The Social Security Administration (SSA) sent an email on March 27 to beneficiaries saying that reports that field offices were closing was an invention of fake news media.
So, the cowardly and craven Trump administration saw and heard immediate angry backlash from all who will fight any cutting of their ability to get SSA retirement income that they have paid for--we've all bought and paid for SSA payments through our work.
Thank you, Judd, for your painstaking investigation. Whoever is engineering this action is going into all field offices designed to serve all of us who have worked and deserve to be paid as promised. SSA payments are the opposite of a Ponzi scheme--this would be DOGE recklessly cheating people wherever they close anything down.
They are only backing off when approached individually by R senators. The senators do not have the guts to collectively oppose the DOGE destruction system, only to protect their constituents. If they can manage to make SS contingent on having a R senator elected, they can make electing a D representative personally dangerous to voters and unlikely politically. Then they can hold “elections” without fear of losing.
Hahahahahahahahaha! They want all of that sweet sweet cash we the people paid in. I've been working since 15 years of age (Mom signed my work permit) and I'll be 65 this year. No South African MORON with scammed/stolen money (more $$$ than sense or humanity) can tell me that my investiture into SSA is a fraudulent waste, a scam with real poeple's money that he's gonna take and in doing so, save us from the horrors of paying bills, rent, purchasing food and having a measure of financial autonomy. All of that.
Liars gonna lie. These DOGE guys are getting tangled up in all of their lies, tripping over their lies and will be scarred by their lies when the reckoning comes.
They only stopped closing offices until the main stream media focus on the next noise the trump-vance-musk troika comes up with…. Please stay on top of this story so they permanently don’t close offices for those of us who need the service of the SSA.
Should noncitizens approved for work authorization be concerned about going to field offices for their SS numbers? Concerned that they will be kidnapped?
This is exactly what I came here to say! Sounds like their goal, at least in part, is to create additional opportunities to abduct as many noncitizens as possible.
Just like in Trump1, the actual numbers of illegals expelled will likely be small, as Trump1's actual deportation numbers were below those of Obama1&2 and Biden. This is likely a repeat of Trump1 where glitzy performative theatre is necessary to convince their FOX-addled Base that the demonized foreigner population is being expelled. The anguished cries of Liberals over this issue is more garnish to please the Base, when they see on TV big ICE raids.
The reality is that key GOP and business constituencies would be financially hurt by bigly big-sized deportations, and Trump knows this. Real estate development, agriculture, hotels, restaurants, meat-packing, etc. would lose massive amounts of income if 10-40% of their workforces were suddenly deported. Consumer inflation would spike upwards as a result.
I’ve heard that his low numbers of deportations during his first term is what is driving his determination to have dramatically higher numbers now, and he does not care if people are here illegally. See, green card holders, student visas, HB-1 visas, asylum seekers.
The evidence is there for the observant that this administration does not care about industry losses due to loss of labor force. The tariff debacle demonstrates this.
But high-profile televised ICE raids are a repeat from Trump1. And that Venezuelan gang expulsion stunt!? Talk about made for television.
And DJT has a proven track record acting like a scalded cat when he gets outraged calls from high-profile donors or donor groups. If--or rather when--his ICE theatrics start to cost major donors real money, he'll back off. Each new tariff gets immediately delayed or rescinded almost as soon as they're announced.
Sneaky little bastards...aren't they. Create a narrative of waste and fraud, cut staff and asset expense at great cost to the government, employees and served population. Come back in and pretend to salvage the program while actually killing off the weakest non voting recipients who have no political or media supported voice..
About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code in some new language thing, since this is a subject I have a whole lot of expertise in, a few anecdotes and thoughts.
Some time in the early 2000s I was doing some work with the real-time Java team at Sun, and there was a huge defense contractor with a peculiar query: Could we document how much memory an instance of every object type in the JDK uses? And could we guarantee that that number would never change, and definitely never grow, in any future Java version?
I remember discussing this with a few colleagues in a pub after work, and talking it through, and we all arrived at the conclusion that the only appropriate answer to this question as "Hell no." and that it was actually kind of idiotic.
Say you've written the code, in Java 5 or whatever, that launches nuclear missiles. You've tested it thoroughly, it's been reviewed six ways to Sunday because you do that with code like this (or you really, really, really should). It launches missiles and it works.
