These sorts of don't hate the cogs hate the machine takes are worthless because they create an instant exploit where the machine can be as bad as it wants as long as it hides behind the cogs.
The exploit is already there whether or not you blame the cogs. Did blaming the cogs in this instance solve anything? Are disability benefits reformed in any way?
One letter "doesn't do anything", but a surprisingly small number of letters does. And the one Congressmen "can't do anything", but usually a small number of Congressmen can sway real change. HN often advocates writing angry letters to Congress because it understands this dynamic.
You will never be allowed to talk to the people who made the fax policy; they hired people like Karen specifically to make sure that doesn't happen. The person who can talk to management is... Karen.
These systems usually settle into a steady state where the interface with the public receives an acceptable amount of abuse. I guarantee that if a few people a month did what OP claims to have done, they'd figure out how to take docs over email pretty quickly.
And saying it doesn't is like saying "my one piece of litter won't make the park dirty". Just because you can't see the effect one instance has doesn't mean that it isn't meaningful when added all up.
Regardless it doesn’t matter in the end. Because you don’t litter, I don’t litter, vast swaths of the population don’t litter
Yet still, I routinely see otherwise nice parks around me trashed.
They usually offer "casework" services where a staffer will facilitate their constituent's interactions with federal agencies. This would probably help get the OP's specific issue solved AND make the legislators aware of the problem more generally. My impression is that agencies are often pretty responsive to these things: nobody wants to be on a senator's bad side.
That's almost worse because what it creates is a system that abuses everyone by default and only when someone cries to their politician does it shape up.
In this case, I’d guess “fax in your documents” was, long ago, meant to be an improvement over having to mail them in. It wasn’t chosen to be intentionally inconvenient. The system—or perhaps the laws it operates under—could certainly be modernized and your rep is well-positioned to nudge that along.
Likewise, I doubt the rudeness was a matter of policy. At a business, you’d ask to speak with the manager. Here, YOU via your rep are the manager and this is how you get your say.
If you goal is to not have a machine at all for some particular thing, then potentially no one wanting to work a job that does that thing might be an effective way of abating the machine from doing that.
Although inconveniencing bureaucrats handling disability benefits is probably a poor starting point no matter what your opinion is.
That's a bit of a stretch saying that someone who enforces the rules around disability for a job is doing bad things for money. These same rules filter out a lot of scammers that if not stoped would mean less money going to the right people.
It's also a low skill low pay job, probably worked by a large percentage of people who are close to the poverty line and just trying to make ends meet to support a family.