4 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: A Legal Researcher's Guide to Trump Anti-Trans Executive Orders
Casefile would refer to the individuals' records. While there is physical storage of paper documents *somewhere*, most records are stored in databases nowadays.
If the data were stored in a format where you could only look up one individuals' data at a time, eg, through typical user-interfaces that a regular worker might use to amend the records, it would be prohibitively expensive and basically impossible.
But that is a wildly inefficient way to store that type of data. Nowadays, data is stored in relational databases, ie, sets of tables with rows and columns that are "connected" to each other by an identifier, eg, SSN. So there might be a SS payment history table, a table with tax history, a table with contact information, a change log table, and so on. You can "join" these tables together into a custom table using SQL or another query language to pull the specific information you want.
Doing so would be *extremely* easy. The main hiccup would be that bureaucratic hurdles, identifying who has the authority to authorize that type of query (ie, that's protected/sensitive info, the workers at the local SSA office could not do that), and so on. But essentially anyone who has the permissions to query their database could pull those records in a few minutes.
Comment by JessicaPink703 at 21/01/2025 at 22:25 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
You explained this really well. I'd like to add two points:
(1) I don't imagine Social Security going along with this, they are an independent agency under the Social Security Act who's head can only be fired per cause. They are not subject to executive orders.
(2) Just because there is a gender change doesn't mean they quickly know why! Do they manually have to go through each casefile to see if it was a gender change for a trans person, an error, a typo, or a number of things? This would be logistically unfeasible.