DeJoy isn't the only Trump holdover who needs to go. Meet Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul
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DeJoy isn't the only Trump holdover who needs to go. Meet Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul
DeJoy isn't the only Trump holdover who needs to go. Meet Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy isn't the only Trump official wreaking havoc with and sabotaging a beloved institution, and not the only Trump official still in office who needs to go. Since 2019 wh...
dailykos.com
12:38 PM · Mar 22, 2021
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/3/22/2022302/-DeJoy-isn-t-the-only-Trump-holdover-who-needs-to-go-Meet-Social-Security-Commissioner-Andrew-Saul
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy isn't the only Trump official wreaking havoc with and sabotaging a beloved institution, and not the only Trump official still in office who needs to go. Since 2019 when they were installed, Andrew Saul, the Social Security commissioner, and David Black, the deputy commissioner have been working doggedly to undermine the system. Unsurprisingly, Saul was a big-time Republican donor, Black a former Bush administration staffer. The two have created a hostile work environment for staff at the Social Security Administration and politicized the Social Security disability program, trying to make benefits harder to get and more burdensome to keep by creating all sort of hoops for disabled people to jump through.
Saul and Black have also run roughshod over SSA staff, leading Melissa McIntosh, president of the union representing the agency’s administrative law judges, to say they "have engaged in no-holds-barred union busting." That includes "allegedly flouting contractual rights, discriminating against employees for protected union activities and denying unions information they have a right to receive." Back in December, Association of Administrative Law Judges and the National Council of SSA Field Operations Locals (Council 220) declared "no confidence" in SSA Commissioner Andrew Saul and Deputy Commissioner David Black, and demanded their ouster. The council's executive committees finding of "no confidence" was "unprecedented" according to a union statement, the result of "years of mismanagement and poor leadership."
"The vote is also an admonition of their handling of the remote work program, the lack of open communication with SSA employees amid a global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus, and the absence of a clear vision for SSA," the union said. Those charges start back in 2019, when Saul cancelled a popular teleworking program, saying that "A time of workload crisis is not the time to experiment with working at home," citing the long wait times Social Security claimants face. While Saul was ending that program, he himself refused to show up at work in the SSA's Baltimore headquarters. Ralph de Juliis, president of the AFGE Council 220 said that employees were told he was "spending his time in New York because that's where he's from" to explain his absence. So he got to work from home while staff no longer could.
It turns out he wasn't really working from home, either, de Juliis told HuffPost. The SSA uses Skype for internal communication, and was doing so pre-pandemic. According to Skype screenshots de Juliis shared with HuffPost, at one point last year Saul didn't even bother to log in to the program. There was a period in January 2020 when his account had been inactive for 67 days. “We really think Biden should find new people to run the Social Security Administration, who haven’t made it a point to be bad and horrible to employees and the union,” de Juliis said.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
...there's so much focus on DeJoy & folks like Saul, & I see a lot of folks saying that firing DeJoy needs to be a top priority, but I would feel MUCH more comfortable if Congress would pass a bill explicitly saying the individual mandate is severable from the rest of the ACA, because that would render a pending SCOTUS decision moot & guarantee healthcare for millions of Americans, myself included.
It's likely SCOTUS will uphold the ACA (Nancy was smart enough to utilize parts of it in the COVID relief bills, which implies, by actions at least, that Congress did in fact intend for the individual mandate to be severable, since parts of it were utilized by Congress in other bills AFTER the individual mandate had been struck down) but I would feel a LOT more comfortable if Congress removed all doubt & passed a bill making it explicit, it would pre-empt a potentially bad SCOTUS ruling that could, worst case, declare the entire ACA unconstitutional. To me, guaranteeing the future of the ACA & protecting healthcare for millions of Americans is MUCH more important than firing DeJoy, but it doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar & I don't see anyone demanding it.
As I said, I'm puzzled. I guess folks just don't know about the case & the media isn't writing about it?
