Trump messes with Maine's Social Security

 Michael Hiltzik, LA Times - On Feb. 21, Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, publicly upbraided Donald Trump over his transgender policies.

Here’s what happened after that. Out of the blue, the Trump administration canceled a contract that allowed parents in the state to apply for Social Security numbers for their newborns by simply checking a box on a form at the hospital—the way parents in all 50 states have done for decades, as the Social Security Administration has said.

The change meant that new parents would have to bring their infants to one of only eight Social Security field offices in Maine, sometimes by traveling for hours, exposing the newborns to infectious diseases in public.

That happened Thursday. The change, which came with no explanation, created an immediate uproar among Social Security advocates and healthcare providers in Maine.

Dr. Joe Anderson, advocacy chair of the Maine chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that eliminating the program “creates a lot of unnecessary and unfair burdens for families.”

“It makes absolutely no sense to me at all to do this,” Anderson told the Portland Press Herald. “I see no logical explanation for forcing parents and newborns — with 11,000 babies born in Maine every year — to sit in a crowded waiting room, when we have done this easily, securely and efficiently for decades.”

As has happened so often with the Trump White House’s thoughtless policy decisions, this one was reversed a day later.

Lee Dudek, the acting commissioner of Social Security, issued a press release Friday, stating that the contract allowing parents to apply for their newborns’ Social Security numbers through Maine’s healthcare agency, along with another through which Maine authorities reported deaths of Maine residents to the Social Security Administration, had been reinstated.

“In retrospect, I realize that ending these contracts created an undue burden on the people of Maine, which was not the intent,” Dudek said. “For that, I apologize and have directed that both contracts be immediately reinstated.”

If throwing a stink bomb into Maine wasn’t the “intent,” what was? No one in the administration has said. I asked the Social Security Administration for further explanation, but haven’t received a reply.

To Social Security advocates, however, the intent was clear. The move, said Max Richtman, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, “defies common sense and implies nefarious motives....Why on earth would the administration want to make it harder for parents to register their children for Social Security unless the aim was to shrink the size of the program?”