A new version of Java comes out. Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you? Because you could blow up the world 10 milliseconds sooner after someone pushes the button?
It launches fucking missiles. Of COURSE you don't do that.
There is zero reason to ever do that, and to anyone managing such a project who's a grownup, that's obvious. You don't fuck with things that work just to be one of the cool kids. Especially not when the thing that works is life-or-death (well, in this case, just death).
Another case: In the mid 2000s I trained some developers at Boeing. They had all this Fortran materials analysis code from the 70s - really fussy stuff, so you could do calculations like, if you have a sheet of composite material that is 2mm of this grade of aluminum bonded to that variety of fiberglass with this type of resin, and you drill a 1/2" hole in it, what is the effect on the strength of that airplane wing part when this amount of torque is applied at this angle. Really fussy, hard-to-do but when-it's-right-it's-right-forever stuff.
They were taking a very sane, smart approach to it: Leave the Fortran code as-is - it works, don't fuck with it - just build a nice, friendly graphical UI in Java on top of it that *calls* the code as-is.
We are used to broken software. The public has been trained to expect low quality as a fact of life - and the industry is rife with "agile" methodologies *designed* to churn out crappy software, because crappy guarantees a permanent ongoing revenue stream. It's an article of faith that everything is buggy (and if it isn't, we've got a process or two to sell you that will make it that way).
It's ironic. Every other form of engineering involves moving parts and things that wear and decay and break. Software has no moving parts. Done well, it should need *vastly* less maintenance than your car or the bridges it drives on. Software can actually be *finished* - it is heresy to say it, but given a well-defined problem, it is possible to actually *solve* it and move on, and not need to babysit or revisit it. In fact, most of our modern technological world is possible because of such solved problems. But we're trained to ignore that.
Yeah, COBOL is really long-in-the-tooth, and few people on earth want to code in it. But they have a working system with decades invested in addressing bugs and corner-cases.
Rewriting stuff - especially things that are life-and-death - in a fit of pique, or because of an emotional reaction to the technology used, or because you want to use the toys all the cool kids use - is idiotic. It's immaturity on display to the world.
Doing it with AI that's going to read COBOL code and churn something out in another language - so now you have code no human has read, written and understands - is simply insane. And the best software translators plus AI out there, is going to get things wrong - grievously wrong. And the odds of anyone figuring out what or where before it leads to disaster are low, never mind tracing that back to the original code and figuring out what that was supposed to do.
They probably should find their way off COBOL simply because people who know it and want to endure using it are hard to find and expensive. But you do that gradually, walling off parts of the system that work already and calling them from your language-du-jour, not building any new parts of the system in COBOL, and when you do need to make a change in one of those walled off sections, you migrate just that part.
We're basically talking about something like replacing the engine of a plane while it's flying. Now, do you do that a part-at-a-time with the ability to put back any piece where the new version fails? Or does it sound like a fine idea to vaporize the existing engine and beam in an object which a next-word-prediction software *says* is a contraption that does all the things the old engine did, and hope you don't crash?
I would like to hear more about the success rate of Democratic politicians in getting SS offices in their districts reopened. How many others besides Rep. Latimer in NY have tried and failed? If DOGE responds to political pressure in favor of red states, it must be coming from the top. Are seniors in blue states yet another pressure point in trump's campaign to get those states to cave on deportations, transgender bans, etc.?
This. It's looking more and more that Trump is specifically targeting Blue states and Blue districts for SS office closures; like he's using the Orban playbook used in Hungary. Or more like, Elon's DOGE kids have finally figured out it's unsafe to close SS offices in Red areas--but OK to do so in areas that are Blue.
Another thing occurred to me. By favoring red-state pols, he's also keeping them tethered to him in Congress AND giving them something to run on in the next election: "I saved your SS office (or post office, or whatever DOGE is taking away)!"
The White Plains, NY Social Security office has been closed, despite intense pressure placed by our Congressman George Latimer and constituents. What else can be done? People needing hearings now have to travel a long way to plead their cases. Help!
Even before the current regime’s assault on public services, there were situations that required an in person visit. The internet site handles specific pre-chosen tasks. Phone service workers do not have full access to records already there. After Louis Dejoy’s maiming of the Post Office, using the mail to send materials is no longer reliable. The field offices would be crucial even if everyone had easy access and fluent use of the internet.
