Another day, another political media narrative blaming Trump’s cuts for government ineptitude.
Social Security website keeps crashing, as DOGE demands cuts to IT staff – Washington Post
The SSA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (silly name, but not the real issue) has 3,200 employees.
If the website is crashing and going down, as the Post, claims with “outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day”, it’s not because it doesn’t have enough employees.
Over 3,000 IT people for even a very popular platform is ridiculous. There’s a reason that cuts are being suggested.
And the SSA websites were having ridiculous problems even under Biden.
It feels like the ultimate Kafkaesque expression of government bureaucracy: the United States’ Social Security Administration (SSA) website has listed hours when it is open.
If you try to access the secure post-login portion of the SSA website (known as My Social Security account, at ssa.gov) outside of these hours, you’ll just be met by an error message, stating the hours of operation and encouraging you to return at these times:
On weekdays, the site is up for 20 hours per day, with 4 hours of downtime in the early morning. On weekends, the site is live for less time; 18 hours on Saturday and 15.5 hours on Sunday.
That’s from 2022. This isn’t Trump or DOGE. It’s that very same department that DOGE wants to cut.
Now some of the current events are a kind of media DDOS attack in which the media spreads panic about access to the site, more visit it and the site, which already appears to run on spiderwebs and faint hopes while being programmed by an orangutan in BASIC, crashes. (You can do that to any number of sites.)
But the SSA’s site had longstanding problems. And it’s not just SSA. Everyone remembers that glorious Obamacare website launch. (If you don’t, ask your parents.)
“Those are the risks,” the former employee told CNN. “You lose staff that have the institutional knowledge, and when something happens, you can’t recover, or it takes you a lot longer to recover. The implication is American people get degraded services on the tech side because people internally are understaffed.”
This isn’t understaffing. SSA has 3,000 employees working in its IT office. Maintaining a website should not be about “institutional knowledge” which implies it’s some strange Dickensian library, but functionality. And while not everything DOGE does right, in the realm of IT services, its people likely understand functionality better than the 3,000 men and women toiling by candlelight in the steam-powered servers of the SSA.
