DOGE and Social Security
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https://www.axios.com/2025/03/13/doge-social-security-musk
For now DOGE is cutting the service rather than cutting benefits. (Reducing headcounts working for the service, closing field and regional offices, etc.)
Giving this its own thread because it seems it's just a matter of time for more shoes to drop on this one.
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Service levels will most certainly drop, I think. I know people who have had the phone support at SSA tell them to go to the local office for particularly gnarly problems.
The biggest issue with what DOGE is doing is that it's getting rid of people and institutional knowledge before replacing those with well-designed systems, or at least confirming that the systems that are in place are sufficiently robust to support the clients well without human support. I don't know about anyone else, but I've found that some automated customer support doesn't cut the mustard because whoever designed it has never been on the customer side and they miss major pieces of functionality. If you have a human on the other side you can often work through those issue.
And we have a population with wide ranging skills as far as computers are concerned. People in their 20s have lived with technology as part of their lives from childhood. We geezers quite often haven't. I don't know how well it will go pulling the plug on people who are in their 70s and 80s who still do things the way they always have. I think the path to automated customer support needs to be walked in a more measured manner.
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It's not good when any office is closed or when staffing is cut. Offices were already being closed and staffing was already too low.
I think the handwriting was on the wall when the mid-century arrangement of the offices was changed to mostly solid "walls" separating the employees from the public with the two talking to each other through holes in clear plastic while passing paperwork and documents through a metal tray under the "window" and over the "shelf."
There are probably too many problems with "DODGE" for me to try to mention them.
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Leaked memo: DOGE plots to cut Social Security phone support
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/25/social-security-phones-doge-cuts/
Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes: Social Security is breaking down
The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts because the servers were overloaded. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones at the front desk as receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. But the agency no longer has a system to monitor customers’ experience with these services, because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.
And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.
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Agreed with all that has been said - that the staffing cuts are ill-advised and harmful to a population of people who often may not be technologically capable. Of course, it is also interesting how uninformed the genius behind DOGE appears to be - e.g. not understanding how 8 years could be receiving SS. One saving grace in all of this - if funds could be allocated to develop AI to handle at least some of the issues that people have. Generally, the service component of our government has been on the trailing edge of technology. This is one instance where it could prove beneficial to modify that approach.