There is another issue with SSA that hasn’t been reported yet, and that’s the agency’s failure or inability to MAINTAIN its website so that people who should be able to avoid telephone opening-person communications will not be able to do so. They seem to be hoping we will just give up. I authenticated my SSA online identity a long time ago (in 2021), and retained my username and password in an electronic password manager (so I know I didn’t “forget” either one). Despite having just sent me an email notice that my annual statement is available online (so they must know who I am…), the website refuses to recognize my login info (neither my SSA login nor my login.gov, which I use every day to log into my work computer). I tried 3 times without success, so the system locked me out. Now what? I just wanted to download my statement; I wasn’t planning to apply for benefits yet. Maybe I should start now and they might answer the phone by the time I’m ready to retire.
Please investigate what could happen if, as reported, Doge changes the operating system of SSA in a matter of months instead of doing it in a systematic manner that was previously determined to take years. If Doge crashes the operating system, millions of SSA recipients will suffer irreparable harm.
Closing offices and laying off workers is a problem that will haunt Republicans in the midterms, but the DOGEbags plan to rewrite the Social Security system in "months" using generative AI is a disaster in the making. Having spent 40 years in IT I know all about replacing complex systems, especially complex mainframe systems and rewriting the SSA system in a task that requires years, mostly for testing all of the edge cases and parallel runs to ensure the system is correct. These clowns will throw their replacement together and it will crash. Seniors will not get their money. And they will be looking for someone to blame. Republicans will be in the electoral crosshairs and few of them will be in safe enough seats to survive.
So, the cowardly and craven Trump administration saw and heard immediate angry backlash from all who will fight any cutting of their ability to get SSA retirement income that they have paid for--we've all bought and paid for SSA payments through our work.
Thank you, Judd, for your painstaking investigation. Whoever is engineering this action is going into all field offices designed to serve all of us who have worked and deserve to be paid as promised. SSA payments are the opposite of a Ponzi scheme--this would be DOGE recklessly cheating people wherever they close anything down.
They are only backing off when approached individually by R senators. The senators do not have the guts to collectively oppose the DOGE destruction system, only to protect their constituents. If they can manage to make SS contingent on having a R senator elected, they can make electing a D representative personally dangerous to voters and unlikely politically. Then they can hold “elections” without fear of losing.
With risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, do you think this is part of the plan or is it only a coincidence?
"only a coincidence?"
Hahahahahahahahaha! They want all of that sweet sweet cash we the people paid in. I've been working since 15 years of age (Mom signed my work permit) and I'll be 65 this year. No South African MORON with scammed/stolen money (more $$$ than sense or humanity) can tell me that my investiture into SSA is a fraudulent waste, a scam with real poeple's money that he's gonna take and in doing so, save us from the horrors of paying bills, rent, purchasing food and having a measure of financial autonomy. All of that.
right on target. American grifters have eyed these programs for years to grab.
I paid in for 45 years and I damned well want my money. 😠 😡 🤬
Damn right. WITH interest!
Liars gonna lie. These DOGE guys are getting tangled up in all of their lies, tripping over their lies and will be scarred by their lies when the reckoning comes.
I pray for the reckoning!!!
And for the awesome beat-down they've earned and with all my heart I hope they will get!!!!
Well, the DOGE works for the Liar-in-Chief, need I say more?
They only stopped closing offices until the main stream media focus on the next noise the trump-vance-musk troika comes up with…. Please stay on top of this story so they permanently don’t close offices for those of us who need the service of the SSA.
Should noncitizens approved for work authorization be concerned about going to field offices for their SS numbers? Concerned that they will be kidnapped?
This is exactly what I came here to say! Sounds like their goal, at least in part, is to create additional opportunities to abduct as many noncitizens as possible.
Just like in Trump1, the actual numbers of illegals expelled will likely be small, as Trump1's actual deportation numbers were below those of Obama1&2 and Biden. This is likely a repeat of Trump1 where glitzy performative theatre is necessary to convince their FOX-addled Base that the demonized foreigner population is being expelled. The anguished cries of Liberals over this issue is more garnish to please the Base, when they see on TV big ICE raids.
The reality is that key GOP and business constituencies would be financially hurt by bigly big-sized deportations, and Trump knows this. Real estate development, agriculture, hotels, restaurants, meat-packing, etc. would lose massive amounts of income if 10-40% of their workforces were suddenly deported. Consumer inflation would spike upwards as a result.
