Attorney General James and Eight AGs Applaud Biden-Harris Administration Housing Protection Plan

NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James and a coalition of eight other attorneys general today released the following statement applauding the Biden-Harris administration’s new actions to protect tenants, strengthen fair housing laws, and expand access to affordable housing for Americans across the country:

“Once again, the Biden-Harris administration has made clear that supporting hardworking Americans and ensuring that we all are equally protected under the law are top priorities. Too many people across the country are facing record-high housing costs, and families are struggling to find safe and affordable housing. Today’s announcement is a comprehensive plan that will address many of the challenges that people are facing every day and will help strengthen our ability to regulate and enforce fair housing laws and confront the other systemic issues that prevent people from finding a home. We look forward to continuing our work with our partners at the local, state, and federal level to ensure that no one is discriminated against or taken advantage of as they seek this most basic life necessity.”

Joining Attorney General James in issuing this statement are Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, and District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb.

Attorney General James has always fought to protect tenants and ensure New Yorkers have access to safe, affordable housing. In December 2019, she launched an investigation into housing discrimination practices at multiple Long Island brokerages, and in August 2022, she secured settlements to fix illegal practices and require fair housing trainings for agents. Attorney General James has taken action against landlords that violated lead protection laws, putting tenants, especially children, at risk. She has fought back against tenant blacklisting efforts, and held landlords accountable for harassing, misleading, and illegally threatening to lock out New York renters. Attorney General James has also secured millions of dollars for tenants who had money illegally withheld by landlords, and provided tens of millions of dollars to preserve and expand affordable housing throughout the state.

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Stroke survivor can’t access benefits as Social Security engulfed in ‘turmoil’ under Trump



An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is “in turmoil” one year into Trump’s second term, resulting in a customer service system that has “deteriorated.”

The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.

This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers,” as the remaining SSA workforce has “struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices.”

The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.

However, the Post‘s sources said these employees “were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions.”

One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency “offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim.”

Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.

Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.

An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.

Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle “calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail.”

Also hampering the SSA’s work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.

The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.

“I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, ‘You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?’” the employee said. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”

Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

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