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As the nation reeled from covid-19, the federal government sent many Americans a financial lifeline.

This story is part of the Overpayment Outrage series onCox Media GroupTV stations. It can be republished for free. Share Your Story

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But some recipients say the covid relief payments have triggered financial distress by jeopardizing their Social Security benefits.

The government has demanded they repay much larger amounts thousands of dollars in benefits for the poor and disabled distributed by the Social Security Administration.

The government gave this money to them with one hand. They should not be trying to take it back with the other, said Jen Burdick, an attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia who has helped many people contest repayment demands.

Jo Vaughn, a disabled 63-year-old in New Mexico, received $3,200 in federal covid relief. Then came a letter from the Social Security Administration dated Aug. 25, 2023, saying she owed the government $14,026.

They are sending me to a very early grave, Vaughn said.

The covid clawbacks show the trauma the Social Security Administration can cause when it claims to have overpaid beneficiaries, many of them highly vulnerable, then calls on them to pay the money back.

And the collection efforts illustrate the limitations and dysfunction that have come to define the agency.

Social Security Administration spokesperson Nicole Tiggemann declined to comment for this article or to arrange an interview with the agencys acting commissioner, Kilolo Kijakazi.

(WHIO-TV, Dayton)

(WSOC-TV, Charlotte)

In the wake of a recent investigation by KFF Health News and Cox Media Group, House and Senate members have called for action on problems at the Social Security Administration. The agency has announced that it is undertaking a review of its own, and a House panel is scheduled to hold a hearing on Oct. 18.

Vaughn and other recipients didnt ask for the covid money. The checks, known as economic impact or stimulus payments, landed automatically in their mailboxes or bank accounts in three installments in 2020 and 2021. The payments, which were based on the recipients income, totaled as much as $3,200 per person.

The payments pushed some beneficiaries bank balances above the $2,000 asset limit for individuals on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a program for people with little or no income or assets who are blind, disabled, or 65 or over. The limit, which hasnt been adjusted for inflation in decades, can discourage people from working or saving more than a perilously small amount of money.

In some cases, when the Social Security Administration belatedly noticed the higher bank balances, it concluded the beneficiaries no longer qualified for SSI, according to people affected. Then the agency set out to recapture years of SSI benefits it alleged they shouldnt have received.

Even as recipients appealed the actions, the agency stopped sending monthly benefit checks.

The ripple effects can disrupt health care, too. In most states, receiving SSI makes someone eligible for Medicaid, so halting SSI benefits can jeopardize coverage under the public health insurance program, said Darcy Milburn of The Arc, an organization that advocates for people with disabilities.

Vaughn, who suffered a disabling injury while working as a cook at a truck stop, said she depends on the $557 she was receiving from SSI each month. It hasnt come since August, she said.

Her only remaining income, she said, is $377 in monthly Social Security retirement payments.

Im afraid of being homeless, she said by phone. I dont want to end up on the street.

Or even worse, she said in an email: If I dont start receiving my money back, well lets just say I have my will ready. Email Sign-Up

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Actions Defy Agencys Own Policy

The covid stimulus payments arent supposed to trigger Social Security clawbacks.

Early in the pandemic, the Social Security Administration said that, when assessing peoples eligibility for SSI, it would exclude the payments for 12 months. Later, it said it would exclude them indefinitely.

But what the agency says and what it does indeed, what it is capable of doing are often very different, people who study the agency said.

Its not clear SSA knows where money in beneficiaries accounts is coming from, said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

As far as we can tell, SSA simply doesnt have the tools to implement a permanent exclusion from the resource limit, Romig said.

The number of people who have received Social Security clawback notices due to covid relief payments is unclear.

Whats more, beneficiaries might not realize stimulus payments could be at the root of alleged overpayments. As a result, they may be ill-equipped to challenge any clawbacks.

(WFXT, Boston)

(WFTV, Orlando)

A lot of people have been caught up in inaccurate or improper overpayment notices because of stimulus money, said Burdick, the legal aid attorney in Philadelphia. She estimated that her office alone had seen about a hundred such cases.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, asked the Social Security Administration in September 2021 how many people had their SSI payments reduced or cut off on account of the stimulus payments. In its written response, the agency didnt say.

At the time, Wyden said the agencys decision to indefinitely exclude stimulus payments from the asset limit may have come too late for many struggling families.

The Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, an umbrella group for advocacy organizations, flagged the problem as early as May 2021. In a letter to the Finance Committee, the group said it was concerned that some people would have their benefits reduced in order to recover overpayments that never should have been assessed.

Vaughn said she saved her covid stimulus funds to leave herself some money to fall back on.

When the Social Security Administration told her she had been over the asset limit for more than two years, the agency didnt mention the stimulus payments. But Vaughn reviewed her bank records and concluded the covid payments were the cause.

Lost in the System Julia Greune with her father, Dave Greune.(Cox Media Group)

Dave Greune of North Carolina said that, in the case of his disabled 43-year-old daughter, Julia, the cause of an overpayment notice was clear.

The reason her assets exceeded the limit, Greune said, was that $3,200 in stimulus payments had been deposited directly into her bank account by the same government now demanding she repay almost twice that amount.

How does he know?

The only funds that flowed into Julias account were her SSI payments and the covid stimulus payments, Greune said.

In April 2023, two years after Julias last stimulus payment, the agency notified Greune that it had been overpaying her since September 2020.

First it said she owed $7,374.72. Later, it revised that to $6,253.38.

Julia is blind with cerebral palsy and a mental disability, Greune said, leaving her totally disabled. The family was saving the stimulus money to buy her a new wheelchair, he said.

In correspondence, the agency pointed to checking account balances as the basis for its finding that Julia exceeded the $2,000 asset limit. It noted that the agency doesnt count the value of a home, one vehicle, or a burial fund of up to $1,500. But it didnt alert Greune that, according to its own policy, covid stimulus payments shouldnt count toward the limit. He figured that out himself.

Greune said he immediately filed an appeal online.

In July, at the direction of an agency representative, he drove 45 minutes to a Social Security office in Raleigh and delivered a stack of bank statements and an appeal for.

Greune, 64 and retired from a career in real estate, logged many unsuccessful efforts to follow up by phone. Left on hold for 15 minutes until the call dropped. Left on hold for 46 minutes until the call dropped.

Ultimately, he said, he reached a person who told him she saw no record of the agency having received the appeal he filed online or the documents he delivered by hand.

In the meantime, Social Security stopped sending Julias monthly benefits. The last payment, of $609.34, arrived six months ago, he said.

Late last month, the county government sent Julia a notice that, because the Social Security Administration was stopping her SSI checks, the county was reviewing her eligibility for Medicaid.

And if we dont have Medicaid thats going to be a big problem, Greune said. Now Im really pissed off. Dave Greune says the sole reason his daughter Julias assets exceeded the Social Security Administrations limit to receive SSI was that she received $3,200 in stimulus payments from the same government now demanding almost twice that amount be paid back.(Cox Media Group)

Angst, Lots of It

In early 2021, about a year after the first economic impact payments, known as EIPs, were distributed, the Social Security Administration issued what it called an Emergency Message.

It instructed staff on how to handle the payments and contained information that could have been useful to SSI beneficiaries.

Develop and exclude the EIP from resources in other words, assets only when an individual alleges receiving and retaining an amount that may affect eligibility, it said.

It also told staff to take beneficiaries at their word. Accept the individuals allegation, it said.

Martin Helmer of Denver, 77, said that, when the Social Security Administration made a mistake involving his sons benefits, the burden fell on him to speak up.

He said he felt he was treated as guilty until proven innocent.

It was angst, lots of it, Helmer said, especially when I saw how hard-ass they were being about everything.

Helmer manages the benefits for his 40-year-old son, Quinn, who has a mental illness. In July, the Social Security Administration sent a letter alleging in part that, since May 2021, Quinn had received more than $17,000 for which he was ineligible.

Going forward, the agency said, it would reduce his benefits.

Helmer concluded that the main issue was the covid stimulus payments; other than Social Security benefits, that was the only money that flowed into Quinns account, he said.

Helmer, a retired auditor and IRS agent, spent several days studying an agency manual. He contested the agencys action and won.

He worries how other people would fare and how his son would manage without him.

I think disabled people and their caretakers have maybe less energy than the average person to deal with something like this, he said, when theyre already dealing with a lot.