I’ve heard that his low numbers of deportations during his first term is what is driving his determination to have dramatically higher numbers now, and he does not care if people are here illegally. See, green card holders, student visas, HB-1 visas, asylum seekers.
The evidence is there for the observant that this administration does not care about industry losses due to loss of labor force. The tariff debacle demonstrates this.
We need to wait on the data to know for sure.
But high-profile televised ICE raids are a repeat from Trump1. And that Venezuelan gang expulsion stunt!? Talk about made for television.
And DJT has a proven track record acting like a scalded cat when he gets outraged calls from high-profile donors or donor groups. If--or rather when--his ICE theatrics start to cost major donors real money, he'll back off. Each new tariff gets immediately delayed or rescinded almost as soon as they're announced.
Sneaky little bastards...aren't they. Create a narrative of waste and fraud, cut staff and asset expense at great cost to the government, employees and served population. Come back in and pretend to salvage the program while actually killing off the weakest non voting recipients who have no political or media supported voice..
They've been doing that since Reagan.
Yes...and so few are aware.
Here you go Judd:
Tim Boudreau
About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code in some new language thing, since this is a subject I have a whole lot of expertise in, a few anecdotes and thoughts.
Some time in the early 2000s I was doing some work with the real-time Java team at Sun, and there was a huge defense contractor with a peculiar query: Could we document how much memory an instance of every object type in the JDK uses? And could we guarantee that that number would never change, and definitely never grow, in any future Java version?
I remember discussing this with a few colleagues in a pub after work, and talking it through, and we all arrived at the conclusion that the only appropriate answer to this question as "Hell no." and that it was actually kind of idiotic.
Say you've written the code, in Java 5 or whatever, that launches nuclear missiles. You've tested it thoroughly, it's been reviewed six ways to Sunday because you do that with code like this (or you really, really, really should). It launches missiles and it works.
A new version of Java comes out. Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you? Because you could blow up the world 10 milliseconds sooner after someone pushes the button?
It launches fucking missiles. Of COURSE you don't do that.
There is zero reason to ever do that, and to anyone managing such a project who's a grownup, that's obvious. You don't fuck with things that work just to be one of the cool kids. Especially not when the thing that works is life-or-death (well, in this case, just death).
Another case: In the mid 2000s I trained some developers at Boeing. They had all this Fortran materials analysis code from the 70s - really fussy stuff, so you could do calculations like, if you have a sheet of composite material that is 2mm of this grade of aluminum bonded to that variety of fiberglass with this type of resin, and you drill a 1/2" hole in it, what is the effect on the strength of that airplane wing part when this amount of torque is applied at this angle. Really fussy, hard-to-do but when-it's-right-it's-right-forever stuff.
They were taking a very sane, smart approach to it: Leave the Fortran code as-is - it works, don't fuck with it - just build a nice, friendly graphical UI in Java on top of it that *calls* the code as-is.
We are used to broken software. The public has been trained to expect low quality as a fact of life - and the industry is rife with "agile" methodologies *designed* to churn out crappy software, because crappy guarantees a permanent ongoing revenue stream. It's an article of faith that everything is buggy (and if it isn't, we've got a process or two to sell you that will make it that way).
It's ironic. Every other form of engineering involves moving parts and things that wear and decay and break. Software has no moving parts. Done well, it should need *vastly* less maintenance than your car or the bridges it drives on. Software can actually be *finished* - it is heresy to say it, but given a well-defined problem, it is possible to actually *solve* it and move on, and not need to babysit or revisit it. In fact, most of our modern technological world is possible because of such solved problems. But we're trained to ignore that.
Yeah, COBOL is really long-in-the-tooth, and few people on earth want to code in it. But they have a working system with decades invested in addressing bugs and corner-cases.
Rewriting stuff - especially things that are life-and-death - in a fit of pique, or because of an emotional reaction to the technology used, or because you want to use the toys all the cool kids use - is idiotic. It's immaturity on display to the world.
Doing it with AI that's going to read COBOL code and churn something out in another language - so now you have code no human has read, written and understands - is simply insane. And the best software translators plus AI out there, is going to get things wrong - grievously wrong. And the odds of anyone figuring out what or where before it leads to disaster are low, never mind tracing that back to the original code and figuring out what that was supposed to do.
