A terrifying thread from Rogue SSA [View all]

Oh my god

🧵I get a lot of questions about what will happen to Social Security payments. The way I see it, there are 3 factors that will impact payments, all of which will feed off each other to exponentially increase the likelihood that SSA will miss payments: backlogs, error, and system failure.

They've reassigned almost all of our support staff to the front lines (customer service reps, claims specialists, field office and 800# supervision) based solely on paygrade. There's been little to no regard for past experience or the critical functions of their support position.

For example, we have IT specialists moving to field offices who haven't touched a social security record in decades. Many were external hires who never worked in any sort of front line job at all, let alone SSA's front lines.

These aren't jobs that just anyone can do. It's high-stress/low-reward work that requires vast experience and knowledge to perform without error. SSA's recruiters look for very specific innate abilities before someone is even considered a good candidate. Patience and empathy are crucial.

Even with comprehensive training, it takes about a year before someone in an entry-level position has their feet completely under them. Until then, there are layers of manual and automated processes to catch errors so the right people receive the right payment at the right time.

These people are going to struggle. Not just from lack of experience and knowledge, but also from having their entire career path devalued and trashed. There's going to be a massive increase in errors. The people reviewing for errors are in the same boat, and errors will go further down the line.

On top of all this, thousands of our most experienced and knowledgeable people were pushed completely out of the agency by DOGE's ultimatums to either resign/retire or face termination. There was zero consideration of who was leaving or what knowledge they were taking with them.

That's where system failure comes in. The teams who were the only ones who knew how many of our software programs work have been dissolved. There's no one to maintain or fix them. These are systems that are critical to catching errors, processing claims, communicating with external agencies, etc.

So the path of each error will to be either caught manually, causing unnecessary additional work, or passed up to fragile systems where errors cause more strain. As those compound, that's where we'll start seeing failure.

As each of those systems begin to fail, and there's no ability to repair them, more work will become manual and time-consuming. Workloads on inexperienced employees will drastically rise, again increasing the errors pushed through the system.

Eventually, our processing centers will start to collapse under the strain. Confusing automated notices will be generated to claimants, pushing more traffic on our public-facing units, compounding the problem further.

Without our policy divisions at the Regional Offices (also dissolved), there will be no coherent strategy for dealing with any of this. Regional offices also had teams to allocate resources in their jurisdiction to respond to pressing needs. Those are also gone. Each office will be on their own.

Once all of this reaches a critical point, that's where we'll start seeing failures in our central system, the SSA mainframe. The people who know that system are also mostly gone. Failure there will be catastrophic, and payment records will no longer consistently go to the treasury department.

(You've probably heard the term "COBOL". That's the mainframe's programming language, which DOGE couldn't figure out.)

How long until this plays out? I'm not sure. Decisions are being made so impulsively and irrationally that it's hard to predict what might accelerate or slow down the collapse, but it's inevitable at this point.

I expect there will be a series of crises, and the administration will try to shift resources around to respond to each one, but that will just be plugging one leak while causing another. We literally don't have the staffing to keep the agency afloat. That's BEFORE the upcoming May 7th firings.

If I had to guess, I'd say before the end of this year we'll hit the critical failure point.

That's when the Trump administration will say the only way to keep Social Security going is to hand it over to a private company to manage. The keys to the $2.5 trillion trust fund will go to some crony.

It'll be vastly more expensive to run, but they'll just lie about that and claim it saves taxpayers somehow. They'll use the trust fund to manipulate stocks under the guise of "investment", risking all of it. Then they'll give you the option of diverting FICA deductions to investment accounts.

At that point, Social Security is completely dead. Guarantees of benefits will be gone in favor of the whims of the stock market. The rich will get richer, and people that lose the ability to work will get pennies.

All the while, they'll say, "We'll never touch Social Security!"