Madison Carter of WSOC-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

Do you have an experience with Social Security overpayments youd like to share? Click here to contact our reporting team. David Hilzenrath: @DavidHilzenrath

Jodie Fleischer, Cox Media Group: @jodieTVnews Related Topics Aging Health Care Costs Biden Administration Colorado Disabilities Investigation New Mexico North Carolina Trump Administration U.S. Congress Contact Us Submit a Story Tip

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Sports

Passan: Why a Dodgers-Brewers NLCS could define MLB’s labor battle

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October 13, 2025

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Passan: Why a Dodgers-Brewers NLCS could define MLB's labor battle

The winner of the National League Championship Series could determine if Major League Baseball is played in 2027.

This might sound far-fetched. It is not. What looks like a best-of-seven baseball series, which starts Monday as the Milwaukee Brewers host the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1, will play out as a proxy of the coming labor war between MLB and the MLB Players Association.

Owners across the game want a salary cap — and if the Dodgers, with their record $500 million-plus payroll, win back-to-back World Series, it would only embolden the league’s push to regulate salaries. The Brewers, consistently a bottom-third payroll team, emerging triumphant would serve as the latest evidence that winners can germinate even in the game’s smallest markets and that the failures of other low-revenue teams have less to do with spending than execution.

The truth, of course, exists somewhere in between. But in between is not where the two parties stake out their negotiating positions in what many expect to be a brutal fight to determine the future of the game’s economics. And that is why whoever comes out victorious likely will be used as a cudgel when formal negotiations begin next spring for a collective bargaining agreement that expires Dec. 1, 2026.

If it’s the Dodgers, MLB owners — who already were vocal publicly and even more so privately about Los Angeles spending as much as the bottom six teams in payroll combined this year — will likely cry foul even louder. Already, MLB is expected to lock out players upon the agreement’s expiration. Back-to-back championships by the Dodgers could embolden MLB and add to a chorus of fans who see a cap as a panacea for the plague of big-money teams monopolizing championships over the past decade.

Such a scenario would not scare the union off its half-century-old anti-cap stance. The MLBPA has no intention of negotiating if a cap remains on the table, and considering MLB was on the cusp of losing games in 2022 because of a negotiation that didn’t include a cap, players already have spoken among themselves about how to weather missing time in 2027. Certainly, the Brewers winning wouldn’t ensure avoiding that, but if in any argument about the necessity of a cap, the union can counter that the juggernaut Dodgers lost to a team of self-proclaimed Average Joes with a payroll a quarter of the size, it reinforces the point that team-building acumen can exist regardless of financial might.

The Brewers have joined the Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Guardians as vanguards of low-revenue success in this decade. Over the past eight years, Milwaukee has won five NL Central titles and made the playoffs seven times. At 97-65 this year, the Brewers owned the best record in baseball. And they did so with a unique blend of players.

Of the 26 players on Milwaukee’s NLCS roster, 15 came via trade, according to ESPN Research, including a majority of its best players (slugger Christian Yelich, catcher William Contreras, ace Freddy Peralta and Trevor Megill, the closer for most of the season). The Brewers drafted four (Brice Turang, Jacob Misiorowski, Sal Frelick and Aaron Ashby, all major contributors), signed three as minor league free agents, brought in two via international amateur free agency (their best player, Jackson Chourio, and closer Abner Uribe) and snagged one in the minor league portion of the offseason Rule 5 draft.

That leaves one major league free agent. One. And it was left-hander Jose Quintana, who signed a one-year, $4 million deal in March.

Think about that: The MLBPA, which has fought for free agency since its inception, would be heralding a team that does not spend on free agents. Strange bedfellows, yes, but it strengthens the union’s position: If the current system is beyond repair because of money, how did a team that doesn’t spend win a championship?

The Dodgers, on the other hand, are not nearly as free-agent-heavy as might be assumed. They’ve acquired the most players via trade, too, though it’s only nine, and several of them — from Mookie Betts to Tyler Glasnow to Tommy Edman to Alex Vesia — play a significant role on the team. Los Angeles signed five major league free agents (including Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and Blake Snell), plus two professional international free agents (Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Hyeseong Kim), two amateur international free agents (Roki Sasaki and Andy Pages) and two minor league free agents (Max Muncy and Justin Dean). They drafted five of their players — one more than the Brewers, whose development system is regarded as one of baseball’s best — and rounded out their roster with Jack Dreyer, an undrafted free agent.

Dreyer highlights what the Dodgers and Brewers do exceptionally well: extract talent from players through systems that value a combination of scouting, analytics and superior coaching. It doesn’t matter whether you spend half a billion dollars or the $115 million or so currently on the Brewers’ books. If you can become an organization that gets the best out of players, winning will follow.

