Gebbia wants to change the retirement process from its current paper-based system to “an online digital process that will take a few days at most.”
This can only go wrong, like it always does when some fancy big idealist tries to take a limping but still working system and overhaul it to a full digital "seamless and easy" procedure.
I have no doubt the current process is inefficient, because its the federal government, but these people retiring are getting a lot of benefits. It should take a moment to make sure they qualify properly and are getting only what they should be getting. They could probably cut a lot of the inefficiency while still keeping it fully hard copy and reliable.
I like a lot of what DOGE is doing, but we should also be weary of reaching the other extreme, where we lose site of doing things fully properly just to make it quick and minimalist, or just part of Musk's futurist all digital utopian ideals.
What, you think going through 3 months of paid training and 2 months of afterhours training in order to file specific documents and send them around the country (paper only, no email), which then are re-assembled a salt mine (again paper-only, no emailing them) to be brought down a once-a-week elevator which is then, a week later, verified by another person, at which point, another week later, another third party comes in and files just that one paper set (other retirees need to wait) could POSSIBLY have ANY inefficiencies to it?
I remember working for the 2010 census and they were very excited to tell us that we were getting laptops with 56k modems to take home. But you needed a landline to update anything and it had to be the old style landline that didn't connect to a modem.
This can only go wrong, like it always does when some fancy big idealist tries to take a limping but still working system and overhaul it to a full digital "seamless and easy" procedure.
I have no doubt the current process is inefficient, because its the federal government, but these people retiring are getting a lot of benefits. It should take a moment to make sure they qualify properly and are getting only what they should be getting. They could probably cut a lot of the inefficiency while still keeping it fully hard copy and reliable.
I like a lot of what DOGE is doing, but we should also be weary of reaching the other extreme, where we lose site of doing things fully properly just to make it quick and minimalist, or just part of Musk's futurist all digital utopian ideals.
If memory serves, the current method takes months so honestly I'd be surprised if they found a way to make it worse.
Seriously the current retirement process is kind of comical.
What, you think going through 3 months of paid training and 2 months of afterhours training in order to file specific documents and send them around the country (paper only, no email), which then are re-assembled a salt mine (again paper-only, no emailing them) to be brought down a once-a-week elevator which is then, a week later, verified by another person, at which point, another week later, another third party comes in and files just that one paper set (other retirees need to wait) could POSSIBLY have ANY inefficiencies to it?
I remember working for the 2010 census and they were very excited to tell us that we were getting laptops with 56k modems to take home. But you needed a landline to update anything and it had to be the old style landline that didn't connect to a modem.