RICHMOND — In a cavernous gallery of the Valentine museum filled with marble busts and giant images of maps, Bill Martin gestured at a humble 1950s school history textbook in a display case.
“This is where it gets personal for me,” Martin said one day last August.
That book taught generations of young Virginia fourth graders — including Martin — that slavery was benign and enslaved people were happy. Now, as the director of a history museum, he had featured it in an exhibit that exploded the lies of the Southern “Lost Cause” mythology.
Martin has been one of the most beloved and influential figures in the movement to retell the story of Richmond — and, by extension, Virginia and the nation — in a more honest and clear-eyed fashion.
Over the weekend, Martin, 71, was struck by a vehicle and killed while crossing a street near the Valentine in downtown Richmond.
His sudden loss has brought an outpouring of grief and shock from a wide swath of the community, ranging from historians to activists to politicians.
“He stood in the gap for so many — helping to connect some of the very most complicated corners of the city through arts, culture, and history,” Sesha Joi Moon, co-leader of the JXN Project’s effort to commemorate a historic Black neighborhood, said in a written statement. Moon has been nominated as state director of diversity by Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger.
“No one was more dedicated to fostering a deep understanding of Virginia’s complicated history than Bill Martin,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) posted on X this week.
A bespectacled white man from rural Culpeper County with a soft Southern accent and a wit as sharp ashis penchant for neckties, William J. “Bill” Martin was an unlikely agent of reform in the former capital of the Confederacy.
He graduated from Virginia Tech and had worked at museums in Georgia and Florida before landing in Petersburg,Va., in 1987 to run that city’s museums and tourism effort. Martin joined the Valentine, which is dedicated to Richmond history, in 1994, just in time to see it nearly sink from depleted finances and low attendance.
Over time, Martin became known as the “dean” of Richmond’s many museums, a one-man welcoming committee for new directors and a clearinghouse for collaborative efforts.
He was a congenial force for change as the city wrestled with its complicated history. As recently as 2020, giant statues of Confederate leaders still loomed over busy intersections and enthusiasts waving the rebel battle flag regularly greeted traffic outside the national headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Martin led a long process to reorganize the Valentine, using community input to focus its collections and slowly homing in on a story he felt it was uniquely positioned to tell: the origins of the Lost Cause, the romanticized view of the South that took hold in the years after the Civil War. After all, one of the primary creators of the images that fueled the myth was sculptor Edward Valentine, first president of the museum that bears his family’s name and the artist behind some of the iconic statues of Confederate leaders.
When Martin’s changes to the museum’s messageprovoked hate mail and even death threats, he was known to invite his critics to lunch, as recounted last year by Richmond’s StyleWeekly magazine in naming him Richmonder of the Year for 2024. “You can’t do history and sit on the sidelines,” Martin told the magazine.
That philosophy was put into action in 2020 when Richmond’s streets erupted in racial justice protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police. One night in early June, Martin stayed alone at the Valentine in case there was rioting or vandalism. Police broke up demonstrations with chemical sprays and trapped protesters in a warren of downtown blocks, arresting them by the dozens.
As he described in an interview with the Post that year, Martin heard voices whispering outside a museum window and found several young protesters hiding in the bushes. He hustled them inside, helped wash the chemical spray out of their eyes with milk, and kept watch until it was safe for them to leave without being arrested. The next morning, he gathered rubber bullets and signs from the streets to display in the museum.
Only a few days later, protesters dragged down a statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis from stately Monument Avenue. That touched off a series of events that saw city and state officials eventually remove almost all Confederate monuments from public spaces in the city.
Martin had quietly been angling to get Davis into the Valentine for several years, at least since the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 began turning the tide of public opinion against the monuments. The Davis figure was an Edward Valentine creation — the former Confederate had posed for his likeness in the carriage house studio that now sits on the grounds of the museum.
While the rest of Richmond’s statues went into storage, the Davis — dented and spattered with paint — went on display at the Valentine. The museum convened community meetings to discuss how to remake the sculpture studio to better tell the story of what Valentine’s body of work had created.
On Aug. 19 of this year, reporters descended on the Valentine to see the Davis statue removed from the museum to be loaned to a gallery in Los Angeles. Martin was there, of course, and pulled a few reporters aside individually to show them something he considered more profound: the remade sculpture studio, located across a courtyard from the main gallery.
Where floor-to-ceiling shelves once held hundreds of pieces of Valentine’s work — studies of hands, heads, other body parts — now a black screen covered the far wall. A multimedia display would occasionally illuminate sculptures behind the screen, bringing them out of darkness to tell the story of how the South constructed a new narrative for itself after the Civil War.
Or, as Martin put it, “How does fiction become accepted truth?”
He emphasized that the answer to that question came not with lecturing or preaching but with facts. Around the room, quotes highlighted in orange signified primary sources — figures from the postwar era stating, clearly and in their own words, that they were devising a massive publicity campaign to burnish Southern honor.
“All that is left of the South is the ‘war of ideas,’ ” author Edward Pollard wrote in his 1866 book The Lost Cause, which was published in Richmond.
“If statues should be erected, they must be defensive of the Southern cause, as much as histories and school books,” sculptor Valentine wrote in a letter around 1900. He was a chief image maker of the movement, creating everything from the noble statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that until recently represented Virginia in the U.S. Capitol to caricatures of happy, simpleminded Black people.
With an animated map, Martin demonstrated how grand monuments proliferated across Richmond — not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but in the 20th century during the repression of Jim Crow, when the statues made the same intimidating point as the Ku Klux Klan Christmas parade that’s also depicted in the gallery. Similar tales played out across the South.
“Richmond is the only place” to tell that story, Martin said, “because you have every part of the history here.”
Martin spent more than 30 years investing in that belief. On Saturday, Dec. 27, he stopped by the Valentine to check in — as he often did on weekends, staffers said. He left around 2 p.m. and was just two blocks away, crossing Broad Street, when he was struck by a vehicle. Martin died the next day in a hospital.
Police have released little information about the incident, other than to say the driver remained at the scene and that the investigation is ongoing.
Martin’s leadership “helped shape the museum into the place it is today, and his impact will be felt for generations to come,” Meg Hughes, who will serve as acting director while the Valentine’s board seeks a replacement for Martin, said in a written statement to museum members. “We remain committed to serving our community and honoring the legacy that he leaves behind.”
CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland — Swiss investigators are probing what caused a fire in a bar at an Alpine ski resort that left around 40 people dead and another 115 injured during a New Year’s celebration.
Most injuries, many of them serious, occurred when the blaze swept through the crowded bar less than two hours after midnight Thursday in southwestern Switzerland.
The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue. Overnight, its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies.
While officials said Thursday it was too early to determine the fire’s cause, investigators have already ruled out the possibility of an attack.
Crans-Montana is less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Sierre, Switzerland, where 28 people, including many children, were killed when a bus from Belgium crashed inside a Swiss tunnel in 2012.
Here’s what we know about the deadly fire:
A frantic attempt to escape
The blaze broke out around 1:30 a.m. Thursday during a holiday celebration inside the Le Constellation bar.
Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lit candle in a bottle. The flames spread, collapsing the wooden ceiling, they told the broadcaster.
People frantically tried to escape from the basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door, causing a crowd surge, one of the women said.
A young man at the scene said people smashed windows to escape the fire, some gravely injured, reported BFMTV. He said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames.
Gianni Campolo, a Swiss 19-year-old who was in Crans-Montana on holiday, rushed to the bar to help first responders after receiving a call from a friend who escaped the inferno.
“As we get closer, we see almost dismembered persons lying on the floor, in cardiac arrest. People were also inside trapped, laying on the ground. We saw their clothes melting onto their skin,” Campolo told TF1. “I have seen horror and I don’t know what else would be worse than this.”
The blaze triggered a flashover or backdraft
The Swiss officials called the blaze an “embrasement généralisé,” a French firefighting term describing how a blaze can trigger the release of combustible gases that can then ignite violently and cause what English-speaking firefighters would call a flashover or a backdraft.
The injured suffered from serious burns and smoke inhalation. Some were flown to specialist hospitals across the country.
Authorities urged people to show caution in the coming days to avoid any accidents that could require the already overwhelmed medical resources.
Italian and French nationals are among the missing
Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani placed flowers at the memorial in Crans-Montana and said 13 Italian citizens were wounded and six remained missing by midday Friday.
One of the missing was Giovanni Tamburi, whose mother Carla Masielli issued an appeal on Italian state television network RAI for any news about her son and asked the media to show his photo in hopes of identifying him.
“We have called all the hospitals but they don’t give me any news. We don’t know if he’s among the dead. We don’t know if he’s among the missing,” she wailed. “They don’t tell us anything!”
Three of Italy’s wounded were transported Thursday from Switzerland to a Milan hospital while a fourth is expected to be transferred Friday, Tajani said.
France’s foreign ministry said eight French people are missing and another nine are among the injured. Top-flight French soccer team FC Metz said one of its trainee players, 19-year-old Tahirys Dos Santos, was badly burned and has been transferred by plane to Germany for treatment.
A top venue for the world’s best athletes
With high-altitude ski runs rising around 3,000 meters (nearly 9,850 feet) in the heart of the Valais region’s snowy peaks and pine forests, Crans-Montana is one of the top venues on the World Cup circuit.
Daycare operators say the Trump administration’s restrictions on federal childcare funding unfairly punish them over a conservative activist’s fraud allegations against Minnesota centers that are undercut by state records anddisputed by some of the owners.
YouTuber Nick Shirley recently went to nine federally subsidized daycare centers in Minneapolis, many operated by Somali Americans.
In a 42-minute video of his visits that went viral last week, he claimed that thecenters weren’t caring for any children because none could be seen entering or exiting the buildings.
In response, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cut off funds to the centers until they undergo extensive auditing and announced stricter verification measures nationwide for childcare funds.
Minnesotastate regulators visited the centers within the past 10 months and saw children, according to state officials and records,undermining claims that they are fraudulent businesses.
One daycare manager told theWashington Post thatsecurity camera footage showed Shirley visiting her facility when it was closed. Another daycare director said staff didn’t open the door in part because they assumed that Shirley and six or seven men with him, some masked, were from Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which launched an operation in early December focused on Somali immigrants in the Minneapolis area.
Ahmed Hasan, director of ABC Learning Center, said the YouTuber showed up at the front entrance around noon on Dec. 16. During the winter, most parents use the back entrance and Shirley stayed no more than a few minutes, he said.
“There were kids here all the time,” Hasansaid. “I was also here.”
Hasan said his daycare serves about 56 children, most from low-income East African families. It was last visited by a state regulator on Nov. 7. Since the video went viral, people have flooded his center’s phones with harassing calls, threatening to have him arrested or call ICE, he said.
Ayan Jama, manager at Mini Childcare Center, said that herdaycare has also received threatening phone calls, including a bomb threat, and that people have attempted to break in.
She said Shirley visited in the morning before her center opened after noon. Its typical hours are 12:30 to 9:30 p.m. to serve mostly Somali children after school while their parents work in the afternoons and evenings, she said.
“Why not come during operating hours?” she said. “This is a targeted attack on our community.”
Jama, whose business was last visited by a regulator on June 11, said she won’t be able to keep her doors open if federal funds, which account for 90% of her revenue, aren’t restored.
Of the seven other daycare centers featured in Shirley’s video, five didn’t return requests for comment on Wednesday, the mailbox was full for a sixth, and multiple calls to a seventh resulted in a busy signal.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said the Trump administration is threatening funding for childcare services “apparently all on the basis of one video on social media.”
“To say I am outraged is an understatement,” Ellison said in a statement Wednesday.
The scrutiny on the nine daycare centers in Shirley’s video has nationwide implications because all daycare centers will have to submit more documentation to HHS before receiving childcare funds.
The new guidelines, while still unclear, mirror “defend the spend” requirements that briefly went into effect in April before they were stopped, child welfare policy analysts said. For a few weeks, states seeking to draw down money to reimburse daycares were asked to upload additional details on why the payments were justified.
That effort significantly delayed payments to providers, said Stephanie Schmit, director of childcare and early education at nonpartisan Center for Law and Social Policy.
If the new documentation requirements are the same or more onerous, providers that are chronically underfunded will struggle to keep their doors open, she said.
“We already know that childcare providers don’t have a lot of additional time to do things like this,” Schmit said.
HHS said federal childcare dollars, which help familieswith low incomes pay for care, will be frozen to the centers under suspicion until they release extensive documents, including attendance records, inspection reports, and complaints.
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said the agency has “a clear duty to verify the proper use of taxpayer funds.”