Perhaps if they weren’t so terminally parked at opposite ends of the continuum, the league and union could agree that staking an argument around one playoff series is foolhardy. Both sides should understand that, in the grand scheme, a seven-game series says very little, particularly when it comes to the complicated economic system of 30 billion-dollar corporations competing in the same space.

But this battle is as much about narrative as it is reality, and if MLB is going to push for a salary cap, it needs as much evidence as possible, and the Dodgers becoming the first team in a quarter-century to win back-to-back World Series would provide another nugget on top of the reams the league already cites. The last team to do that was the New York Yankees — and the competitive-balance tax, the proto-cap that currently penalizes high-spending teams, came into existence specifically to check what other owners believed the Yankees’ runaway spending.

The Dodgers are the new Yankees, more moneyed and willing to spend than anyone. They’ve won the NL West 12 of the past 13 years and captured championships in 2020 and 2024. And despite their seeming inevitability, baseball is not suffering in most areas important to the league. Television ratings are up. Attendance has increased. The implementation of the pitch clock before the 2024 season modernized the game and is now almost universally beloved. The addition of an automated ball-strike challenge system next year will only add to the game’s appeal.

This NLCS is baseball at its best. A well-oiled machine of superstars, peaking at the right time, looking to become baseball’s first back-to-back champions since 2000, against a team that plays a delightful brand of baseball, is wildly likable and always seems to succeed, too. The Brewers haven’t won a championship yet — not just in this recent run of excellence but in their 57-year history — and derailing the Dodgers en route to doing so would make the tale of triumph that much greater.

And, yes, despite the higher win total, the Brewers enter this series as the underdog, and it’s a fair designation. Even if they swept the Dodgers in the six games they played in July. Even if their bullpen is filled with fireballing nastiness. Even if they have whacked as many home runs this postseason as Los Angeles, despite the Dodgers hitting 78 more during the regular season.

There will be a lot of great baseball played in Milwaukee and Los Angeles over the next week-plus, fans’ cups running over with the sorts of matchups that make October the most special month of the year. Ohtani, Betts and Freeman trying to catch up to Misiorowski’s fastball and read his slider. Chourio, Contreras and Turang trying to solve Snell, Yamamoto, Glasnow and Ohtani. The Brewers’ terrifying bullpen, with five relievers throwing 97 mph-plus, against the team that hit high-octane fastballs better than anyone this year. The Dodgers trying to figure out if they can rely on any reliever other than Sasaki, and the Brewers, who were the fifth-toughest team to strike out this season, trying to get to Los Angeles’ bullpen with a barrage of balls in play.

While the baseball itself will be indisputable, this NLCS is bigger than the game. Its tentacles will reach into the future, with an unwitting but undeniable place in something far more consequential. It’s just one series, yes. But it’s so much more.

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Technology

Salesforce adds voice calling to Agentforce AI customer service software

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35 mins ago

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October 13, 2025

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Salesforce adds voice calling to Agentforce AI customer service software

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 17, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Salesforce is adding voice to its Agentforce software, letting clients go beyond text when using artificial intelligence agents to respond to customer questions.

With Agentforce Voice, companies can customize the tone and speed of voices and adjust the pronunciation of specific terms, Salesforce said Monday, ahead of its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. The feature also allows people to interrupt the AI agent during phone calls.

Voice is becoming a bigger part of the generative AI boom, which started with text-based prompts in late 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT. In the past year, OpenAI and Anthropic have enabled their chatbots to conduct spoken conversations without sounding overly robotic. Now that capability is taking hold inside business software.

Agentforce Voice will integrate with corporate phone systems from Amazon, Five9, Genesys, Nice and Ericsson’s Vonage.

Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor is also trying his hand in the market. Taylor helped start Sierra in 2023, and last year the startup announced that its AI agents “can now pick up the phone.” Sierra has been valued at $10 billion, and has a client list that includes ADT, SiriusXM and SoFi.

Salesforce has been under pressure this year in part due to investor concern that software companies could lose business as AI moves deeper into coding. The stock is down about 28% so far in 2025, while the Nasdaq has gained around 15% over that stretch.

Anthropic told reporters in September that its Claude Sonnet 4.5 model built a chat app similar to Salesforce’s Slack in 30 hours. In Salesforce’s latest earnings report, the company warned that new AI products “may disrupt workforce needs and negatively impact demand for our offerings.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has downplayed the risk to this company.

