April 2025: 

The MLO Minute: “Some Disabled Social Security Recipients Falsely Told Their Payments Suspended; Veteran’s Mortgage Rescue Plan Terminated” — 

By Dennis McAndrews, Esq., Founder and Managing Partner Emeritus — 

Millions of disabled Americans who rely on Supplemental Security Income were needlessly alarmed recently from a Social Security Administration (SSA) message falsely claiming they were no longer receiving payments. The erroneous alerts apparently came during a series of website outages tied to internal agency upheaval and untested system changes amid sweeping job cuts and downsizing efforts at SSA under directives from Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which recently cut 50,000 jobs from the SSA. It has been reported that for nearly two days, the SSA’s website displayed messages stating that recipients were “currently not receiving payments”. While payments were ultimately deposited as scheduled, the confusion triggered widespread panic among users, with beneficiaries spending hours rechecking the portal or reaching out to overwhelmed phone lines, fearing a sudden loss of essential income. DOGE’s changes to the SSA’s technology division have coincided with repeated outages and access issues across its digital services, including authentication failures, crashed scheduling tools, and blocked disability claim systems. Kevin Thompson, the CEO of 9i Capital Group, said: “It seems DOGE didn’t adequately test for or anticipate this level of traffic. But when you direct everyone to apply online and 10,000 people become eligible every single day, well… the math isn’t that complicated. For such supposedly smart people, this feels like a basic oversight.”

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has announced that it will end new enrollees to a mortgage-rescue program designed to help veterans who have fallen behind on their mortgages keep their homes. The limited details offered by the VA do not indicate whether the program will be replaced by a different rescue program — or what the move will mean to thousands of veterans, many of whom are in financial peril after the VA previously cancelled a key part of a pandemic-era mortgage relief program that allowed vets to skip mortgage payments if they had trouble paying. In late 2023, there were about 40,000 vets in danger of losing their homes. The VA then responded by halting foreclosures for a year while it initiated a rescue plan called “Veterans Affairs Servicing Purchase Program” (VASP) that put 17,109 veterans and their families into new, low-interest-rate, affordable mortgages. In a recent statement, the VA said it was ending new enrollees for the VASP program: “This change is necessary because VA is not set up or intended to be a mortgage loan restructuring service.”

The work of our law firm regularly involves assisting senior citizens who rely on Medicare, individuals with disabilities who depend on Medicaid, and assisting Veterans as they plan for their future. We will continue to monitor these matters carefully and advise our clients and the public of important issues as they arise.