They probably should find their way off COBOL simply because people who know it and want to endure using it are hard to find and expensive. But you do that gradually, walling off parts of the system that work already and calling them from your language-du-jour, not building any new parts of the system in COBOL, and when you do need to make a change in one of those walled off sections, you migrate just that part.
We're basically talking about something like replacing the engine of a plane while it's flying. Now, do you do that a part-at-a-time with the ability to put back any piece where the new version fails? Or does it sound like a fine idea to vaporize the existing engine and beam in an object which a next-word-prediction software *says* is a contraption that does all the things the old engine did, and hope you don't crash?
Thanks for this. Takes me back to my days as a Database Administrator who also wrote COBOL programs for my NYC agency that still run to this day.
What are the likely downstream effects when they try to go live with their steaming 💩? What systems would likely take a hit?
I would like to hear more about the success rate of Democratic politicians in getting SS offices in their districts reopened. How many others besides Rep. Latimer in NY have tried and failed? If DOGE responds to political pressure in favor of red states, it must be coming from the top. Are seniors in blue states yet another pressure point in trump's campaign to get those states to cave on deportations, transgender bans, etc.?
This. It's looking more and more that Trump is specifically targeting Blue states and Blue districts for SS office closures; like he's using the Orban playbook used in Hungary. Or more like, Elon's DOGE kids have finally figured out it's unsafe to close SS offices in Red areas--but OK to do so in areas that are Blue.
Agreed, this should be called out just as loud and long as the red state ‘closures’
Another thing occurred to me. By favoring red-state pols, he's also keeping them tethered to him in Congress AND giving them something to run on in the next election: "I saved your SS office (or post office, or whatever DOGE is taking away)!"
The White Plains, NY Social Security office has been closed, despite intense pressure placed by our Congressman George Latimer and constituents. What else can be done? People needing hearings now have to travel a long way to plead their cases. Help!
Go to your local media if you haven’t already!
Even before the current regime’s assault on public services, there were situations that required an in person visit. The internet site handles specific pre-chosen tasks. Phone service workers do not have full access to records already there. After Louis Dejoy’s maiming of the Post Office, using the mail to send materials is no longer reliable. The field offices would be crucial even if everyone had easy access and fluent use of the internet.
That's DOG(E) for you, adding inefficiency where it's wasn't great enough already. I can practically see Musk's tail wagging from here.
There is another issue with SSA that hasn’t been reported yet, and that’s the agency’s failure or inability to MAINTAIN its website so that people who should be able to avoid telephone opening-person communications will not be able to do so. They seem to be hoping we will just give up. I authenticated my SSA online identity a long time ago (in 2021), and retained my username and password in an electronic password manager (so I know I didn’t “forget” either one). Despite having just sent me an email notice that my annual statement is available online (so they must know who I am…), the website refuses to recognize my login info (neither my SSA login nor my login.gov, which I use every day to log into my work computer). I tried 3 times without success, so the system locked me out. Now what? I just wanted to download my statement; I wasn’t planning to apply for benefits yet. Maybe I should start now and they might answer the phone by the time I’m ready to retire.
We are not "customers". We are citizens who paid into Social Security and expect a return. If anything, we should be considered valued clients.
Please investigate what could happen if, as reported, Doge changes the operating system of SSA in a matter of months instead of doing it in a systematic manner that was previously determined to take years. If Doge crashes the operating system, millions of SSA recipients will suffer irreparable harm.
Closing offices and laying off workers is a problem that will haunt Republicans in the midterms, but the DOGEbags plan to rewrite the Social Security system in "months" using generative AI is a disaster in the making. Having spent 40 years in IT I know all about replacing complex systems, especially complex mainframe systems and rewriting the SSA system in a task that requires years, mostly for testing all of the edge cases and parallel runs to ensure the system is correct. These clowns will throw their replacement together and it will crash. Seniors will not get their money. And they will be looking for someone to blame. Republicans will be in the electoral crosshairs and few of them will be in safe enough seats to survive.
The downstream effects are going to be incredibly bad.
You constituents need to thank me for putting out the fire my party started, says Republican congressman.
We need to keep hearing the truth about this administration. And keep voicing our dismay at their plans and actions! Don't let up!