A Secret Plan to Shut Down Social Security’s Offices and Outsource Its Work | Alternet
Campaign for America's Future /
By Richard Eskow
A report suggests that many of the SSA’s critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners and contractors.
June 24, 2014
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For months there have been rumors that the Social Security
Administration has a “secret plan” to close all of its field offices. Is
it true? A little-known report commissioned by the SSA the request of
Congress seems to hold the answer. The summary document outlining the
plan, which is labeled “for internal use only,” is unavailable from the
SSA but can be found
here.
Does
the document, entitled “Long Term Strategic Vision and Vision
Elements,” really propose shuttering all field offices? The answer,
buried beneath a barrage of obfuscatory consultantese, clearly seems to
be “yes.” Worse, the report also suggests that many of the SSA’s
critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners
and contractors.
Here are five insights from this austerity-minded outline.
1. This is death by jargon.
The
Social Security Administration has contracted with an entity called The
National Academy of Public Administration, or NAPA, to “conduct a study
and submit a high-level plan proposing a long-range strategic vision.”
The
seven-member panel conducting
the study includes current and former employees of government
contractors IBM, Cisco, and Grant Thornton, as well as career
bureaucrats and the editor of Government Executive magazine.
The
panel’s four-page overview lays down a nearly impenetrable barrage of
consultant-speak. This is a language in which “smaller workforce” means
“layoffs” and “reduced physical infrastructure” is a euphemism for
“closing field offices.” It is a language in which goals, objectives,
strategies and tactics are reduced to a pulpy mash of undifferentiated
“vision elements.” The language is rich in booster-ish phrases like this
one: “Stress program integrity in everything we do.” (As opposed to,
you know, not doing that.)
For most of its four pages the
document’s runic language artfully dodges the question at hand,
preferring instead to inform the public of such need-to-know information
as the fact that “we embrace change and reward managed risk.” It is not
until the final page that the bomb is dropped, surrounded by a cloud of
verbal decoys. The key phrase: “Our communication and business
practices enable a dispersed workforce that is no longer working in
centralized, traditional offices.”
“Centralized, traditional offices.” Or, as the rest of the world calls them, “offices.”
The
document suggests that Social Security’s administrative functions will
be transferred online, allowing for human contact only “in very limited
circumstances.” Even in those cases it appears that the default options
will be telephone calls and online chats, together with rare meetings
with personnel who may be housed in the offices of other agencies – or,
conceivably, private corporations.
2. The SSA isn’t resisting congress’ brutal cuts.
Despite
the fact that a Democratic president is running the executive branch,
the Social Security Administration appears to be accepting the harsh
budget cuts imposed upon it by Congress with an air of surprising
passivity. This is puzzling. Social Security is an enormously successful
and popular program. Historically only conservative Republicans have
urged cuts to its administrative budget. Those cuts are already
frustrating the public and undermining public confidence in the program.
(For more on this topic see
the Special Senate Subcommittee on Aging,
href=”http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/20/us-column-miller-social-security-idUSBREA2J1OV20140320″>Mark Miller of Reuters,
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times,
Hiltzik again, and
ourselves.)
And
yet, these needless and harmful cuts are being accepted as a fait
accompli by both the NAPA panel and the Social Security Administration
itself. The SSA’s “
Agency Strategic Plan for 2014-2018,”
which is published where the “strategic vision” document might
logically be found, glosses over current and impending staffing
reductions with language like this: “In the coming years, as we prepare
for more employee retirements and continued budget constraints, we will
develop and implement a strong succession plan to prepare for the new
skills, competencies and work styles of a leaner, modern Federal
workforce.”
English translation: We are downsizing for budget reasons but would rather not say too much about it.
Then
there’s this: “The size of our workforce has declined by about 11,000
employees since the beginning of FY 2011 and we expect this trend to
continue … we estimate that more than 21,000 of our employees will
retire by FY 2022. A shrinking workforce affects our ability to meet the
needs and expectations of our customers and stakeholders.”
English translation: Our staffing budget keeps getting slashed and our service will continue to decline accordingly.
The
fact that neither the SSA, the administration, nor the president
himself are publicly fighting these brutal cuts is a betrayal of Social
Security’s promise. That betrayal is made even more acute by the fact
that cuts to Social Security’s administrative budgets do not help the
deficit in any way, since the SSA is fully funded from Social Security’s
revenues.
