Roger Marshall Accuses Dems Of ‘Fear-Mongering’: Republicans Want ‘To Save Social Security’

2 days ago

During a Senate Finance Committee hearing last week, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) discussed his disapproval for the Democratic Party’s claims about the future of Social Security.

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Transcript

00:00Chairman. Thank you. Senator Marshall. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome, Mr. Bisognano.

00:07Welcome. We appreciate you answering the call that this is a job you don't need. This is a job

00:15that you don't covet, but instead you're one of the patriots stepping forward to help save this

00:20nation. We heard some fear-mongering this morning, and I just want to reassure Americans that

00:26Republicans are the party that wants to save Social Security, that we want to ensure that

00:32the folks that have paid into Social Security their whole lives, who've earned these benefits,

00:36get the money that they were promised. And I also want to remind Americans that we're the

00:42party that wants to stop the taxing of Social Security benefits as well. We want Americans

00:48to keep more of their hard-earned money and not have to pay a tax on this benefit that they've

00:54paid into their whole lives. The Social Security Administration had probably $10 billion of

01:02improper payments in 2023. I think it's a lot more than that. Can you explain how you use your

01:09past experience in payments processing to bring down these improper payments? I think my past

01:17experience is beyond payment processing, but I think in this case it's good to talk about

01:23in a broader sense. I think every error requires root cause analysis. Why did it happen?

01:29There are no one-offs. My lifetime of experience shows there's pattern recognition. And the fact

01:37that we produce an Inspector General report that talks about a 1 percent error rate, that is

01:45completely too high for the function we're talking about. In your past experience, what was your

01:52error rate? Five decimals to the right, five decimal points to the right, so 0.00001, and

02:01that's what the target would be. And if you think about that type of error rate running through the

02:08agency, it creates the opportunity for more problems than we need. Ultimately, we're talking

02:15about quality of service to our beneficiaries. So I think it's about root cause analysis. I think

02:21it's about rigor. I know that there's lots of stats that are produced, but when I go on and

02:28look at the stats, they're not at the level that you all should accept or that I will accept or

02:35that the American public should accept. Certainly one way of saving Social Security is by eliminating or

02:40decreasing these improper payments. I don't think anyone could argue against that. Let's talk about

02:45customer experience a little bit more. How you use your background to improve processing times

02:49and customer service. I think many of this is about what I call process engineering,

02:55understanding where we are creating backlogs, obviously with the amount of time it's taking.

03:03I don't know if our standards are appropriate yet. We have a six-month standard on disability.

03:10It takes much longer. A lot of things, we need to go analyze them. But I don't believe that this is

03:19going to take us years. I think there's many things we'll solve in year one. And that would

03:26be my expectation. You know, I bring a sense of urgency, and I want the people in the agency

03:34to feel like they're winning. I want them to feel like they're winning. Let's talk about Americans'

03:38personally identifiable information. All of us, from credit cards to banks, I mean even this week

03:45I got another alert from health insurance that our data has been violated. What's your experience

03:52been like in the private world to protect people's identifiable information, and how can you improve

03:58and protect that? Let me ask you, is this a priority for you? It's job one. You know, in this

04:04job, it's job one. And if you're running a financial institution, it's job one. And if you're

04:08on FISA, it's job one. You know, you must have the trust. And that's something PII, as you would

04:18call it, needs the highest level of scrutiny and protection. And we need to understand who can

04:26access what information and ensure that that information is anonymized so they're not getting

04:33data that they could use in a bad way. My last question, let's talk about the IT systems that

04:39you've used in the past. What can you do from an IT standpoint to improve social security's

04:45efficiency and improve customer experience? Well, I think technology is a great enabler.

04:51You don't have to throw a system out. You have to figure out how to make it work better.

04:56You have to understand how to make yourself more efficient. I think, you know, one of the

05:01greatest efficiency opportunities we have is using artificial intelligence. That doesn't mean

05:06we use it for answering the phone. It means we use it to learn how to do our work better.

05:13And I don't think these are monumental economic spends. I think we can do them within the plan.

05:18Thank you, Mr. Bisognagno. You're hired. Thanks. Thank you, sir.

Roger Marshall Accuses Dems Of ‘Fear-Mongering’: Republicans Want ‘To Save Social Security’

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