In Plain Service

  Election season is upon us, and it reminds me that the oldest trick in leadership is to throw the last guy under the bus. It happens in politics, business, and government. A new leader walks in, sees the challenge, and says, “Don’t blame me. I just got here.” Sometimes that is fair. Every leader inherits something: a bad budget, tired employees, broken systems, old backlogs, and a culture built more around avoiding risk than solving problems. There is an old joke about a departing leader who leaves two letters for his successor, each to be opened during a crisis. The first letter says, “Blame everything on me.” So, he does. For a while, it works. Then the second crisis comes. The same excuses no longer work, so he opens the second letter. It says, “Write two letters.” That is the politics of inherited failure. Blame buys time. It does not buy competence. Every leader gets a short grace period to explain what they walked into. But eventually, ownership arrives. The question change...

Imagine pulling up to a Social Security field office like it is a McDonald’s drive-thru. You state your problem into a speaker. You hand over your papers to someone trained mostly to take the order. Then your claim disappears into a distant kitchen, where some centralized unit, automated system, or overworked specialist is supposed to make sense of it all. That may sound efficient. It may even sound modern. But for an older person who cannot navigate a phone tree, a disabled claimant who cannot explain their life in a web form, or a rural worker who has paid into this system for forty years and now needs help, it feels like something else. It feels like being moved through a line instead of being served by a government that knows your name, understands your problem, and has the authority to fix it. Let me be clear. I believe in IT modernization. I believe in AI. I believe Social Security needs a serious digital future. Modernization is not the same thing as hollowing out service. AI is...

  Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Orlando and the ACRD annual conference! It’s a pleasure to be here with you, and even better to see folks in person. We spend so much time on calls, emails, on screens, and helping others, that we don’t always get the chance to step back, shake hands, connect. You matter. You’re doing the hard work. This conference is your opportunity to lean in and connect with “birds of a feather”, other people doing the same work across this great country of ours. So, I am looking forward to the conversations this week. The ones in the hallway. The ones over coffee. The ones where someone says, “Are you seeing this too?” And the answer is usually, “Yes. Every day.” Now I will admit, when I saw the conference was in the Orlando area, I thought to myself, this might be the only conference where people flew in thinking they were going to Disney, and instead got a deep dive on disability policy, medical records, and administrative law. Not quite Space Mountain....