The Social Security Administration does not provide information regarding caller wait times. Critics complain that it misleads the public.
Social Security Trust Fund is expected to dry out within 10 years
The main trust funds used to pay Social Security benefits are projected to run out by 2033 if lawmakers do not make changes to the system.
Straight Arrow News
Congressional members and supporters say they provide the public with misleading information about how long it will take for the Social Security Agency to resolve their issues.
Over the past few weeks, agents have stopped 34 publicly available real-time performance metrics, including the amount of time they have to wait to contact a living person over the phone, and the amount of time before the application for new advanced or social security benefits is approved. The metric has been in use for years and shows how long it takes to reach a living person at a particular location, or via 1-800 numbers nationwide, and as an accountability measure for agents.
Instead, the webpage now emphasizes how quickly problems can be resolved online, and states that the “average response speed” that excludes callback latency is 19.2 minutes.
USA Today reporters called Social Security 1-800 lines multiple times over several days, finding that wait times consistently lasted an hour. They didn’t reach the living before the lines were cut without warning multiple times.
Social Security Commissioner Frank Vignano told members of Congress on June 25 that three of the four who call numbers between 1 and 800 were not waiting on the phone using the callback feature. He said he said he removed the wait time metric from the website.
“If you show that you had an hour and a half wait, people will be disappointed and won’t call,” he said.
When California Rep. Judy Chu asked the indicators to be revived so that Congressional members and the public could have an accurate barometer of the agency’s performance, Visignano avoided answering questions until when Chu asked.
“Unless you have these metrics, how can you know how the Social Security Administration is doing with regard to answering calls or processing benefits applications? They need to be compared over time.
How did you get here?
When President Donald Trump took office in January, Social Security staffing was already at its lowest level in 10 years. Meanwhile, as the baby boomer generation retired, the number of new applicants has skyrocketed.
That means that when the Trump administration began cutting staff amid efforts to reduce government, the wait time before reaching employees was already high.
In February, the agency announced plans to cut its agency’s 57,000 employees (more than 10% of its staff) in response to President Trump’s executive order. At least 3,000 employees have already accepted the acquisition agreement.
The average waiting time to creep up to 90 minutes by early May and contact the living. A May 22 screenshot of Live Metrics on Social Security websites saved by the Internet Archive shows call wait times are 1 hour 46 minutes and wait times are 1 hour 44 minutes. We also showed how many people are pending and how many people are currently waiting for a callback.
In addition to the 1-800 wait time information, the Social Security Metrics page also included processing times for retirement, survivors and Medicare benefits. For disability benefit applicants, it may take more than a year to obtain a decision, but there was information on the action time, review time, and adjudication time.
The average response speed was presented as 20.3 minutes based on average monthly data from last year. That speed is similar to data previously published by the agency. Then, on June 6, a comprehensive dashboard showing live metrics was removed from the Social Security Administration website, showing “maintenance” until June 16th.
When the dashboard page returns on June 16th, it no longer contains live call latency data or information about the number of people waiting for a hold or callback, and instead simply lists the average response speeds excluding callback latency of 19.2 minutes last year.
“We update our performance metrics to reflect the real-life experiences of the people we serve and highlight the fastest way our customers can get their services,” Social Security spokesman Stephen McGraw said in a statement to USA Today. “It’s important to measure what’s most important to improve customer service while providing all Americans with the information they need to select the best service channel for them while also measuring what’s most important to improve customer service.”
What Warren’s team found
Concerned that information currently available on the website did not match what her staff had heard from members, staff members of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren began conducting their own tests of 1-800 numbers by calling timely from June 12th to June 20th.
Warren leads the Senate Democrats’ Social Security War Room, seeking to pay attention to the changes the Trump administration is making to social security.
In a letter Warren sent to Vignano late on June 25th, she called the results of her office investigation “deeply troublesome.” Compared to the number available online, the average wait time was about 1 hour and 45 minutes, often over 3 hours.
Office Survey data showed that over 50% of people were not answered on 50 calls. The majority ended when the caller was put on hold and then the call was dropped.
Of the calls answered, 32% had a waiting period of more than two hours. The average waiting time was 102 minutes.
“These delays are unacceptable, and have been exacerbated by your misleading claim that the service has actually improved under your watch,” she wrote in her letter, first sharing with USA Today. “Service disruptions and barriers make it difficult for beneficiaries to receive Social Security benefits, a payment that is the main source of income for more than half of the seniors in America.”
In another statement to USA Today, Warren accused Bisignano of lying about improving agency wait times.
“Donald Trump and Dozi (the government’s Bureau of Efficiency) have taken a chainsaw to Social Security and waited for hours just to get help with the Americans. That’s when their calls are answered at all. Instead of owning that mistake, Commissioner Vignano and his team are trying to hide it,” she said.
“From apple to orange”
Taking data offline makes it difficult for Congress and Americans to know what agents are doing, said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group that wants to expand the agency.
The information currently on the website is a comparison of “orange to orange apples” with previously available, she said. In addition to call waiting times, there is little detail before new applications are processed and failure claims are appealed, and there is little about how wait times will change geographically.
She said there was “zero” evidence that the waiting time suddenly decreased. “It’s going to ignore logic because it makes it easier, given how they hollowed out every part of the institution.”
Altman said the agency’s lack of transparency about waiting times raises questions about other information they have made public.
And while the website says the average hold is 19.2 minutes, if they’ve been making calls for much longer, it’s hard for Americans to tell you how widespread the problem is, Altman said.
“The American people are frustrated, but I don’t know if that’s just happening to them,” she said.
Jemberdick, a supervising lawyer for Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, said he has not seen a reduction in call times.
“Social security lawyers and paralegals from our office call SSAs dozens of times a day. They uniformly discover that they can’t queue due to system outages, phone disconnection, or AI chatbot issues,” she told USA Today.
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