I want to circle back to the series of posts I did in the last few days about people with disabilities on SSI whose Social Security portals were showing that they were no longer Social Security recipients. As I noted, the people whose payments seemed like they might be a little late all ended up receiving their payments overnight Monday into Tuesday. That still left the fact that people’s portals showed they were not in fact recipients on top of their payment histories disappearing. Well, around mid-afternoon eastern yesterday those messages disappeared from the portals. In other words, everything went back to how it had always been. There was no language saying recipients were not recipients and people’s payment history reappeared.

In the first weeks of the administration, I wrote a number of pieces on the shuttering of PRAMS (the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System), a decades-old data collection and analysis program at CDC tracking infant and maternal health from pregnancy through childbirth and postpartum. It’s a critical source of data across time, affluence, demographic groups, etc. It was shuttered, as I eventually learned, because of the President’s “DEI” executive order. Various of the questions didn’t pass muster under the White House’s standards of what counted as DEI. It wasn’t clear if the shuttering was in effect permanent or whether the program might come back after undergoing some kind of DEI cleanse. Then a couple weeks ago I learned that it was in the process of being resurrected. Some questions were stripped out, but not as many as feared. It also seemed like some data from the disruption period might not be recoverable. There was a lot of work in terms of new IRB reviews and things like that. But it seemed on the way to coming back. Today all CDC employees who worked at PRAMS were terminated (RIF’d). So while there hasn’t been any official announcement that the program is permanently shuttered, all the people who ran it are out as of today.

This is a small data point I’ve been following but one with potentially vast implications. Since mid-February I’ve noticed a consistent pattern based on speaking to many sources across the federal government. In contrast to almost every other part of government, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has emerged relatively unscathed. Obviously, this is not at all a bad thing. CMS oversees Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health care provision services.

This is in great contrast to the situation at the Social Security Administration which has been submitted to a full DOGE onslaught. SSA has been the focus of a propaganda wave from Elon Musk himself, major cuts and a host of disruptions. Wired reported on Friday that DOGE plans to rewrite SSA’s computer system from scratch over a period of a few months. It’s difficult to describe how crazy a plan this is. Such an effort is one that under any realistic timeline would take years not months.

I reported last night that a significant number of SSI recipients had Social Security portals which showed they were no longer beneficiaries. Their payments were also at least slightly late. As of this morning it appears that most or all of those beneficiaries have now received their payments. (I haven’t heard from everyone yet but everyone I’ve heard from has received them.) So as of now this appears to be a records error in the SSA portals rather than a disruption of payments.

As noted last night, in the instances in question, the beneficiaries’ SSA portal now includes the text:  “This beneficiary is currently not receiving payments” under “Benefits & Payments.” Those portals now also include no records of historical payments. It’s as though the person had never been an SSI recipient. I will provide more updates when I have more information.