The Ohio Capital Journal has out a long article on service at the Social Security Administration. It mostly quotes former Commissioner Martin O'Malley. Here are a couple of very brief quotes from the piece:
... O’Malley, the former Democratic governor of Maryland, claimed that under its current management, the Social Security Administration is no longer reporting some metrics to Congress and manipulating others to gaslight the public. ...
O’Malley described one way he thinks the new administration is manipulating some of the metrics it does report.
At the start of 2024, the 8 million who called the agency’s 1-800 number each month had to wait 42.5 minutes on average to get through. After a vendor and technology change, the agency got the average wait down to 12.8 minutes before beneficiaries could get an answer, O’Malley said.
The Social Security Administration on Monday reported that it had gotten those wait times down even further, to eight minutes. But O’Malley said it appears to have simply changed the definition of “answer.”
“‘Answer’ would appear to be anytime a person calls and hangs up after hearing a recording, or calls and gets run around the barn three times by a chatbot and has their call dumped,” he said. “That’s what they call ‘answered.’ That’s what they call ‘served.’ None of it bears any reality to what people are experiencing.”
A call Wednesday to the Social Security Administration’s Georgesville Road field office in Columbus appeared to produce such a result. A caller was asked by a chatbot why he was calling. When he said he wanted to check his eligibility, the chatbot hung up. ...
It's much the same as in most aspects of the Trump Administration -- lies, exaggerations, and carefully plucked statistics that misrepresent the true situation. The experts know the truth but the public doesn't know who to believe so they believe what they want to believe until reality smacks them in the face.
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