“The documentation process exists to rule out fraud and confirm that funds are supporting legitimate child care providers,” he said in a statement. “Any provider operating should be prepared to demonstrate compliance.”
Clare Sanford, a government relations chair for the Minnesota Child Care Association, which represents more than 300 centers across the state, called the viral video misleading.
For example, daycare centers often lock their front doors for safety reasons, and it is not unusual for employees to not answer a door if they are caring for children and not expecting a visitor, she said.
If an employee opens a door, children might not be visible because daycare centers keep them in classrooms, away from entrances, she said.
Shirley did not return requests for comment Wednesday evening.
The action comes amid state and federal fraud investigations of 14 Minnesota-run safety net programs, including for child nutrition, housing, and autism assistance.
President Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers, and conservative activists and media outlets have cited the involvement of Somali Americans to blast the immigrant group. Trump said in a Cabinet meeting last month that he doesn’t want Somali immigrants in the United States and referred to them as “garbage.”
Around threedozenpeople gathered Wednesday at the Minnesota Capitol to express opposition to the childcare funding restrictions, holding signs that said “No child care, no workforce” and “Fund care not fear.”
“Let’s be honest about how we really got here: Our president decided he doesn’t like the Somali community and he wants to destroy them,” said Amanda Schillinger, a Minnesota childcare provider, to a loud chorus of boos.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, tweeted Tuesday that Trump was “politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”
State Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, a Democrat who is cochair of the House Children and Families Finance and Policy Committee, said thestate has been actively working for years to put safeguards in place against fraud.
“It’s incredibly frustrating to me that Donald Trump and the Republicans want to use this as a political vehicle to cut funding to our state,” she said.
Eight of the daycare centers depicted in Shirley’s video have received multiple violations by state regulators. ABC Learning Center was cited for deficiencies, which Hasansaid were corrected and described as common among daycares, such as not having food menus with proper nutritional requirements and not having an individual care plan for a child with a known allergy.
The ninth center in Shirley’s video — Super Kids Daycare Center — had its license activated Oct. 1 and shares the same address as another daycare center whose license expired that same day and previously received violations.
The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families did not return requests for comment after the Trump administration announced its funding freeze.
KYIV, Ukraine — Russian officials said Thursday that a Ukrainian drone strike killed 24 people and wounded at least 50 more as they celebrated the new year in a Russian-occupied village in Ukraine’s Kherson region.
Three drones struck a cafe and hotel in the resort town of Khorly on the Black Sea coast, the region’s Moscow-installed leader Vladimir Saldo said in a statement on Telegram. He said that one of the drones carried an incendiary mixture, sparking a blaze.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the claim of a strike. The attack could not be independently verified by the Associated Press.
The attack was condemned by a number of Russian officials as tensions between the two nations continue to spike despite diplomats hailing productive peace talks.
Valentina Matviyenko, the chair of Russia’s upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, said that the strike “strengthened” Russia’s resolve to quickly achieve its goals in its almost four-year invasion of Ukraine.
The strike “once again demonstrates the validity of our initial demands,” Matviyenko said.
The statement follows claims from Moscow that Ukraine launched a long-range drone attack against one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official residences in northwestern Russia on Tuesday. Kyiv has denounced the claims as a “lie.”
Russia’s Ministry of Defense said Thursday that its specialists had accessed the navigation system in one of the drones it claimed was used in the Tuesday attack and used its data to confirm that Putin’s residence was the drone’s final destination.
The claim could not be verified as the ministry did not share evidence on the findings, but officials said that it would transfer the data to U.S. officials “through established channels.”
On Wednesday, Russia’s Defense Ministry also released a video on Wednesday of a downed drone it said was involved in the attack.
The nighttime clip showed a man wearing camouflage, a helmet, and a Kevlar vest standing near a damaged drone lying in snow. The man, his face covered, talks about the drone. Neither the man nor the Defense Ministry provided any location or date and neither the video nor its claims could be independently verified.
Kyiv has called the allegations of an attack on Putin’s residence a ruse to derail ongoing peace negotiations, which have ramped up in recent weeks on both sides of the Atlantic.
In his New Year’s address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that a peace deal was “90% ready” but warned that the remaining 10%, believed to include key sticking points such as territory, would “determine the fate of peace, the fate of Ukraine and Europe, how people will live.”
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said Wednesday that he, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner had a “productive call” with the national security advisers of Britain, France, Germany, and Ukraine “to discuss advancing the next steps in the European peace process.”
“We focused on how to move the discussions forward in a practical way on behalf of (Trump’s) peace process, including strengthening security guarantees and developing effective deconfliction mechanisms to help end the war and ensure it does not restart,” Witkoff said in a post on X.
Lead Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov also reaffirmed that European and Ukrainian officials plan to meet Saturday. Zelensky is due to hold talks next week with European leaders.
In the diplomatic sphere, Kyiv has also continued to push the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to take action against Russia for alleged attacks on electricity infrastructure deemed “critical for nuclear safety and security” at Ukraine’s nuclear power stations.
The IAEA on Tuesday published a Note Verbale sent by Kyiv to the agency, saying that a Russian drone and missile attack on Dec. 23 had caused certain Ukrainian nuclear power plants to lose a “significant part of their off-site power connections.”
Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russia attacked the Odesa region overnight, targeting civilian infrastructure in several waves of drone attacks, according to regional head Oleh Kiper.
In a post on Telegram, Kiper said that a two-story residential building was damaged and that a drone hit an apartment on the 17th floor of a high-rise building without detonating. There were no casualties reported.
In its daily report, Ukraine’s air force said air defense forces had downed or suppressed 176 of 205 drones targeting the country overnight. It said hits by 24 strike drones were recorded at 15 locations and the attack was still ongoing.
Chad Hanson remembers a time, not so long ago, when driving on a bridge across Florida’s Apalachicola Bay meant witnessing an astounding sight.
“You’d see just boats lined up along the reefs and spread out,” he said of the hundreds of oyster fisherman that used to harvest fromroughly 10,000 acres of the bay, about 75 miles southwest of Tallahassee.
For generations, those boats helped fuel the local economy and provided 90% of the oysters harvested in Florida, as well as about 10% of the nation’s wild caught oysters.
“Pretty much the whole community, in one way or another, was involved with the oyster industry,” said Hanson, a science and policy officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts who works on conservation issues around the Southeast.
