I’ve posted here on numerous occasions about my back and forth with Social Security Disability. In brief, due to a major coding error on their part, I was granted $13,000 in overpayments. It was not of my doing, and was not my fault. When I reported these overpayments, I was accused of trying to rip off the government, and chastised that I simply should have known better. Whomever I spoke to took no accountability for his actions, and attempted to shift the blame squarely onto me.
Today, I spoke to someone different from the same local office, and arranged a hearing in front of a judge to finally resolve the matter. Due in part to routine back up, it will be 18-24 months before my case is even considered. Specific to my case, it was, for two years, under the purview of a government employee who likely knew that he or she was about to retire soon, so he or she decided to not pursue the next step in the process. This meant that I appealed the decision four times over the course of two full years, and had said employee still been employed, I might have had to appeal the decision for years and years further.
In this unprecedented moment, we are asking the federal government to make significant changes, many of which must be enacted. They cannot be hamstrung by deliberate oversights similar to my own. This issue is not an abstraction to me. It is not a campaign promise. It is very real. If I did not have excellent counsel, competent legal advice, privilege, a degree of wealth, and education, I would have slipped through the cracks. Government is designed to help needy people and to prevent them from slipping through the cracks. This was a massive fail on its part, and, writ large, it does not need to be repeated.
Here is a big example. If Progressive Democrats want to enact single-payer health care at some point in the future, they are going to have to first address the shocking number of reforms government already badly needs. At this relatively rare moment in history, with the Democratic party in control of the Executive and both chambers of the Legislative branch, we need to enact badly needed changes to existing programs as we institute new ones. Social Security, first enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the New Deal, is one such program. It is currently ripe with nepotism and a kind of lazy ethos that does not incentivize its employees to do quality, competent work.
If Progressive legislation, Executive action, or some combination of the two does not take on this challenge, it will only feed conservative and Republican narratives about the evils and downright inadequacy of government. The phrase “good enough for government work” should be purged from our lexicon. I am surely not proposing that government is the problem or that we should shrink the size of it as some kind of remedy, but we must make sure that its bureaucrats and workers are properly trained and educated.
A conservative-majority Supreme Court may well take that to mean that Affirmative Action needs to be completely scrapped. Should it be, then we need to start over and use our collective brains to determine an alternate system that takes into account diversity, but does not leave us open for pervasive arguments which claim that minority hires are the root of the problem. What would be a fairer metric, when we know that the deck is still stacked in favor of the affluent, the well-educated, and the white race? In the midst of Black Lives Matter and other calls for radical social change, it is up to us to insist that such reforms are both needed and necessary. We can prove that government lives up to its lofty expectations, the product of idealistic dreamers of a century or two ago.
But to level the playing field, we’ve got to infuse government workers with the notion that what they are doing is not simply a paycheck or another day towards a pension. We’ve got to emphasize the great moral purpose of being public servants, even as businesses and the private sector enrich themselves through sometimes unfair, if not amoral means. If we say we want Democratic Socialism, or something closer to pure socialism, we can’t forget such things and we can’t be distracted by the temptation towards attaining material possessions and predatory acquisition. It asks a ton of flawed humanity, but it’s a worthwhile ambition to shoot for, that is, if we really want it.