“When we get into this kind of zero-sum game, well, all this is going to get wiped out, or all this is going to change, then, you know, you’re not dealing with somebody who actually runs a company, because that’s not the way business works,” Benioff told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan last month. “Business is incremental, it’s evolutionary, it’s growing, it’s evolving, and we don’t see that kind of change.”

Salesforce launched Agentforce last year as a service that could respond to customer requests over text chats with help from generative AI models. Agentforce now has more than 12,000 implementations, according to a statement. But there’s some skepticism about its popularity.

“Investor enthusiasm around Agentforce has moderated as adoption has lagged expectations,” RBC Capital Markets analysts, who recommend holding the stock, wrote in a note to clients last week.

In November, Salesforce will provide early access to Agent Script software, which organizations can use to customize what agents say and do.

WATCH: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on what the market is getting wrong about AI

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on what the market is getting wrong about AI

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UK

Government accused of ‘cover-up’ over collapse of China spy trial

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35 mins ago

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October 13, 2025

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Government accused of 'cover-up' over collapse of China spy trial

Kemi Badenoch has accused the government of a “cover-up” over the collapse of a China spy trial.

The Tory leader said there were a “lot of questions to answer” as to why the trial involving two men did not proceed.

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It is expected that ministers will have to answer questions about the case today, as parliament returns from recess.

In particular, there are questions around the role played by Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s national security adviser, in the trial not going ahead.

Ministers have repeatedly said Mr Powell played no role in the decisions that led to the collapse of the trial – but Ms Badenoch said she was “worried that there is a cover up taking place”.

Speaking to broadcasters in Grantham today, Ms Badenoch said: “We will be making sure that we ask questions in parliament about exactly who knew what, where and when, but Jonathan Powell certainly has questions to answer.”

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She refuted suggestions from ministers that Mr Powell had had no involvement in the collapse of the trial, saying: “We are seeing information that contradicts that.

“That is why it is very important that the government come clean about who knew what, where, when, and why this has happened.”

Former parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash, 30, of Whitechapel, east London, and teacher Christopher Berry, 33, of Witney, Oxfordshire, were charged with passing politically sensitive information to a Chinese intelligence agent between December 2021 and February 2023. They have both denied the allegations.

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Over the past week, Sir Keir Starmer, his ministers and Mr Powell have faced accusations they were involved in the trial being dropped.

Last week Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions and the head of the Crown Prosecution Service, took the unusual step of sending MPs a letter to claim that the government repeatedly refused to provide evidence that China represented a national security threat at the time of the allegations.

Mr Parkinson said the CPS had tried “over many months” to get the evidence it needed to carry out the prosecution, but it had not been forthcoming from the government.

Downing Street also said today it was “entirely false” to suggest the government influenced the collapse of the case because of concerns Beijing could withdraw investment in the UK.

Asked about reports in the Sunday Times which suggested a decision was taken high up in government to abandon the case, the prime minister’s official spokesman told reporters: “It is entirely false. The CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) decision to drop the case was entirely a matter for the CPS.

“There was no role for any member of this government, no minister, or special adviser, to take any decision in relation to this case. That is entirely for the CPS.”

The government had argued that China needed to have been branded an “enemy” during the period it was accused of spying for the prosecution to go ahead – effectively blaming the previous Conservative government.

The Conservatives claim the government’s rationale is an excuse because it had said many times Beijing was a national security threat while it was in government.

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The prime minister has said he wanted to be “absolutely clear no ministers were involved” in any decisions relating to the case, but notably sidestepped answering whether Mr Powell was involved.

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, yesterday gave the government’s most definitive answer yet about whether Mr Powell was part of the reason the case was dropped weeks before they were set to go on trial.

Asked on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips if she could assure him that the national security adviser played no role in the decision, Ms Phillipson said: “Yes, I can give that assurance.

“We’re very disappointed that the CPS were not able to take forward the prosecution.”

The Liberal Democrats have called on the government to hold an inquiry into the collapse of the case.

Calum Miller, the party’s foreign affairs spokesman, said the case had “exposed appalling gaps in our government’s ability and willingness to challenge China’s espionage efforts”.

“We cannot let the government sweep this case under the rug in its efforts to cosy up to President Xi. An inquiry – preceded by rigorous scrutiny through parliament – would provide the answers the public deserves.”

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