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Another day, another political media narrative blaming Trump’s cuts for government ineptitude.
Social Security website keeps crashing, as DOGE demands cuts to IT staff – Washington Post
The SSA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (silly name, but not the real issue) has 3,200 employees.
If the website is crashing and going down, as the Post, claims with “outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day”, it’s not because it doesn’t have enough employees.
Over 3,000 IT people for even a very popular platform is ridiculous. There’s a reason that cuts are being suggested.
And the SSA websites were having ridiculous problems even under Biden.
It feels like the ultimate Kafkaesque expression of government bureaucracy: the United States’ Social Security Administration (SSA) website has listed hours when it is open.
If you try to access the secure post-login portion of the SSA website (known as My Social Security account, at ssa.gov) outside of these hours, you’ll just be met by an error message, stating the hours of operation and encouraging you to return at these times:
On weekdays, the site is up for 20 hours per day, with 4 hours of downtime in the early morning. On weekends, the site is live for less time; 18 hours on Saturday and 15.5 hours on Sunday.
That’s from 2022. This isn’t Trump or DOGE. It’s that very same department that DOGE wants to cut.
Now some of the current events are a kind of media DDOS attack in which the media spreads panic about access to the site, more visit it and the site, which already appears to run on spiderwebs and faint hopes while being programmed by an orangutan in BASIC, crashes. (You can do that to any number of sites.)
But the SSA’s site had longstanding problems. And it’s not just SSA. Everyone remembers that glorious Obamacare website launch. (If you don’t, ask your parents.)
“Those are the risks,” the former employee told CNN. “You lose staff that have the institutional knowledge, and when something happens, you can’t recover, or it takes you a lot longer to recover. The implication is American people get degraded services on the tech side because people internally are understaffed.”
This isn’t understaffing. SSA has 3,000 employees working in its IT office. Maintaining a website should not be about “institutional knowledge” which implies it’s some strange Dickensian library, but functionality. And while not everything DOGE does right, in the realm of IT services, its people likely understand functionality better than the 3,000 men and women toiling by candlelight in the steam-powered servers of the SSA.
Candlelight and steam power is the enemedia formula for gaslighting.
There is an interesting article on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal tiled “Social Security Cutbacks Contribute to Chaos” that includes an allusion to the frustration some people have been experiencing with visits to the Social Security offices. Maybe Social Security could hire fewer IT people and have more people actually having questions about their Social Security.
The local Social Security office has a security guard. When that guard does not show up, the doors to the office remained locked with the workers just sitting inside doing squat to help those who need help. Whether it is a good use of taxpayers’ money to have a security guard is certainly debatable.
What is a matter of fact is that the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare is about twice the size of the $36,000,000,000,ooo and quickly growing national debt. Here are both the Republicans’ plan and the Democrats’ plan for addressing those unfunded liabilities–> <–
Anticipating more pathetic responses, allow me to include one already previously posted in the comment section.
"President Trump is right and the Wall Street Cornhole is consistently wrong."
That comment is what passes as intelligent for people unwilling to tolerate any criticism of President Trump.
You were ok until you added this lie: “That comment is what passes as intelligent for people unwilling to tolerate any criticism of President Trump.”
You no doubt suffer from TDS which is the liar’s lament
Dick cannot stand the fact that
… some of us have been waiting 60 years for someone in Washington DC
… to fight those criminal traitors.
And we are willing to let him smash the china shop, turn over the tables, change the paradigms,
… and scare the yellow liquid out of the cowards.
And that means SSA is on the bottom of the priority list.
Because it’s not important.
If we don’t fix elections, deport illegals, and cannot cut the fat from the budget …
… fixing social security will not happen.
Dick’s not brave enough to have patience,
and he’s not attentive enough to understand priorities.
Did you need a trigger warning? I voted for Trump and, for our country’s sake, hope he is successful. I am not an Always Trumper who refuses to concede the flaws in some of his policies. Make Canada the 51st state? Time to recalibrate the Dumbometer for that one.
Did you think Trump’s $500,000,000,000 Platinum Plan in an effort to buy the votes of black people with taxpayers’ money was a good idea? He’s the guy who gave us President Sleepy with a Dem House and Senate. I hope he doesn’t repeat that trifecta.
Trump, who claims to want a balanced budget, called the last deficit-financed stimulus check of $600 “measly.” Here’s his plan for addressing the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare–>
The lefties in my area, responding to media screaming about cuts “ Trump will kill my mother,” told everyone to quickly sign in to social security website, download their “ file” before Trump erased it thereby taking away all of their social security income or future income. I received an urgent message from a lefty urging me to take action or lose all my benefits. This person believed it and was trying to warn me.
Truly, the propaganda is dangerous. It could be adding stress to a lousy website
thank you, that kind of thing explains a lot
Messing with Social Security is political suicide. Goes back to the the Corn Dole in Ancient Rome. Once it was instituted the rich Oligarchs were never able to get rid of it, for 800 years or more, Rome fell first.
Same thing has happened in many present day countries, and throughout history. I think it was Egypt or some similar country that cut back fuel subsidies which led to riots. In Sri Lanka mobs burned down the leaders house. I’ve been watching that for many years, always the same thing happens. The Rich Oligarchs try to save money by cutting back entitlements the masses depend on to survive, the masses riot. Billionaire Oligarchs don’t have to worry about their Social Security, and never have to deal with the practical problems of working with the system. They can’t imagine how difficult it is for the little guy.
It’s fine to take a chainsaw to foreign aid but taking a chainsaw to Trump’s base of voter support is liable to wreck his Presidency.
Good points about the third rail, and on how old it really is, but Trump’s not cutting social security. He’s cutting the fraud and waste, and there’s a lot of it to cut. The bureaucracy is grossly bloated and inefficient, and much of what they do, can be done by automation. That won’t solve the insolvency and unfunded liability problems, which would require congress quit using ‘donations’ as revenue, but it’s a good start, and long overdue.
Dems are fearmongering, like they always do. There isn’t any money in our social security ‘accounts’ to be looted, anyway. Dems did it with education, where the states are going to get the money without the DC middlemen. Most states aren’t going to like it if DC tries to reinsert the middlemen once they’re gone.
Liberals and their Partners in Crime the M.S. Media always claim Cutting Taxes will effect the Poor
Get rid of ID.me, a third party login boondoggle. What a piece of crappy software.
I wonder if Facebook has 3000 people trying to keep its website up. I kind of doubt it. There’s a fair to middlin’ chance Facebook has as many daily visits as SSA. If the people at SSA can’t keep their website running with a minimum of down time, they’re in the wrong job. Or worse.
Basically the same government folks who had an elevator running to a mine to collect paperwork for government retirements. The government does very little things well and is incredibly inefficient, it needs to stick to what it as good at as efficiently as possible. DOGE helps with the efficiency part at least.
I would be curious how many large consultant contracts the SS Admin has out as well, I doubt most of these 3k IT folks do a whole lot of work.