Now, more than a decade after the once-iconic industry began to fade — and five years after harvesting was shuttered completely — Apalachicola’s storied oyster beds have opened once more, on the first day of 2026.
In 2013, the fishery entered a precipitous decline, the result of pressures such as excessive drought, overharvesting, the loss of reef material and long-running water disputes along the rivers that feed the bay— a reflection of stressors that have affected oyster populations across the Gulf of Mexico and beyond.
By 2020, Florida had imposed a five-year oyster harvesting ban, in an effort to try to jump-start an ecological recovery.
When harvesting in Apalachicola begins anew, it won’t be anything like the glory days just yet, with a truncated season, fewer permits available to access fewer acres and catches strictly monitored and limited.
But for folks such as Shannon Hartsfield, a fourth-generation Franklin County fisherman, it’s something.
“How can I put it?” Hartsfield, 56, said on a recent afternoon. “It’s a step forward, but it’s not going to be enough to say you can make a living in the bay.”
The decision to reopen the bay
In the fall, Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission voted unanimously to reopen Apalachicola Bay to oyster harvesting on Jan. 1 — a decision that drew swift praise from Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican.
“Apalachicola’s oyster industry has been the cornerstone of Florida’s seafood economy for generations. No place knows oysters better than Apalachicola,” DeSantis said at the time.
“I look forward to continuing to invest in restoration activities that support the long-term restoration of Apalachicola Bay and the communities that rely on it,” DeSantis said.
The approval came with a series of restrictions. To begin with, the state will allow only a two-month season, ending on Feb. 28. If all goes well, officials plan to reopen future seasons beginning in October.
For now, the state considers only about 500 acres suitable for harvesting, and commercial crews who qualify for a permit will be allowed to fish Monday through Friday along four small, designated reefs.
Each permit holder also will be limited to a certain number of bags from each reef. A bag is equal to two 5-gallon buckets, one 10-gallon bucket, or 60 pounds of oysters.
No one is pretending that such modest limits are enough to bring back oystering jobs that have been lost over the years, or to immediately make harvesting a sustainable line of work again in Apalachicola, where some oystermen have sold their boats and many have had to seek other kinds of work.
“I just don’t know how it’s going to be,” said Hartsfield, who said he quit harvesting oysters in 2013 but has helped academic researchers with their ongoing search for solutions. “We have a drop in the bucket compared to what we used to have.”
Merely reaching the point of being able to temporarily reopen Apalachicola Bay to harvesting took years of work and significant funding.
Numerous small-scale restoration efforts have unfolded during the years of closure, but the largest effort came in 2024, whenthe state’s fish and wildlife commission constructed 77 acres of new reef on degraded oyster habitat, the agency said.
State officials have set a long-term goal to restore 2,000 acres of oyster reefs in the bay by 2032 — still a fraction of what once existed, but far more than its recent lows.
The state also hopes to reestablish an oyster fishery with a long-term “cultch” program, in which oyster shells or other material are added back onto reefs to create an ideal habitat for baby oysters to attach and grow.
Such a program “is necessary component of any sustainable oyster fishery,” state wildlife officials wrote in a recent presentation.
“The success of oyster recovery in Apalachicola Bay, which includes a viable oyster fishery, depends on continued restoration and reef maintenance,” the agency wrote, estimating that such efforts will require an annual budget between $30 million and $55 million.
A budget proposal rolled out by DeSantis in December seeks $30 million in funding to expedite the state’s efforts to restore oyster habitats, including $25 million in Apalachicola Bay. But even if that amount ultimately is approved, restoring resilience in the estuary will take time.
“I’ll be frank,” said Hanson, who also serves on the board of the Partnership for a Resilient Apalachicola Bay. “Oyster restoration and habitat rebuilding is on the order not of years, but decades.”
Stress on the industry across the region
The pressures facing Florida’s once-renowned oyster industry are not unique. Other oyster populations around the Gulf of Mexico have faced declines in recent years for a litany of reasons, including habitat loss, pollution, and damage from storms.
Recently, Alabama announced that the state would close all public water bottoms oyster harvesting on Dec. 23 after one of the worst harvests in years.
State conservation officials said in a statement that surveys of reefs “suggest Alabama’s oyster populations have faced multiple stressors in recent years which have led to a population decline.”
Those threats extend across much of the Gulf Coast — and far beyond — said Tom Wheatley, a conservation project director for Pew. “It’s a global issue,” he said.
Indeed, researchers have estimated that as much as 85% of oyster reefs have been lost. Those losses matter not only because of the fishing industry they support, but also because of the habitat they provide for other marine life and the critical role they play in improving water quality and helping buffer the impacts of storm surges and waves.
Hanson said so much work remains in Apalachicola Bay before its beloved reefs resembled anything from decades ago. But he sees the reopening of the harvest season as a small step to a potentially brighter future.
“Hopefully, this is the beginning of a success story,” he said.
Hartsfield, like others who come from generations of oyster families, shares that hope. He said he plans to be back out on the water come January, and so does his 78-year-old father.
But he also knows how delicate the situation remains. How if another drought hits hard, or salinity levels aren’t just right, or other threats deepen, “It could go right back to where it was” when officials closed the bay in 2020.
“Right now, for the next few years, we will just be waiting to see what happens,” he said. “It’s very fragile.”
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump defended his energy and health in an interview with the Wall Street Journal and disclosed that he had a CT scan, not an MRI scan, during an October examination about which he and the White House delayed offering details.
Trump, in the interview, said he regretted undergoing the advanced imaging on his heart and abdomen during an October visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center because it raised public questions about his health.
His physician said in a memo the White House released in December that he had “advanced imaging” as a preventative screening for men his age.
Trump had initially described it as an MRI but said he didn’t know what part of his body he had scanned. A CT scan is a quicker form of diagnostic imaging than an MRI but offers less detail about differences in tissue.
The president’s doctor, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, said in a statement released Thursday by the White House that Trump underwent the exam in October because he planned to be at Walter Reed to meet people working there. Trump had already undergone an annual physical in April.
“President Trump agreed to meet with the staff and soldiers at Walter Reed Medical Hospital in October. In order to make the most of the President’s time at the hospital, we recommended he undergo another routine physical evaluation to ensure continued optimal health,” Barbabella said.
