Republican Sabotage of Social Security Left Tens of Thousands of Eligible Recipients Without Benefits

By JOAN McCARTER

In a December report that got kind of lost in the ongoing coup efforts of Donald Trump and his pet Republicans, the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) inspector general (IG) office issued a scathing report on the agency’s performance during the pandemic. It’s not good. The inspector general is estimating that 27,724 eligible recipients have not received payments owed to them to the tune of $52.1 million. There are another 17,772 people eligible for about $90 million total who Social Security has not been able to locate.

This report was a follow-up to an audit done earlier to determine if SSA was taking steps to correct the issues uncovered in a previous audit. The IG sampled 71 underpaid beneficiaries to see if the agency had corrected the oversight. “As of September 2020,” the IG reports, “SSA took action to pay underpayments for six cases. SSA had not taken corrective action for the remaining 65.” A statement from Social Security to the Washington Post said the agency is still reviewing those 65 cases and assuring them that SSA “will complete corrective actions in accordance with policy.” Sometime. These sampled cases stretch back as far as October of 2019. There could be people eligible for the money they are owed who are living through a pandemic, who’ve waited 14 months for SSA to do something. “It is important to emphasize that these are earned benefits that people are being deprived of through no fault of their own,” Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, told the Post.

There are a couple of issues at work here. One is that SSA has been starved by Congress for administrative funds for years as Democrats fell under the deficit peacock spell, not effectively replacing Republican spending cuts. Web Phillips, an analyst and consultant with the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told the Post: “This is being driven by the availability of resources. … It’s not that there are bad people who don’t care. It’s just that they have to triage the work that they’ve got.” But it’s not just lack of funding for the SSA to effectively operate, as true as that is and as important as it is that the agency be fully funded and restored in the Biden administration.

There’s also the problem with Trump’s Social Security Trustee appointments. The Association of Administrative Law Judges and the National Council of SSA Field Operations Locals (Council 220) have declared “no confidence” in Trump’s appointees, Andrew Saul and David Black, and are calling for their removal. Social Security Works is also lobbying President-elect Joe Biden to fire Deputy Commissioner Mark Warshawsky, who they say is “the apparent mastermind behind an ongoing regulatory war on disability beneficiaries.” The Trump administration has been intent on making getting and keeping Social Security more onerous for the disabled.

The IG report on the SSA’s failure to correct already identified issues is scathing:

• “We found no evidence that SSA took action to pay the beneficiaries based on the last address on record or notify the beneficiaries of the underpayment.”

• “We found no evidence SSA attempted to locate the 25 beneficiaries or individuals in our sample who may have been eligible for $127,113 in underpayments.”

• “We found no evidence of SSA employees’ attempts to contact or locate eligible individuals for the payments due to these deceased beneficiaries.”

• “We found no evidence of systems alerts to remind SSA employees to resolve the underpayments.”

With these Trump appointees, and with the years and years of constrained budgets, the most popular program in the history of the United States is slowly being destroyed. As Republicans have intended all along, if they can’t just get rid of it outright by privatizing it, they’ll erode it slowly and surely away. Biden has to find a way to get rid of the commissioners—it’s going to be a challenge—and to restore SSA to full funding.

He’s going to have to use the bully pulpit to do it. Social Security, despite all the sabotage, has achieved the status of an institution in this country and remains the most popular one we’ve got. The people will have Biden’s back on saving it, but he has to make it a priority (along with every other goddamned thing Trump and the Republicans have destroyed).

Joan McCarter is a writer for Daily Kos.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2021

Populist.com