- reverse pyromania
- Posts
- Constituent Services
Constituent Services
Kay W.
April 06, 2025
My husband is lucky enough to have some family money to play with so for the first 20 years of our relationship he read the Wall Street Journal for investment info. I came from a different kind of family so I had not read the Journal prior to hanging around with him (although I love newspapers) but I eventually read his every day and grew to love their news coverage – Right leaning, sure, but rigorous and really meaty. Stay away from the lunatic editorial page and you’re good. Then I drifted away from the Journal and read the WaPo and NYtimes for about a decade. When Trump was re-elected I started reading the Journal again and it’s been interesting – they’ve been quite tough on Trump, arguably more tough than the (supposedly) liberal NYTimes.
This is a good piece about what’s happening to Social Security on the ground:
at about 1,200 Social Security field offices across the nation, where employees, beneficiaries and advocacy groups describe a depleted, overburdened staff, long waits and frequent disconnections from the agency’s toll-free number, and hours spent idling in field offices. Social Security has become a central focus of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, with Elon Musk referring to it as a “Ponzi scheme” and pressing for dramatic changes.
The Social Security Administration is cutting staff, restricting what recipients can do over the phone and closing some local field offices that help people in person. The agency is reducing its workforce from 57,000 employees to about 50,000, the lowest level in decades. These changes are coming as the number of retirees claiming benefits has risen in recent years as baby boomers age.
The agency’s computer network has crashed 10 times during the past six weeks, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, the main union that represents Social Security workers.
Later this month, the agency plans to roll out new restrictions on services that can be conducted over the phone, including claims for retirement or survivor benefits, to reduce fraud and strengthen identity-proofing procedures. Advocates and workers say that could lead to longer waits at field offices.
“It’s like a house of cards that’s about to collapse,” said John Pfannenstein, who works at a different Seattle-area field office and serves as a regional vice president for the AFGE. “It’s just been a gradual degradation of service, of staffing, of funding.”
Pfannenstein said employees in the Seattle area have yet to receive training or guidance ahead of the April 14 start of the new identity-proofing measures.
.
I worked for the Postal Service as a clerk then carrier then manager and one of the things you learn working as a front-line employee in rural post offices is many Americans cannot really read. They were bringing me letters and documents and notices and asking for help not because these communications they received were poorly written or at some high level but because many of them are very poor readers.
I reckon these are the majority of the people who use the phone line and in person visits to the 1200 Social Security offices all over the country – people who can’t just be shunted to a website and told to deal with it, people who need another human being to help them.
I hope Democrat electeds find these people and tell them who took away their local connection to the federal government and destroyed constituent services: Elon Musk and the team of clueless douchebags in the White House who know absolutely nothing about how this country actually operates and who keeps the big machine that operates in the background running.
Reply