3. They intend to do more outsourcing, too.
One
of the bitter ironies of the bipartisan austerity craze has been the
fact that, while there has been an assault on government jobs, there has
been an equal or greater push to transfer government revenues to the
private sector using lucrative, cost-inflating “privatization”
contracts.
That seems to be what somebody has in mind for Social
Security’s future, too. One of the 29 “vision elements” in the Vision
2025 document states that service delivery should be “integrated across
SSA programs and with external partners …” It goes on to state that all
support functions for SSA should be “provided through a shared services
model (e.g., within SSA, across government, and by contract).” (Emphases
ours.)
No descriptions are offered for those “external partners”
or the recipients of those “shared services” contracts, but the message
seems clear: they’re closing the field offices, laying off employees,
and shifting the work to other agencies as well as profit-driven (and
therefore ultimately costlier) private enterprises.
The choice of
private partners thus far isn’t encouraging. The user portal informs
people signing up for online access that they may be subject to an
eligibility verification by Experian. That’s the credit-rating firm that
is currently the subject of a multistate investigation, as well a a
lawsuit on behalf of the people of Mississippi. The
complaint,
which is unrelated to Social Security, alleges that Experian knowingly
made “sweeping errors” on consumers’ credit records and repeatedly
violated consumer protection laws.
4. They expect people to do everything on the Internet – and their website is terrible.
The
“vision” document states it plainly: “We … use online, self-service
delivery as our primary service channel.” They also expect to “automate
processes to maximize operational efficiency.” “Direct service options
(e.g. in person, phone, online chat, video conference)” will only be
available “in very limited circumstances.”
That’s a bad idea.
Seniors use the Internet far less than other people. Only 57 percent of
people over 65 are online, as opposed to a nationwide average of 87
percent, according to a recent
Pew study.
Disabled people, Social Security’s other major user group, can also
experience difficulties accessing the Internet. Minorities and
low-income people, many of whom depend on the SSA’s assistance, are also
less likely to be web-connected.
This idea gets even worse when
one attempts to use the SSA’s website, as we did recently. We will
document that tragicomic misadventure in greater detail shortly, but the
short version is this: although I have led very large-scale information
technology projects, it took me several days to successfully enroll in
the SSA website. The delays were caused by a combination of downtime and
poor web design.
The website is confusing, even for tech-savvy
and (relatively) youthful users. Imagine how daunting it must be those
who aren’t comfortable with computers, those whose cognitive skills may
be in decline, and those who have lost the full use of one or more
senses. To make matters worse, the SSA site explicitly forbids would-be
users from allowing others to navigate the process on their behalf.
On
the other hand, converting more of Social Security’s functions to
website technology could be result in a very lucrative payday for
government contractors like… well, like IBM and Cisco.
5. They’re downsizing just as demand grows.
The
“Vision 2025” agenda has a number of other problems. For example, it
calls for ending the practice of retaining employees with specialized
knowledge of specific programs. They are to be replaced with
“generalists,” even though applicants and beneficiaries are more likely
to obtain useful information from employees with more specific
knowledge. And yet, the “vision” calls for “empowering” employees even
as it proposes to deprive them of the specialized knowledge they need to
use that power wisely.
But the most important takeaway is this:
They’re closing field offices, downsizing their workforce, and trying to
force everyone through an inadequate Internet portal. That’s all in an
effort to reduce Social Security services at a time when the need is
about to grow dramatically.
The scare rhetoric about the cost of
baby boomers’ benefits is just that: scare rhetoric. Any long-term
imbalances are easily rectified through one or two simple and equitable
adjustments (like lifting the payroll tax cap). But there is no question
that the number of Social Security applicants and recipients is going
to increase dramatically, and with them will come a greater
administrative workload. The SSA’s own website lays out the numbers: “By
2033, the number of older Americans will increase from 46.6 million
today to over 77 million.”
The SSA is perfectly willing to cite that figure as part of an
overly fearmongering set of statistics meant
to raise false alarms about solvency. But when it comes time to craft
an appropriate plan for the program’s administrative future, statistics
like that are nowhere to be found. Instead, the SSA continues to close
offices and plans even more dramatic cuts to its workforce.
It has
become increasingly clear that plans are underway at the SSA to impose
more needless cuts on SSA’s budgets and render the program’s benefits
increasingly inaccessible to Americans who have earned them. The
American Federation of Government Employees is
currently on a campaign that encourages people to register their objections to this troubling plan.
Richard (RJ) Eskow is a blogger and writer, a former Wall Street executive, a consultant, and a former musician.
