Writing he wants to “tread carefully on this” Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall reports he’s heard from the parents of two disabled adults who receive Social Security insurance payments for support who say the online portal on Monday abruptly changed to say “This beneficiary is currently not receiving payments” under the “Benefits and Payments” page. They’re not 100 percent sure yet whether the payments have actually been cut off since one of the adults lives in a care home that’s the direct recipient of the benefit disbursement, the other family says the parents are the recipients and sometimes the payout can come slightly later than usual, so it could still arrive on Tuesday.
“Each family contacted me independently and each is from a different part of the country – one in the Midwest, another in the Northeast. Each family is part of a loose local network of families or support group of families with disabled adult children. And in each case multiple families in each support network started seeing the same thing today,” Marshall writes, remarking that it’s clear this isn’t an isolated thing, however a few of the families seeing the “This beneficiary is currently not receiving payments” still got the direct deposits anyway for some completely opaque reason.
Marshall also notes that so far what he’s seen has been confined to Social Security Insurance (SSI) but not Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and, since many of the families in his sources’ networks receive both, it appears that it’s only the former that’s been disrupted. “Of course, we’re dealing with small sample sizes. So it’s possible SSDI might be affected too,” he continues, but also adding that both of the families he’s in contact with are Social Security retirement beneficiaries and they’ve seen no interruption to those sacred cow entitlement payments this month at least.
The fairly preliminary blog post contains no speculation as to what the hell’s going on. To take a crack at it here: It’s not at all out of sync with past patterns for the DOGE regime to fuck people over without telling them first and to do so in the dumbest and most scattershot way possible where some are still getting paid out. The fact that the portal says “This beneficiary is currently not receiving payments” whether or not the payments were still disbursed speaks to intent, that they shut it down for wide swaths of the recipient base and still fucked up at that. On the less pessimistic side, it could’ve been a badly-written iterator meant to go line-by-line in the SSI database to purge the recipients the DOGE incels think are 135 years old and they’ll re-run it to correct it. That they (apparently) went after SSI but not SSDI when many of the recipients are on both may indicate this wasn’t a deliberate full-blown case of “Potentially illegal payments now paused for review.”
Either way if it’s not unfucked fast this could portend a particularly bad stretch for the Trump Reich.