DOGE's reckless SSA cuts may have created a problem too big to fix

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The Trump administration’s colossal cuts to the Social Security Administration in the name of “efficiency” are sowing chaos and dysfunction throughout the agency. Even attempts to fix these new problems are akin to rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship because they fail to address the core problem: staff shortages.

The Washington Post reports the SSA is “temporarily reassigning about 1,000 customer service representatives from field offices to work on the swamped toll-free phone line, increasing the number of agents by 25 percent.” And when the Post reports the phone line is “swamped,” what that means in practice is that people are complaining about dropped calls and previously reported wait times of up to five hours.

But there’s one little oversight: There is no one in place to do the work that the reassigned representatives had to leave behind. According to the Post, “Jessica LaPointe, president of Council 220 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said the move will slow responses to the complex cases that the field office employees handle and be only a temporary bandage for the phone problems.”

“The 1-800 number — they do offer a critical role at the agency, but it’s triage, whereas customer service representatives actually clear work for the agency,” LaPointe told the Post. “So it’s just going to create a vicious cycle of work not getting cleared, people calling for status on work that’s sitting because the claims specialists now are going to have to pick up the slack of the customer service representatives that are redeployed to the tele-service centers.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/retirement/doge-s-reckless-ssa-cuts-may-have-created-a-problem-too-big-to-fix/ar-AA1Ivwe3