Wonkette

Last year, in a failed effort to pacify the anti-illegal-immigration people screaming about amnesty and American jobs, the Bush Administration issued a regulation to force employers to cross-check (at their own expense, naturally) their records with that of the Social Security Administration. How could they fuck that up? A federal judge helps us count the ways.

The first problem with the regulation is that the Social Security Administration’s own inspector general found that the SSA’s database of 435 million records against which employers would be cross-checking contained 17.8 million errors that might cause people to be erroneously fired (for the non-math types, that’s 4 percent of their records). A program designed to “save” American jobs for Americans that results in 17+ million people getting fired and having to fight the SSA over the errors is not a good program, the judge ruled last month. Plus, the judge found that the Administration (unsurprisingly) disregarded its own rules in making the rules in its hurry to appease the anti-immigration forces.

Rather than continue the court battle (that they’d probably lose) or spend a lot of money fixing the problems at the SSA, the Administration plans to do a rush-job complying with the pieces of the regulation-issuing regulations it skipped before and then issue the same stupid regulation again next spring after the primaries are over. Yay.

Social Security database full of errors [UPI]
Revised Rule for Employers That Hire Immigrants [NY Times]