"A Lot Of Us Are Medicated"

     The New York Times has a long piece on service delivery problems at the Social Security Administration. Below are some excerpts. Note that I haven't included excerpts talking about the experiences of actual people although those are quite interesting.

... Frontline workers, whose morale had already been low for years, say they are asked on a daily basis to do more with less.

“In my 24 years, I have never seen it so bad to the point that a lot of us are medicated,” said one Social Security technical expert who works in a field office in the Midwest and takes an anti-anxiety medication daily. She asked not to be identified because she didn’t want to jeopardize her position and scheduled early retirement. “We openly talk about it,” she said. “We joke about it, because what else can you do?”

The agency’s recent effort to reduce wait times for callers to the national 800 number has worsened their plight. ...

 “There is a tipping point, where you can’t do more unless you are going to cut corners and not do the work properly,” said Heather Hughes, a local union president in Raleigh, N.C. “We don’t want to do that. We know these are people and these are people’s lives and livelihoods.” ...

“The process to get a digital S.S.N. into the phone is one of my No. 1 priorities,” Andy Sriubas, who was recently appointed to lead the agency’s vast field operations, said on an internal call with agency staffers also reviewed by The Times. Mr. Sriubas was most recently an executive at Outfront Media, a billboard company, but said he worked with Mr. Bisignano at JPMorgan during the financial crisis. ...

Preliminary findings from a study by a group of academic researchers to be released in October said that access to services — while never easy — had worsened since early 2025, especially for that population.

“Respondents overwhelmingly reported that compounding administrative breakdowns — loss of staff with specialized knowledge, rapidly changing policies, significantly worse processing delays, more frequent errors with emails and faxes routinely lost — have made even basic tasks impossible,” said Katie Savin, the lead author and assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento. The results are “devastating consequences to claimants who’ve experienced hunger, eviction, and loss of health care as a result.” ...

Commissioner Bisignano has said the average wait time on the national 800 number had already been reduced to single digits during his first 100 days, down from 30 minutes last year.

But the metric being cited is actually the “average speed of answer,” which doesn’t include the time customers wait for a callback, an option the vast majority of callers use and that took roughly an hour, on average, in August. That statistic is no longer on the website, but it reflected improvements in July and August, just as more field workers were asked to work the phones.

Call wait times have been removed from the agency website, but internal agency logs reviewed by The Times show many callers are still lingering.

On Sept. 3, for example, the only time callers had a single-digit wait time was at 8 a.m. Later, by 5 p.m., the average wait had stretched to an hour and 18 minutes, and the longest a caller waited that day was more than three hours, according to internal agency data. ...