In addition to the various obstacles this creates for disabled or rural people, I expect this will create a lot of phishing opportunities. The commercial banks struggle a lot with that and they’re not constrained by post-DOGE budgets.
The point seems to be making Social Security and other services painful to use, rather than eliminating them, which would take an act of congress.
The result is the de-facto crippling of the services and/or the privatization of them, per plan [0]. This is particularly harmful or fatal for the V.A., where lives could be lost through cutbacks in services. Loss of Social Security could be ruinous to many seniors.
Sounds like the rural, older voters (who leaned strongly towards Trump) are going to be the most affected by this. Sucks to be them. For others, combine closing SSA offices with forcing people who can't/aren't able to use online verification to physically go to an office will probably make the SSA office visit all the more 'fun'. I wonder how much social security identity fraud there actually is (as opposed to the anecdotes of such fraud used to enrage).
It's almost like the current administration is trying to make obtaining government services annoying/infuriating on purpose...
You might want to read past the first paragraph before incorrectly claiming it’s clickbait. The fourth paragraph covers why online verification excludes a lot of people - nearly half of older Americans - and the fifth covers the building closures which remove the option many people use to fill that gap.
One thing in particular to consider is how painful MFA is for many people, especially those with marginal connectivity or disabilities, and how commonly older people are phished or have malware on their generally older, often unpatched devices. If you haven’t supported a population like this, it’s way more of a barrier than you might think.
Definitely. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen some horrid login flow and cringed to think about what it’s like for people who have visual or cognitive impairments, use a janky old phone they got on one of those lifeline plans, etc. If I’m remembering right, one test with SMS codes with a short expiration (10-15 minutes) had lose to half of older users struggling with delays and the challenge of copy-pasting or remembering only the code within that time limit.
We have really lost our way as a field for some basic user experiences and that really shouldn’t be acceptable for government services or companies people need to deal with like utilities, banks, etc.
It's a terrible policy. I know someone who is 74 and never owned a computer. They own a smartphone but only know how to use the phone app and really don't understand texting. I was shocked when I learned this and I imagine there are many people like him.
A lot of older individuals still don’t use the internet in any capacity, not even through a smartphone. For those people, effectively the only option is to visit an office.