Barbabella said that he asked the president to undergo either a CT scan or MRI “to definitively rule out any cardiovascular issues” and the results were “perfectly normal and revealed absolutely no abnormalities.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Thursday that the president’s doctors and the White House have “always maintained the President received advanced imaging” but said that “additional details on the imaging have been disclosed by the President himself” because he “has nothing to hide.”
“In retrospect, it’s too bad I took it because it gave them a little ammunition,” Trump said in the interview with the Wall Street Journal published Thursday. “I would have been a lot better off if they didn’t, because the fact that I took it said, ‘Oh gee, is something wrong?’ Well, nothing’s wrong.”
Trump, 79, became the oldest person to take the oath of office when he was sworn in as president last year and has been sensitive to questions about his health, particularly as he has repeatedly questioned his predecessor Joe Biden’s fitness for office.
Biden, who turned 82 in the last year of his presidency, was dogged at the end of his tenure and during his abandoned attempt to seek reelection over scrutiny of his age and mental acuity.
But questions have also swirled around Trump’s health this year as he has been seen with bruising on the back of his right hand that has been conspicuous despite a slathering of makeup on top, along with noticeable swelling at his ankles.
The White House this summer said the president had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition among older adults. The condition happens when veins in the legs can’t properly carry blood back to the heart and it pools in the lower legs.
In the interview, Trump said he briefly tried wearing compression socks to address the swelling but stopped because he didn’t like them.
The bruising on Trump’s hand, according to Leavitt, is from “frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin,” which Trump takes regularly to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.
He said he takes more aspirin than his doctors recommend but said he has resisted taking less because he’s been taking it for 25 years and said he is “a little superstitious.” Trump takes 325 milligrams of aspirin daily, according to Barbabella.
“They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart,” Trump said. “I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?”
Trump, in the interview, denied that he has fallen asleep during White House meetings when cameras have caught him with his eyes closed, instead insisting that he was resting his eyes or blinking.
“I’ll just close. It’s very relaxing to me,” he said. “Sometimes they’ll take a picture of me blinking, blinking, and they’ll catch me with the blink.”
He said that he’s never slept much at night, a habit he also described during his first term, and said he starts his day early in the White House residence before moving to the Oval Office around 10 a.m. and working until 7 or 8 p.m.
The president dismissed questions about his hearing, saying he struggled to hear only “when there’s a lot of people talking,” and said he has plenty of energy, which he credited to his genes.
“Genetics are very important,” he said. “And I have very good genetics.”
Respondents to an annual Michigan college survey of overused and misused words and phrases say 6-7 is cooked and should come to a massive full-stop heading into the new year.
Those are among the top 10 words on the 50th annual “Banished Words List,” released Thursday by Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.
The tongue-in-cheek roundup of overused slang started in 1976 as a New Year’s Eve party idea and is affectionately called the list of “Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.”
Around 1,400 submissions came from all 50 states and a number of countries outside the U.S., including Uzbekistan, Brazil, and Japan, according to Lake Superior State.
Also in the top 10 are demure, incentivize, perfect, gift/gifted, my bad, and reach out. My bad and reach out also made the list decades ago — in 1998 and 1994, respectively.
“The list definitely represents the fad and vernacular trends of the younger generation,” said David Travis, Lake Superior State University president.
“Social media allows a greater opportunity to misunderstand or misuse words,” Travis said. “We’re using terms that are shared through texting, primarily, or through posting with no body language or tone context. It’s very easy to misunderstand these words.”
Few phrases in 2025 befuddled parents, teachers and others over the age of, say 40, more than 6-7. Dictionary.com even picked it as its 2025 word of the year. Merriam Webster chose slop, and Oxford University Press pickedrage bait.
But what does 6-7 actually mean? It exploded over the summer, especially among Gen Z, and is considered by many to be nonsensical in meaning — an inside joke driven by social media.
“Don’t worry, because we’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means,” the dictionary’s editors wrote.
Each number can be spoken aloud as “six, seven.” They even can be combined as the number 67; at college basketball games, some fans explode when a team reaches that point total.
The placement of 6-7 at the top of the banished list puts it in good company. In 2019, the centuries-old Latin phrase quid pro quo was the top requested phrase to ban from popular use. In 2017, fake news got the most votes.
Alana Bobbitt, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is unapologetic about using 6-7.
“I find joy in it,” Bobbitt said. “It’s a little bit silly, and even though I don’t understand what it means, it’s fun to use.”
Jalen Brezzell says that a small group of his friends use 6-7 and that it comes up a couple of times each week. But he won’t utter it.
“Never. I don’t really get the joke,” said Brezzell, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. “I don’t see what’s funny about it.”
But banning it, even in jest, might be a bit of a stretch, he said, adding that he does use other words and phrases on the list.
“I’ve always used the word cooked,” Brezzell said. ”I just think it got popular on the internet over this past year. It’s saying, like, ‘give it up, it’s over.’”
Some of the phrases do have longevity, Travis said.
“I don’t think they’ll ever go away, like ‘at the end of the day,’” he said. “I used ‘my bad’ today. I feel comfortable using it. I started using it when I was young. A lot of us older people are still using it.”
Travis said that while some terms on the list “will stick around in perpetuity,” others will be fleeting.
NEW YORK — Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani took his midnight oath of office on a centuries-old Quran, marking the first time a mayor of New York City used Islam’s holy text to be sworn in and underscoring a series of historic firsts for the city.
Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democrat, became mayor in a long-closed subway station beneath City Hall, the first Muslim, first South Asian, and first African-born person to hold that position.
These milestones — as well as the historical Quran — reflect the longstanding and vibrant Muslim residents of the nation’s most populous city, according to a scholar who helped Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, select one of the books.
Most of Mamdani’s predecessors were sworn in on a Bible, although the oath to uphold the federal, state, and city constitutions does not require the use of any religious text.
And while he has focused heavily on the issue of affordability during his campaign, Mamdani was outspoken about his Muslim faith. He frequently appeared at mosques across the five boroughs as he built a base of support that included many first-time South Asian and Muslim voters.
This photo provided by the New York Public Library shows the Schomburg Quran.
A look at the three Qurans that Mamdani used
Two Qurans were to be used during the subway ceremony: his grandfather’s Quran and a pocket-sized version that dates to the late 18th or early 19th century. It is part of the collection at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
That copy of the Quran symbolizes the diversity and reach of the city’s Muslims, said Hiba Abid, the library’s curator for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.
“It’s a small Quran, but it brings together elements of faith and identity in New York City history,” Abid said.
