Social Security workers pushed to promote partisan agenda

Steve Kofahl, a union leader representing Social Security Administration (SSA) workers in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska, was one of those testifying. Kofahl, president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3937, told senators that the agency has established a plan to convince the public that the Social Security programs, as currently constituted, are unsustainable.

Most Congressional Republicans had left Washington, D.C., for a three-day West Virginia meeting to plan their campaign to privatize Social Security, so the Senate’s Democratic Policy Committee, the policy and research arm of Senate Democrats, took the opportunity to hold a hearing of their own on the issue. The hearing, called by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, was attended by nine Democatic senators, including Oregon’s Ron Wyden.

Kofahl and fellow AFGE leader Debbie Fredericksen, a Minneapolis SSA claims representative, testified that over the last two or three years, SSA employees have been told that there is an impending crisis, and that the crisis could best be solved through privatization. SSA employees have been directed to share this message with the public at every opportunity, Kofahl said, using a set of “talking points” outlined in a “communications/marketing tactical plan,” copies of which the union leaders shared with the Senate committee.

Callers to Social Security’s toll free number, 1-800-772-1213, hear a recording, while on hold, which warns of the impending retirement of the baby boom generation: “Long range changes need to be made to ensure the system remains solvent for future generations,” says the recording, and “the sooner those changes are made, the less they are going to cost.”

The same message is now contained in the annual statements mailed out to Social Security participants:

“Unless action is taken soon to strengthen Social Security,” the statements say, “in just 14 years we will begin paying more in benefits than we collect in taxes. Without changes, by 2042 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted. By then, the number of Americans 65 or older is expected to have doubled. There won’t be enough younger people working to pay all of the benefits owed to those who are retiring. At that point, there will be enough money to pay only about 73 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits.”

“The Social Security system is facing serious future financial problems,” participants are told in the statements, “and action is needed soon to make sure that the system is sound when today’s younger workers are ready for retirement.”

Kofahl, a 31-year employee of the SSA, says until the administration of George W. Bush, the agency never crossed the line into telling Americans that reforms should be made to the system it’s responsible for administering.

Fredericksen concurred: “Unfortunately, over the last three years, there has been a significant shift in agency policy and practice on political activity. Today, as part of an agency-wide, top-down marketing and communications strategy, frontline agency employees are being instructed to provide the American public with information that is designed to promote the idea that Social Security is in crisis and that Social Security privatization is the answer.”

AFGE filed a grievance Feb. 2 objecting to the agency’s “ongoing use of career employees to make statements that are untrue, and of a political nature, regarding Social Security solvency in a way that promotes the president’s plan.”

It’s also against several federal laws for tax dollars to be used for propaganda. “Publicity and propaganda” clauses in appropriations law restrict the use of funds for “purely partisan communications, and covert propaganda.” And a 2004 law passed in response to similar revelations about Bush administration activities in other agencies prohibits the use of appropriated funds to hire publicity experts.

So far, it hasn’t been easy to enforce those laws. But Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) have introduced a bill to tighten that law’s enforcement.

No federal agency monitors federal PR activities to make sure they’re in compliance with the law against partsan propaganda, but a member of Congress can ask the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate an agency’s expenditures on PR activities to determine if they’re legal.

Earlier in January, eight top Democratic leaders in the House sent a letter to Social Security Commissioner Jo Anne B. Barnhart demanding detailed information about the campaign exposed by AFGE.

Investigations have revealed a series of similar violations at other Executive Branch agencies in the last year.