During grad school my medicaid was denied. After months and months of no insurance i finally got a court date, the final level of appeals. At the appeal i asked the judge where all of my sensitive documents went, he said "good luck finding that out". My experiences as a consumer of social services played a huge role in my interest in social services/data during graduate school.

In the U.S. we have normalized the unregulated use, storage, & sharing of data to the point that handing over a multitude of sensitive documents to a caseworker has become unquestionably normalized. Agencies retaining data for decades is normalized. It is near impossible for a consumer to track where their documents are and who has their eyes on them. This is because biocertification has become embedded into the social fabric of our society. Caseworkers are often caught in the middle of this. The push to automate and "AI"ify (see budget reconciliation bill) decision-making processes for "efficiency" make the work of caseworkers more difficult and more precarious, not the other way around.

Pouring $500billion into data infrastructure will make them more efficient yes, but not in the ways that workers OR consumers need. What will happen? We have seen it before. More cases will be erroneously flagged for case closure, more humans will have to fix these errors. More appeals will back up the system. In accordance w/ the budget reconciliation bill and the provisions to increase the frequency of verification's and add work requirements, more doctors will have to spend time going through documents, and more caseworkers will have to increase their already burdensome caseloads.

Many proponents of AI try to convince the masses that automated decision-making is both inevitable and immensely helpful. But in the realm of social-services-under-capitalism, they are first and foremost biocertification tools that operate under eugenic logics. They perpetuate the stratification between the undeserving and deserving poor simultaneous to extracting labor from the working surplus (including caseworkers who largely work low wage labor). They make life so very difficult for so many low income consumers and workers.