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CousinIT

(11,324 posts)
Tue Mar 25, 2025, 10:18 AM Mar 25

Long waits, waves of calls, web crashes: Social Security is breaking down (as planned by "DOGE)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/25/social-security-phones-doge-cuts/

No paywall: https://archive.ph/pKm6q

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.

The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining its ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security.

Financial services executive Frank Bisignano is scheduled to face lawmakers Tuesday during a Senate confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s pick to become the permanent commissioner. For now, the agency is run by a caretaker leader in his sixth week on the job who has raced to push out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000. He has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge, pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that the problem is overstated.


NOTE: Bisignano is a vulture capitalist who is being put there to destroy then privatize the SSA a long with "DOGE".
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Long waits, waves of calls, web crashes: Social Security is breaking down (as planned by "DOGE) (Original Post) CousinIT Mar 25 OP
Exactly as planned. bif Mar 25 #1
Fine the living fuck out of Musk every day until it is fixed. GreenWave Mar 25 #2
One more link sent to my maga congresscritter. I've lost count lindysalsagal Mar 25 #3

bif

(25,356 posts)
1. Exactly as planned.
Tue Mar 25, 2025, 10:25 AM
Mar 25

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Unless you're the Orange Turd and his sidekick!

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