Can We Trust Social Security’s Numbers?

From USA Today:

… Over the last several weeks, the agency has stopped making public 34 real-time performance metrics about things like how long they will have to wait to reach a live person on the phone, and how long applications for new senior benefits or social security benefits take to be approved. The metrics have been used for years to show how time-consuming it can be to reach a live person at certain locations or through the national 1-800 number, and as an accountability measure for the agency.

Instead the webpage now emphasizes how quickly problems can be resolved online, and says the "average speed of answer," which excludes callback wait time, is 19.2 minutes.

USA TODAY reporters called Social Security's 1-800 line multiple times over several days and found the wait times to be consistently over an hour. Multiple times they did not reach a live person before the line disconnected with no warning. …

Concerned that the information now available on the website didn't match what her staff was hearing from constituents, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's staff began conducting its own test of the 1-800 number, making hourly phone calls from June 12 through June 20. 

In a letter Warren sent to Bisignano late on June 25, she called the results of her office survey "deeply troubling." Compared to the number available online, wait times averaged nearly an hour and 45 minutes and often exceeded three hours.

Data from the office survey showed that in 50 calls, more than 50% were never answered by a human. The majority ended when the caller was placed on hold and then the call dropped.

Of calls that were answered, 32% had wait times exceeding two hours. The average wait time was 102 minutes. …

  Jen Burdick, supervising attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, said they haven't seen a reduction in call times.

"Social Security attorneys and paralegals from our office call SSA dozens of times every day. We are uniformly finding that we can't get placed into the queue, either because of system outages, phone disconnects, or AI chatbot issues.  When we do get put into the queue, wait times seem to be up from last year ‒ sometimes more than an hour.  …

     I’m fully expecting no further Congressional hearings on Social Security in this Congress but Commissioner Bisignano could still be subpoenaed to testify about this issue before a Social Security Subcommittee controlled by Democrats in 2027 even if he’s no longer Commissioner. 

Widespread Resurrections Reported But They’re Now Economic Zombies Instead

       From the New York Times:

The Trump administration has backed away from a maneuver in which it sought to classify thousands of living immigrants as dead in a critical Social Security database, part of a strategy to pressure them to self-deport.

In April, the Social Security Administration placed roughly 6,300 migrants whose legal status had been revoked on its “death master file,” a vital data set that gets distributed to banks, lenders and other financial institutions. …

[N]ow the Social Security Administration has reversed course, taking them off the list in a process known internally as being “resurrected,” according to S.S.A. and White House officials.

Instead, the Social Security numbers of the 6,300 migrants are being flagged as “unverified” in a system typically used by financial institutions to check the numbers. The website generates that response when a person’s Social Security number, name or date of birth do not match the agency’s records. That classification is typically used when a Social Security number may be fraudulent, erroneous or mistakenly associated with someone. …

The new approach was spearheaded by Frank Bisignano, the new commissioner of the agency who took over in May, according to an administration official. It comes after the initial decision to put migrants on the death list generated enormous controversy within the agency. At one meeting shortly after the decision was made, senior level S.S.A. officials had voiced widespread “policy, legal and data integrity” concerns about the approach, according to an email summarizing the meeting viewed by The New York Times. …

From The Commissioner's Written Testimony

     From Commissioner Bisignano's written testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee:

 

Some Questions For The Commissioner

     Frank Bisignano's hearing before two subcommittees of the House Ways and Means Committee is Wednesday at 2:00. Here are some questions I'd like to hear answered:

• What has surprised you about Social Security since becoming Commissioner?
• Your agency has recently stopped posting processing time information. Why? 
• There are reports that you ordered Payment Center employees to stop all regular work in order to complete the WEP/GPO workload by the end of this month -- which happens to nearly coincide with the date of this hearing. Is that accurate? If so, why should the people with WEP/GPO cases take precedence over those of people who have been waiting years to receive any money from Social Security? 
• Is it true that Social Security is making widespread use of overtime to do the work of employees who have been induced to leave the agency since Inauguration Day? Why pay time and a half for work when it could have been done for regular pay by those employees who have since departed?
• There has been talk of a goal to get Social Security down to 50,000 employees. Is that a current goal?
• When would you anticipate resuming hiring new employees on a regular basis to replace departing employees?
• Could you provide us with data comparing employee productivity for in office work versus remote work? 
• How much of your time is spent working in Woodlawn or Washington as opposed to working from home or from the special office set up for you in New York?
• Does Palantir now have access to any Social Security data? If so, have they been allowed to copy the data to other government computers or their own computers? 
• Could you provide us with Full Time Equivalent (FTE) numbers for the Social Security Administration for each month since the beginning of calendar year 2024? 
• What is Lee Dudek's employment status at the moment? 
• Social Security will turn 90 years old in August. Is that an occasion to celebrate? 

Ways And Means Committee Schedules Hearing With Commissioner

      The House Ways and Means Committee has scheduled a hearing with Commissioner Frank Bisignano for 2:00 on June 25th. This will not be a full Committee hearing. It’s a joint hearing between the Social Security and Work and Welfare Subcommittees. The Work and Welfare Subcommittee has jurisdiction over SSI.

