Doge Social Security Closures: Recipients Need to Visit Offices to Get Benefits | Hacker News Reader

Doge Social Security Closures: Recipients Need to Visit Offices to Get Benefits

gizmodo.com

36 pointsrntn14 comments

In addition to the various obstacles this creates for disabled or rural people, I expect this will create a lot of phishing opportunities. The commercial banks struggle a lot with that and they’re not constrained by post-DOGE budgets.

I could see this as being a huge problem if people are physically disabled or bed-ridden.

They should also provide a home visit service for this to handle those cases.

> They should also provide a home visit service for this to handle those cases.

Hard to do when you cut staffing and remove offices from many regions.

They are going to have to hire people back for this. You can't mess with people's social security.

The point seems to be making Social Security and other services painful to use, rather than eliminating them, which would take an act of congress.

The result is the de-facto crippling of the services and/or the privatization of them, per plan [0]. This is particularly harmful or fatal for the V.A., where lives could be lost through cutbacks in services. Loss of Social Security could be ruinous to many seniors.

For background on the current plan, see

'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook [1]

Silicon Valley Whistleblowers Warn Elon Musk 'Hijacking' Republicans to Control Entire US Government [2]

PDF of their letter. [3] 630K

[0] https://www.project2025.org/ plus PDF of their plan [4]

[1] https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...

[2] https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/07/silicon-valley-whistleblo...

[3] https://america2.news/content/files/2025/02/Musk-NRx-Memo-Fe...

[4] https://america2.news/content/files/2025/02/Musk-NRx-Memo-Fe...

Sounds like the rural, older voters (who leaned strongly towards Trump) are going to be the most affected by this. Sucks to be them. For others, combine closing SSA offices with forcing people who can't/aren't able to use online verification to physically go to an office will probably make the SSA office visit all the more 'fun'. I wonder how much social security identity fraud there actually is (as opposed to the anecdotes of such fraud used to enrage).

It's almost like the current administration is trying to make obtaining government services annoying/infuriating on purpose...

The title is clickbait, in the article it says they can verify online. The change is to stop verification over the phone.

A lot of older individuals still don’t use the internet in any capacity, not even through a smartphone. For those people, effectively the only option is to visit an office.

You might want to read past the first paragraph before incorrectly claiming it’s clickbait. The fourth paragraph covers why online verification excludes a lot of people - nearly half of older Americans - and the fifth covers the building closures which remove the option many people use to fill that gap.

One thing in particular to consider is how painful MFA is for many people, especially those with marginal connectivity or disabilities, and how commonly older people are phished or have malware on their generally older, often unpatched devices. If you haven’t supported a population like this, it’s way more of a barrier than you might think.

MFA is often painful for me, and I've been a dev since we were called "programmers".

Definitely. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen some horrid login flow and cringed to think about what it’s like for people who have visual or cognitive impairments, use a janky old phone they got on one of those lifeline plans, etc. If I’m remembering right, one test with SMS codes with a short expiration (10-15 minutes) had lose to half of older users struggling with delays and the challenge of copy-pasting or remembering only the code within that time limit.

We have really lost our way as a field for some basic user experiences and that really shouldn’t be acceptable for government services or companies people need to deal with like utilities, banks, etc.

It's a terrible policy. I know someone who is 74 and never owned a computer. They own a smartphone but only know how to use the phone app and really don't understand texting. I was shocked when I learned this and I imagine there are many people like him.

A good portion of people in such situations will have children or loved ones who will walk them through online portion.

This is going to really hit hard those of us with unverifiable personal identities.

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