[mpnex]

Good luck with Social Security as well. As far as I can tell, their physical offices closed in March 2020 and haven't re-opened. My local office number will reliably drop my call after 10m 30s on hold (line just goes silent) and I have no idea how long hold times actually are on the nationwide number, but I've gotten to the 90 minute mark several times.

It appears that you can do some select things online, but if not? Alternative is to send your documents (which usually involve things like passport, and sometimes state ID aka driver's license) and hope they'll return it in 10-14 days... Just putting both of those things in the same envelope seems like a huge risk to me.

I've been able to submit civil court proceedings at my local district court (in CA), have them get processed and resolved. Sure, there was a break or two in there for temporary closures, and things got delayed. (It closed down for a while back in Dec 2020 but hearings were processed when it reopened in the spring, for example.) Point is, it still /happened/, even with some delay. So why can't the SSA or State Department process anything at all? The amount of institutional failure in the federal government offices right now is pretty alarming, and I haven't seen a lot of attention to this fact.