For a subsequent swearing-in ceremony at City Hall on the first day of the year, Mamdani used both his grandfather’s and grandmother’s Qurans. The campaign hasn’t offered more details on those heirlooms.
One Quran’s long journey to Mamdani’s hand
The manuscript was acquired by Arturo Schomburg, a Black Puerto Rican historian whose collection documented the global contributions of people of African descent. While it is unclear how Schomburg came into possession of the Quran, scholars believe it reflected his interest in the historical relationship between Islam and Black cultures in the United States and across Africa.
Unlike ornate religious manuscripts associated with royalty or elites, this copy of the Quran is modest in design. It has a deep red binding with a simple floral medallion and is written in black and red ink. The script is plain and readable, suggesting it was created for everyday use rather than ceremonial display.
Those features indicate the manuscript was intended for ordinary readers, Abid said, a quality she described as central to its meaning.
“The importance of this Quran lies not in luxury, but in accessibility,” she said.
Because the manuscript is undated and unsigned, scholars relied on its binding and script to estimate when it was produced, placing it sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century during the Ottoman period in a region that includes what is now Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan.
Abid said the manuscript’s journey to New York mirrors Mamdani’s own layered background. Mamdani is a South Asian New Yorker who was born in Uganda, and Duwaji is American-Syrian.
Identity and controversy
The meteoric rise of a Muslim democratic socialist also brought a surge of Islamophobic rhetoric, amplified by national attention on the race.
In an emotional speech days before the election, Mamdani said the hostility had only strengthened his resolve to be visible about his faith.
“I will not change who I am, how I eat, or the faith that I’m proud to call my own,” he said. “I will no longer look for myself in the shadows. I will find myself in the light.”
The decision to use a Quran has drawn fresh criticism from some conservatives. U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, a Republican, wrote on social media, “The enemy is inside the gates,” in response to a news article about Mamdani’s inauguration. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil-rights group, has designated Tuberville as an anti-Muslim extremist based on past statements.
Such backlash is not new. In 2006, Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota who was the first Muslim elected to Congress, faced condemnation from conservatives after he chose to use a Quran for his ceremonial oath.
Following the inauguration, the Quran will go on public display at the New York Public Library. Abid said she hopes attention surrounding the ceremony — whether supportive or critical — will prompt more people to explore the library’s collections documenting Islamic life in New York, ranging from early 20th century Armenian and Arabic music recorded in the city to firsthand accounts of Islamophobia after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“This manuscript was meant to be used by ordinary readers when it was produced,” Abid said. “Today it lives in a public library where anyone can encounter it.”
CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland — About 40 people were killed and another 115 injured, most of them seriously, after a fire ripped through a bar’s New Year celebration in a Swiss Alpine resort less than two hours after midnight Thursday, police said.
Authorities did not immediately have an exact count of the deceased.
The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue, and overnight, its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies.
Valais Canton police commander Frédéric Gisler said during a news conference that work is underway to identify the victims and inform their families, adding that the community is “devastated.”
Beatrice Pilloud, Valais Canton attorney general, said it was too early to determine the cause of the fire. Experts have not yet been able to go inside the wreckage.
“At no moment is there a question of any kind of attack,” Pilloud said.
She later said the number of people who were in the bar is “currently totally unknown,” adding that its maximum capacity will be part of the investigation.
“For the time being, we don’t have any suspect,” she added, when asked if anyone had been arrested over the fire. “An investigation has been opened, not against anyone, but to illuminate the circumstances of this dramatic fire.”
Gisler said the priority until further notice would be identifying the victims, and added that “this work will have to take several days.”
An evening of celebration turns tragic
Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old from Paris who survived the blaze, described “total chaos” inside the bar. One of his friends died and “two or three” were missing, he told The Associated Press.
He said he hadn’t seen the fire start, but did see waitresses arrive with Champagne bottles with sparklers, he said.
Clavier said he felt like he was suffocating and initially hid behind a table, then ran upstairs and tried to use a table to break a Plexiglas window. It fell out of its casing, allowing him to escape.
He lost his jacket, shoes, phone and bank card while fleeing, but “I am still alive and it’s just stuff.”
“I’m still in shock,” he added.
Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lit candle in a bottle. The flames spread, collapsing the wooden ceiling, they told the broadcaster.
One of the women described a crowd surge as people frantically tried to escape from a basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door.
Another witness speaking to BFMTV described people smashing windows to escape the blaze, some gravely injured, and panicked parents rushing to the scene in cars to see whether their children were trapped inside. The young man said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames and likened what he saw to a horror movie as he watched from across the street.
Officials described how the blaze likely triggered the release of combustible gases that ignited violently and caused what English-speaking firefighters call a flashover or backdraft.
“This evening should have been a moment of celebration and coming together, but it turned into a nightmare,” said Mathias Reynard, head of the regional government of the Valais Canton.
The injured were so numerous that the intensive care unit and operating theater at the regional hospital quickly hit full capacity, Reynard said.
Crans-Montana is less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Sierre, where 28 people, including many children, were killed when a bus from Belgium crashed inside a Swiss tunnel in 2012.
Resort town sits in the heart of the Alps
In a region busy with tourists skiing on the slopes, the authorities have called on the local population to show caution in the coming days to avoid any accidents that could require medical resources that are already overwhelmed.
With high-altitude ski runs rising around 3,000 meters (nearly 9,850 feet) in the heart of the Valais region’s snowy peaks and pine forests, Crans-Montana is one of the top venues on the World Cup circuit. The resort will host the best men’s and women’s downhill racers, including Lindsey Vonn, for their final events before the Milan-Cortina Olympics in February. The town’s Crans-sur-Sierre golf club stages the European Masters each August on a picturesque course.
The Swiss blaze on Thursday came 25 years after an inferno in the Dutch fishing town of Volendam on New Year’s Eve, which killed 14 people and injured more than 200 as they celebrated in a cafe.
Swiss President Guy Parmelin, speaking on his first day in office, said many emergency staff had been “confronted by scenes of indescribable violence and distress.”
“This Thursday must be the time of prayer, unity and dignity,” he said. “Switzerland is a strong country not because it is sheltered from drama, but because it knows how to face them with courage and a spirit of mutual help.”
The Social Security Administration — the sprawling federal agency that delivers retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to 74 million Americans — began the second Trump administration with a hostile takeover.
