See, this is the sort of thing that happens when you give amateurs too much power to do things in government they should never be allowed to do. Namely, hurt people who never did anything wrong, all under the pretense of government efficiency.
‘“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Johnson told me. “It’s been truly surreal.”’ One can only imagine. No, strike that. I can not.
Source: Seattle Times
“DOGE Has 10 Staffers at Social Security in Hunt for Dead People,” the headlines read this past week.
I found a dead person on Social Security. Right here in Seattle, on Capitol Hill.
Of course the circumstances of Ned Johnson’s death were completely the opposite of what Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had claimed was rampant.
“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Johnson told me. “It’s been truly surreal.”
And what happened? Musk’s DOGE boys declared Mr Johnson dead.
Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.
Johnson’s strange trip through the netherworld began in February, when a letter from his bank arrived addressed to his wife, Pam.
“We recently received notification of LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s passing,” it began. “We offer our sincerest condolences …”
At first she figured it was a scam — her husband, after all, was sitting right there. But then the bank got to the point.
“We know this is a difficult time, and we’re here to help,” the bank wrote. “We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”
“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.”
And by the time they got it sorted, $5,201 had been stricken from his bank account. After several weeks of wrangling and convincing people that he was in fact not dead, Ned Johnson has managed to get some but not all of that money back.
