would continue except
when there are identity verification problems.
Again it's still a very confusing situation. Apparently some call
types like changing payment information will reportedly still need to
be online or in-person not by phone, and if that's the case it could
still easily cut many seniors off from the payments they need to
survive every month.
Even many Social Security workers are reportedly confused about what
the new rules are given all the sudden changes.
Also the Social Security website has been crashing a lot making it
sometimes impossible for online users to reach it. This reportedly
resulted largely from changes DOGE made without testing them properly
for the kind of load they'd be getting. Also DOGE supposedly wants to
rewrite the millions of lines of software -- mostly in old programming
languages -- into a "modern" language and claims they can do it in
just a few months, presumably using AI. And to most computer
professionals this incredibly short timeline sounds frankly crazy
especially when you're talking about life-critical services like
Social Security.
And by the way, Social Security just announced that all of their
public communications announcements will now only be on the X social
media platform, and that's a whole topic unto itself.
If you're currently getting your Social Security payments properly --
you're getting them as expected every month -- you PROBABLY don't have
to do anything right now. Otherwise, who knows?
There's an old saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Unfortunately, DOGE doesn't seem to always appreciate that adage, so
stay tuned.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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