From personal experience, something that used to be relatively easy and quick has become much harder and much more challenging. I needed to get a replacement Social Security card. I went online expecting it wouldn’t be hard, but after answering some questions, I was told I needed to visit a local Social Security center. I went online and was prompted to answer a few questions before scheduling an appointment. After finishing the questionnaire, I was directed online to the same place I had started. I called, and after an hour, I decided I didn’t need to replace my card. I am retired and don’t have any plans to go abroad, so why look for frustration? Hurricane Harvey destroyed my Social Security card along with numerous other documents.
The Social Security Administration — the sprawling federal agency that delivers retirement, disability and survivor benefits to 74 million Americans — began the second Trump administration with a hostile takeover.
It ends the year in turmoil. A diminished workforce has struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices — record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.
Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit and hasty policy changes and reassignments left inexperienced staff to handle the aftermath.
Exaggerated claims of fraud, for example, have led to new roadblocks for elderly beneficiaries, disabled people and legal immigrants, who are now required to complete some transactions in person or online rather than by phone. Even so, the number of calls to the agency for the year hit 93 million as of late September — a six-year high, data shows.
… “It was not good before, don’t get me wrong, but the cracks are more than beginning to show,” said John Pfannenstein, a claims specialist outside Seattle and president of Local 3937 of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents most Social Security employees. “It is a great amount of stress on our employees that remain on the job, who haven’t jumped ship.”
Commissioner Frank Bisignano has authorized millions of dollars in overtime pay to employees in a race to clear the bottlenecks, which worsened dramatically after nearly 7,000 employees — 12 percent of the workforce — were squeezed out early in the year. The agency said it has made improvements: It reduced the processing center backlog by 1 million cases this fall, cut pending disability claims by a third and kept the website live 24/7 after a series of outages earlier this year.
If Trump could figure out how to screw up a wet dream, he would do that if he thought there was money to be made.