Commissioner Bisignano has replied to the recent letter sent to him by Senator Warren. As you might guess Bisignano’s letter bristles with vicious partisanship. Sure, Warren’s letter was accusatory but public servants are not allowed to respond by escalating the situation. At least they weren’t until this Administration. Nothing like this would have been imaginable at any other time in the 90 year history of the Social Security Administration or any other agency.
15 comments:
"Sure, Warren’s letter was accusatory"
It was factual. If Frank can't take responsibility for turning an independent agency into a propaganda outlet, he should seek another line of work.
"Warren also criticized the SSA for what she called the distribution of an "inaccurate and overtly partisan email" regarding the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill," alleging that it included false information about eliminating federal taxes on Social Security benefits.
...
"The email that went out claiming 90 percent of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay taxes on their benefits was flat-out false. It was political propaganda dressed up as government communication. The message even praised the OBBA and mentioned Trump by name, which is a direct politicization of a government agency. That's unacceptable.""
At what point do we stop believing it’s all a bad dream and realize this administration is not playing games. Welcome to our new reality. The question is now what are we going to do about this out of control administration where truth doesn’t matter.
The letter seems factual to me. Customer service was terrible under the last administration. Employees rated SSA the worst place to work three out of the four years. Where was Senator Warren and the union then?
It would help if you posted the link to the actual letter.
https://www.ssa.gov/agency/commissioner/assets/materials/coss-letter-to-senator-warren.pdf
Link to Frank’s letter isn’t working
When I click on the link for Bisignano's letter, it says "access denied".
No good leader looks backwards to explain his path forward. It's a disappointing response from someone who claims to be a bold transformational leader. More disappointment. Yes, he inherited a mess, his job is to explain HOW he's going to fix it, not continue to finger point at the mess. Go get supplies and start cleaning it up. Missing from the letter is any discussion of a plan, and what little data is shared defies the current experience of every person attempting to access the agency. To answer the question -- no, there's no going back.
"access denied" and Bisagno's letter not viewable
If Bisignano's point is that service at Social Security has been abysmal for a long time and Warren should have been complaining about it for years, well yeah, that's true enough. But his further point that we now in the process of improving service, he is just lying.
Moving staff to answer the 800 number or routing calls to offices where the person that answers the phone can't actually do anything to resolve the problem is no answer at all.
Processing of claims at all levels has ground to a halt because of the lack of staff at the District Offices to process claims after hearings and lack of staff at the payment centers to process those payments once authorized. And not being able to contact anyone to resolve individual problems just makes it worse.
And in one particular area, the processing of Title II claims that are favorably decided after Court Remands, cases involving applications filed as far back as 2025, have been taking over a year to process. This is an absolute disgrace but no one in the Commissioner's Office has been willing to even acknowledge that particular problem.
This is something that the die hard MAGA faction either doesn’t understand or is actively proud of. The partisan-ship of the federal workforce has been unleashed in full. I think actual republicans are not happy with this but it’s too late at this point. As a career civil servant I couldn’t imagine a response like this 10,5, or even a year ago.
The Trump administration's Social Security commissioner on Monday hit back at criticisms of "mismanagement" leveled by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., against the agency's changes to its customer service practices.
Frank Bisignano, commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA), responded to Warren's criticisms in a letter exclusively reviewed by FOX Business ahead of its release. He defended the administration's changes and wrote that the SSA is "experiencing a customer service turnaround after four years of long wait times and record backlogs under the Biden administration."
"While I welcome your recent interest in customer service at SSA and the myriad of correspondences you sent my predecessor and me since President Trump's inauguration on January 20, 2025, I'm struck by how little you corresponded with the agency to express concern about deteriorating customer service during the previous administration," Bisignano wrote to Warren.
With a new administration in office and across-the-board improvement in the performance data due to strong leadership, world-class management, and a new approach, which leverages technology, you now declare there is a customer service crisis at SSA. You further question the long-standing methodology behind the performance data, which is prepared by SSA's dedicated career workforce and regularly reported to Congress across administrations," he wrote.
Bisignano's letter included SSA data showing that the average speed of answer on SSA's national 800 number has improved from 27.6 minutes in fiscal year 2024, to 20 minutes in the Oct. 5, 2024, to May 7, 2025, period. It improved further to 10.4 minutes in the May 8 to July 25 period, and was even quicker at about 4.6 minutes in the July 21-25 period, according to his letter.
Across all of our service indicators, the evidence is clear: better management is improving the customer experience on the phones, in the field offices, and online. Nothing in the data supports the irresponsible allegations of mismanagement and a customer service crisis at SSA," he wrote.
Charles, put the link to the actual letter in your post so people can read it.
Thanks for sharing
Did anyone expect Frankenstein to answer any other way?
From NPR..
Your call to a local Social Security office may be picked up by someone who can’t help
Phone calls to local Social Security offices are currently being rerouted to other field offices — often to staff who don’t have jurisdiction over the caller’s case, employees say.
Phone calls to local Social Security offices are currently being rerouted to other field offices — often to staff who don't have jurisdiction over the caller's case, employees say.
Disability advocates and experts warn this is making it harder for people to get help.
The latest change is part of the Social Security Administration's ongoing efforts to bring down wait times for phone services.
But Angela Digeronimo, a claims specialist in Woodbridge, N.J., and president of a union that represents employees at 25 offices in the state, told NPR this new system creates a "hit or miss" situation for people calling in to their local office.
Digeronimo said the intention of this change "may have been to not have callers waiting," which is a good thing. But in practice, she said, it delays getting an issue sorted if a caller is rerouted to a local office that can't actually fix their problem.
"If it's someone else's office, the jurisdiction is someone else's," she said. "You can't take action on it because your office does not have the ability to clear that claim. You have to refer it over to the servicing office, which is what the member of the public thought they were doing. So, it gets a little bit cumbersome."
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