While President Joe Biden attacks former President Donald Trump for suggesting possible changes to Social Security, Biden’s administration is hammering millions of elderly Americans for receiving extra benefits through no fault of their own.
Florida Rep. Greg Steube on Monday responded by seeking the agency’s commitment to not base recovery actions on race, religion, and gender.
The upshot, based on Steube’s question, was that Biden wanted to put whites, and likely more specifically, white men, at the front of the line for retrieving that additional funding.
As an investigation by KFF Health News and Cox Media Group found in December, Biden’s Social Security Administration in 2022 “clawed back” $4.7 billion in overpayments made to millions of beneficiaries, while seeking to retrieve another $21.6 billion in outstanding overpayments.
The KFF-Cox report indicated, “Overpayments can result from Social Security making a mistake or from beneficiaries failing to comply with requirements, intentionally or otherwise. But much of the fault lies within the system.”
Some of the reasons cited for the disbursal of excess benefits include complex rules, failure to adjust benefit limits for inflation, an agency staffing shortage that is exacerbated by much of their work being done by hand, and “built-in lags” to verify information, such as when beneficiaries make more income.
On Monday, the House Ways and Means Committee panel that oversees Social Security examined this latest Biden debacle.
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GOP Rep. Jason Smith, the subcommittee chairman, noted that in 2022, the SSA issued more than $11 billion in overpayments, and also rescinded a policy that barred the agency from collecting them from the elderly and disabled when the feds haven’t acted to recover them for more than a decade.
Smith noted that this action led to “surprise collection notices for decades old debt.”
But during the hearing Steube, a Sarasota Republican, got the new administrator of Social Security to assure lawmakers that the agency would not root collection actions in race, religion, or gender.
Steube noted that at a previous hearing then-acting Social Security Commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi said the agency’s efforts to streamline the collection process would not “unduly burden” the “underserved, vulnerable, or marginalized communities.”
In Democrat-speak, that typically means everyone who is not a straight white man.
Steube pointed out that at that hearing, during his questioning, Kijazaki admitted that referred to “communities of color.”
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The congressman then asked SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley if, like Kijazaki, he would consider race, religion, or gender a “determining factor” in deciding whom to pursue regarding overpayments.
“No,” O’Malley replied. “I can assure you of that.”
On X, Steube added, “Race, religion, and gender must not be a factor in helping Americans who were overpaid by the SSA due to agency mistakes.”
“We must stop the Biden Administration’s attempts to insert radical, leftist requirements into seemingly every program area.”
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