It ended the year in turmoil. A diminished workforce has struggled to respond to up to six million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices — record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.
Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit and hasty policy changes and reassignments leftinexperienced staff to handle the aftermath.
Exaggerated claims of fraud, for example, have led to new roadblocks for elderly beneficiaries, disabled people, and legal immigrants, who are now required to complete sometransactions in person or online rather than by phone. Even so, the number of calls to the agency for the year hit93 million as of late September — a six-year high, data show.
The troubled disability benefits system is also deteriorating after some improvement, with 66% of disability appointments scheduled within 28 days as of December — down from nearly 90% earlier in the year, data show.
One notable exception is phone service, which improved in the second half of the yearbut is still subpar. Average hold times peaked at about 2½ hours in March, but dropped starting in July as employees were diverted from field office duties to fix what had become a public relations crisis. Average wait times for callbacks remain an hour or longer, however, while new delays have emerged elsewhere in the system, internal data show.
“It was not good before, don’t get me wrong, but the cracks are more than beginning to show,” said John Pfannenstein, a claims specialist outside Seattle and president of Local 3937 of the American Federationof Government Employees, which represents most Social Security employees. “It is a great amount of stress on our employees that remain on the job, who haven’t jumped ship.”
Commissioner Frank Bisignano has authorized millions of dollars in overtime pay to employees in a race to clear the bottlenecks, which worsened dramatically after nearly 7,000 employees — 12% of the workforce — were squeezed out early in the year. The agency said it has made improvements: It reduced the processing center backlog by one million cases this fall, cut pending disability claims by a third and kept the website live 24-7 after a series of outages earlier this year.
The current crisis follows years of disinvestment by Congress and acting leadership, despite a surge in baby boomer retirements. Bisignano promised faster service and a leaner workforce with a digital identity that he says willautomate simple retirement claims and other operations.
Frank Bisignano, President Donald Trump’s nominee for commissioner of the Social Security Administration, arrives for his confirmation hearing in March.
“In the coming year, we will continue our digital-first approach to further enhance customer service by introducing new service features and functionality across each of our service channels to better meet the needs of the more than 330 million Americans with Social Security numbers,” the commissioner said in a statement to the Washington Post.
But responsiveness and trust in the agency have suffered, according to current and former officials and public polling.
This account of the crisis at Social Security is based on internal documents and interviews with41 current and former employees, advocates and customers, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about their concerns.
Social Security officials declined to make Bisignano available for an interview, though he did respond to written questions.
Three days before Christmas, Brian Morrissey, 65, arrived at the field office in Silver Spring, Md., for an appointment to apply for Medicare. He had tried the “MySSA” website, “but navigating it was just really hard,” he said. Morrissey owns a home improvement business, he said.
“If they can make the process easier online, great, but right now it is not well designed,” he said. So his wife waited 30 minutes on hold to schedule a face-to-face appointment for him.
Aime Ledoux Tchameni, an immigrant from Cameroon, waited in line at the Silver Spring office to get an appointment time to fix his last name from being listed as his first name — a mistake that occurred when he came to the U.S. two years ago. He has a provisional driver’s license from Maryland and needs to clear up his name with Social Security by mid-January, he said. But his appointment is not until Feb. 9.
“This is really going to cause me problems, because I need my driver’s license to get to work,” Tchameni said in French. “I don’t understand why I have to wait so long.”
‘I flipped the switch’
The table was set in February by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which installed a loyal, mid-level data analyst with no management experience to lead the $15.4 billion agency.
That former analyst, Leland Dudek, insists that he saved Social Security from a worse fate under Musk’s cost-cutting team. “I flipped the switch,” he said in a recent interview, referring to his disruptive four-month tenure as acting commissioner. “The casualty of that is a smaller SSA, an SSA that is being, for the first time, subject to the whims of being a political organization, which it was never intended to be.”
Regional offices abruptly disappeared in a rushed reorganization. New policies to fight fraud were rolled out only to be canceled or changed, prompting confused customers to jam the phones and the website, which crashed repeatedly. Daily operations in some respects became an endless game of whack-a-mole as employees were pulled from one department to another.
Along the way, Social Security also became ground zero in the administration’s quest to gather Americans’ personal data — largely in service of its mass deportation campaign.
The chaos quickly became a political cudgel, as Democrats saw an opening to defend one of the country’s most popular entitlement programs. Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, set up a “war room,” holding rallies with former commissioners in both parties and issuing demands for more resources to keep the Trump administration on the defensive.
“We’ve kept up the pressure and held Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Frank Bisignano accountable for the chaos they’ve caused,” Warren said in an interview.
Many critics note that Bisignano, a Wall Street veteran who became commissioner in May, now wears a second hat as CEO of the Internal Revenue Service —another massive portfolio with a multibillion-dollar budget.
In a statement, Bisignano said his shared leadership of Social Security and the IRS “will drive a better outcome for the American public.” He saidhe envisions “a Social Security Administration that is easier to access, faster to respond, and better prepared to meet the challenges facing Americans.”
Bisignano also said he is working to improve morale and “have the right level of staffing to operate at peak efficiency and deliver best-in-class customer service to the American people.”
‘Work piles up’
By the time Bisignano was confirmed by the Senate, Social Security had been led by three acting commissioners in six months. He pledged to stabilize the upheaval.
But he confronted immediate challenges. Dudek had reassigned 2,000 employees in administrative, analytical and technical roles to jobs dealing with the public. Many accepted the switch under threat of firing if they refused. Some began working the phones. But the national toll-free number was still in crisis, so another 1,000 staffers were assigned to the phones in July. The employees were thrown in with minimal training, multiple employees said — and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions. The phone staff was told to keep calls under seven minutes in what became a push for volume over quality, employees said.
Although officials have publicly claimed that wait times have improved to single digits in some cases, those numbers do not account for the time it takes for customers to be called back, according to internal metrics obtained by the Post.
An audit published by the Social Security Inspector General’s Office on Dec. 22 confirmed that millions of callers requesting callbacks were counted as zero-minute waits by the agency. The review concluded that the metrics themselves were accurate, however, and showed that customer service overall has improved.
Jenn Jones, AARP’s vice president of financial security, said the improved phone service numbers were “encouraging” but that “more work needs to be done.”
“Wait times for callbacks remain over an hour, and more than a quarter of callers are not being served — by getting disconnected or never receiving a callback, for instance,” Jones said in a statement.
