Social Security is still in the hands of a Trumper, and Biden needs to fix that
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy isn't the only Trump official wreaking havoc with and sabotaging a beloved institution, and not the only Trump official still in office who needs to go. Since 2019 when they were installed, Andrew Saul, the Social Security commissioner, and David Black, the deputy commissioner have been working doggedly to undermine the system. Unsurprisingly, Saul was a big-time Republican donor, Black a former Bush administration staffer. The two have created a hostile work environment for staff at the Social Security Administration and politicized the Social Security disability program, trying to make benefits harder to get and more burdensome to keep by creating all sort of hoops for disabled people to jump through.
That's not all they've done to harm the disabled. According to two inspector general complaints filed just this year, Saul, Black and their deputies have put "illegitimate political pressure on Administrative Law Judges to reduce the rate of Social Security disability case approval." This is after a push by Trump and Saul to cut administrative law judges out of the loop in taking up standard cases, conducting hearings, and issuing decisions on applications for disability benefits—all responsibilities currently reserved for them—and hand them over to SSA lawyers.
Saul and Black have also run roughshod over SSA staff, leading Melissa McIntosh, president of the union representing the agency’s administrative law judges, to say they "have engaged in no-holds-barred union busting." That includes "allegedly flouting contractual rights, discriminating against employees for protected union activities and denying unions information they have a right to receive." Back in December, Association of Administrative Law Judges and the National Council of SSA Field Operations Locals (Council 220) declared "no confidence" in SSA Commissioner Andrew Saul and Deputy Commissioner David Black, and demanded their ouster. The council's executive committees finding of "no confidence" was "unprecedented" according to a union statement, the result of "years of mismanagement and poor leadership."
"The vote is also an admonition of their handling of the remote work program, the lack of open communication with SSA employees amid a global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus, and the absence of a clear vision for SSA," the union said. Those charges start back in 2019, when Saul cancelled a popular teleworking program, saying that "A time of workload crisis is not the time to experiment with working at home," citing the long wait times Social Security claimants face. While Saul was ending that program, he himself refused to show up at work in the SSA's Baltimore headquarters. Ralph de Juliis, president of the AFGE Council 220 said that employees were told he was "spending his time in New York because that's where he's from" to explain his absence. So he got to work from home while staff no longer could.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/3/22/2022302/-DeJoy-isn-t-the-only-Trump-holdover-who-needs-to-go-Meet-Social-Security-Commissioner-Andrew-Saul
Is this the reason the SS Covid payments are slow?
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