Farhana Bhatt

The Social Security Administration (SSA) confirmed in early 2026 that its planned April launch of a modernized digital claims processing and account management system would not proceed on schedule. The system designed to replace the agency’s decades-old COBOL-based legacy infrastructure was intended to streamline benefit applications, reduce processing backlogs, and allow beneficiaries to manage their

The Trump 2027 Budget has not yet been formally released, as of early April 2026, marking an unusually late timeline for an administration budget submission. Under standard practice, the White House sends its annual budget request to Congress during the first week of February a deadline the administration missed this year. Policy analysts and appropriations

United States duplicative federal programmes sit at the centre of the country’s most persistent fiscal debate: the federal government operates hundreds of programmes across multiple agencies that share identical or nearly identical goals, serve the same populations and spend taxpayer money on the same activities often without any coordination, unified accountability or combined performance measurement.

The IRS overtime wage issue stems from a combination of payroll software errors, employer misclassification of overtime pay categories, and the broader confusion created by recent legislative discussions around overtime tax exemptions. When an employer reports incorrect wage figures on a W-2, the IRS receives inaccurate data that does not match what the employee actually