Public outcry and pushback from congressional Democrats derailed the planned closure of dozens of field offices that DOGEhad said were no longer needed.
Leland Dudek, former acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, in November.
Meanwhile, Dudek’s workforce cuts led field offices to shed 9% of their employees by spring due to early retirement and deferred resignation offers. Overtime was restricted and hiring was frozen,even as customer visits continued to climb.
Shortly after taking office, Bisignano’s field operations chief, Andy Sriubas, wrote in an email to the staff that field offices “are, and will always remain, our front line — our face in the community and the primary point of in-person contact.”
In the near term, though, the front line staff were overwhelmed. Attrition was geographically uneven, with some offices losing a quarter of their employees to early retirement offers just as foot traffic grew, according to a staffing analysis by the AFGE’s research partner, the Strategic Organizing Center. The groupcalculated that there were about 4,000 beneficiaries for every field office employee in August of this year.
In several states that ratio is worse, the group found. Wyoming’s field offices, for example, have just 18 employees — or one for every 7,429 beneficiaries.
The shortages have created temporary office closures in many rural areas, some for days or months at a time. The office in Havre, Mont., has been closed for months, with the nearest one almost two hours away in Butte.
Today a majority of Social Security staffers who accepted reassignmentshave not been fully or properly trained, according to several employees with direct knowledge of the initiative. Instruction is often truncated so the staff can respond to customers. Officials said they provide training based on the employee’s level of experience and review the reassigned employees’ work.
“They offered minimal training and basically threw them in to sink or swim,” one veteran employee said of their transferred colleagues.
Training on the phone system and complicated claims and benefit programs lasted four hours for some reassigned workers when it should have taken six months, another employee said. As a result, some customers still can’t get basic questions answered or are given inaccurate information,according to a half-dozen staffers who answer the phones or work closely with employees who do.
The increased workload, hiring freeze and departures have made it harder for the staff to complete their daily tasks, said Jordan Harwell, a Butte, Mont., field office employee who is president of AFGE Local 4012. The staff used to find time between calls to process pay stubs, take in new disability applications and schedule appointments, but now “that work piles up,” he said.
DOGE officials, citing fraud concerns, also required direct deposit changes to be done in person or online — but getting online now calls for new identity verification measures that do not come easily to many elderly or disabled customers. Immigrants approved for green cards to work in the U.S. are now required to get Social Security cards in person under a Trump anti-fraud policy, producing a flood of new field office visits.
In one Indiana field office, one employee said she drags herself to work every day, dreading what will come next. Although she was hired as a claims specialist, she and her colleagues are being told to prioritize answering the phones, which never stop ringing now that her office is taking calls for both Indiana and parts of Illinois due to reorganizations and reductions.
That means she is forced to let other work pile up: 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.
As the backlogs keep building, she is taking calls from 25 or so people every day, already knowing that she won’t be able to help five or six of them. These are elderly people, often poor or bedridden, who have no way to comply with the change requiring that direct deposit actions take place in person or online. Usually they’re calling because something has happened to their bank accounts and they need to alter their financial information. But they can’t access a computer, the employee said, and driving is out of the question.
She received a call this month from a 75-year-old man who suffered a massive stroke that left him unable to drive. He’d also had to switch banks and, as a result, hadn’t received Social Security checks for the last two or three months.
“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?’” she recalled. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”
She ended that call by telling the man to call his bank, hoping they might be able to help when her agency, hampered by administration policies, no longer could.
‘Everybody started laughing’
As the staff races to answer the phones, other tasks are backing up, including Medicare applications, disability claims that require initial vetting by field offices and other transactions that cannot be solved in one conversation. Any case falling in that category is redirected to a processing center, where the backlogs have been building all year.
These back-office operations, located across the country, often handle labor-intensive, highly complex cases that do not call for automated resolution. Among the tasks are issuing checks, including for back pay, to disabled people whose denial of benefits was reversed by an administrative law judge.
As Congress kept funding flat for Social Security over many years, the processing operations fell way behind, requiring headquarters employees to help handle the volume. But it was never as bad as it got this fall.
Many disability payments now takethree to six months to process when they used to take weeks, advocates and employees said.
At the start of September, one benefits authorizer in a processing center was called into an all-staff meeting with her colleagues, she said. There, management explained that the backlog at the time — six million cases — was unacceptable and that everyone would have to work overtime in an attempt to drive it down to two million by Christmas.
“When they told us that, everybody started laughing,” she said. “Because there is just absolutely no way to get it down in that short period of time.”
Still, she and her colleagues have been hustling, she said, processing cases as fast as they can, even as they can see their haste sometimes causes errors. No time to fix them, she has decided: Best to just keep moving.
The Social Security Administration has said it expects to pay $367 million less on payroll this fiscal year than the year before.
Meanwhile, another staffer, who answers phones at a national call center, said she has changed what she says to customers when she realizes their claim can’t be finished in one conversation and must be referred to a payment center.
“I’m supposed to reassure people it’s being worked on,” she said. “But now I avoid giving people a firm date they can expect it to be done by.”
Just before Thanksgiving, Bisignano said that starting next year, he hopes to slash field office visits by half. More than 31 millionpeople visited field offices in the last fiscal year — or tried to. Critics say the change will dismantle the fail-safe for those who cannot use computers, no matter how imperfect.
At the same time, in recent weeks, hundreds of employees who transferred to customer service operations have been recalled to the roles they were originally hired to fill. Others have been reassigned to a new “digital engagement” office.
Social Security has told Congress it plans to put more resources toward IT, with an expected increase of $591 million this fiscal year compared to fiscal 2025, according to the agency’s budget justification. The agency also expects to pay $367 million less on payroll than it did the year before.
Social Security also plans to roll out a new program that will allow customers to book phone appointments with field offices throughout the country, no matter where they live, according to two people familiar with the plans.
The goal is to reduce the number of field office visits, though one field office employee said the change will probably lead to a greater workload for staff keeping up with queries from customers outside their area.
“They’ve created problems and now they are trying to fix problems they created,” the worker said.
During Christmas week, the grind continued for most front line staff. After Trump signed an executive order last week closing most federal offices on Christmas Eve and Friday, Bisignano told his staff that field offices, teleservice centers, processing centers and more operations would remain open.
“In order to balance the needs of the public and our workforce, we will solicit interest from employees who would like to work on Wednesday and Friday,” he wrote.