Social Security To Turn 90 On August 14

     In less than two months Social Security will celebrate its 90th birthday. When it celebrated its 80th birthday in 2015 there was a ceremony at Social Security headquarters. I wonder what will be done this year? Anything? Does Commissioner Bisignano regard the 90th birthday as an event to be celebrated?

Yawn

      It seems quieter at Social Security since Frank Bisignano was confirmed as Commissioner. I don’t know if it’s a good thing but I have less to write about.

Big NYT Article On DOGE, Dudek And Social Security

      From the New York Times:

Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line.

Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record.

That’s when Leland Dudek — plucked from a midlevel job only six weeks earlier to run Social Security because of his willingness to cooperate with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — got an angry call from the White House, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

“The number is 40 percent,” insisted Katie Miller, a top administration aide who was working closely with Mr. Musk, according to one of the people familiar with the April 1 call. President Trump believed Mr. Musk, she said. “Do not contradict the president.” 

Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found. …

Mr. Dudek was recently placed on administrative leave … 

Mr. Dudek, 48, has told associates that while he did his best to fend off deeper cuts, he harbors deep misgivings about the effect of DOGE’s oversight, according to several people familiar with the conversations. … 

On Feb. 27, a DOGE engineer told Mr. Dudek in an email that the administration had identified roughly three dozen federal contracts in Maine as “nonessential,” including the two from Social Security. 

“We should cancel them,” wrote the engineer, Ethan Shaotran, 23, who declined to comment when reached by The Times. … 

Mr. Dudek faced another crisis on March 20, when a federal judge issued an order prohibiting Mr. Musk’s team from entering Social Security databases that contained personally identifying information. … 

On the night of the ruling, two DOGE leaders told Mr. Dudek that the agency should continue allowing access to the data despite the judge’s order, with one arguing that the order was so ambiguous that it could block all Social Security employees, not just members of DOGE, from gaining access, according to a person familiar with events. …

     One question I have after reading this is whether Dudek talked with the Times. I’ll guess he did.

$2.5 Trillion In Transactions A Day?

     Frank Bisignano has said that his old employer, Fiserv, handled $2.5 trillion a day in transactions. There are about 8.2 billion people on the planet. If I remember correctly a trillion is a thousand billion. If my math is correct that means that Fiserv handled about $3,000 in transactions per day for each man, woman and child on the planet. Does that sound plausible? What basis would that be for big-timing Social Security employees even if it's true? Fiserv wasn’t trying to determine disability or administer a needs based benefits program, among other things. For that matter, even if Bisignano had some reasonable claim to big-time Social Security employees, is that a smart thing to do as a manager even if it does fit in with the Trump Administration ethos.

     If Bisignano really wants to impress me and others with Social Security experience he should use Elon Musk’s all stars to solve Social Security’s problem with the windfall offset. Great gobs of time are now wasted on manual, yes manual, calculations. There’s got to be a better way. How complicated could it possibly be? It’s only Social Security. However, the odds are that Bisignano won’t even understand the problem by the time he leaves office.

Improving Service Easy For A Man Who Has Run A Much Bigger Organization

      From Federal News Network:

The new head of the Social Security Administration is looking to get call wait times down to “single digits,” as part of this strategy to make the agency a “digital-first organization.”

An SSA official told Federal News Network that the agency’s monthly average call wait time dropped from 30 minutes in January to just about 12 minutes in May, when including callers who were given a “callback” option and didn’t have to remain on hold.

SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano told employees in an all-hands meeting on Thursday that was agency’s “best performance” since it started tracking these metrics. But said he plans to cut call wait times to a fraction of that using artificial intelligence tools.

“We’re going to get that thing down to single digits,” he said.

Bisignano, a former Wall Street executive who led a financial tech company before joining the Trump administration, told employees he was “using AI before it was AI,” and oversaw financial organizations that processed a higher volume of payments than SSA does.

“Much bigger orgs, much bigger problems — but not as important. Can you see the difference? Here we do $1.5 trillion a year. In my last job, we did $2.5 trillion a day. This is more important than that, though,” he said. …

What’s The Backup Plan?

     From CBS:

Frank Bisignano, commissioner of the Social Security Administration, told CBS News that he believes technology, and specifically artificial intelligence, could be the key to improving his agency's customer service, despite recent changes that have prompted concern among some of the nearly 69 million Americans that receive Social Security each month. 

"We're bringing a massive technology effort to transform the servicing agenda," Bisignano said. "We're gonna bring AI into the phone system...I intend it to be completed this year."  …

      From the New York Times:

… “The technology we’re building today is not sufficient to get [to Artificial General Intelligence or A.G.I. which would be needed to switch Social Security phone service mostly to A.I.]”,  said Nick Frosst, a founder of the A.I. start-up Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered A.I. researcher of the last 50 years. “What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That’s very different from what you and I do.”

In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of respondents said the methods used to build today’s technology were unlikely to lead to A.G.I. …

         The AI phone system that Social Security has tried to implement has been a complete failure so far. I’m not aware of any institution that has an AI phone system that would come close to what Social Security needs. There is good reason to believe that no such system will be in the offing any time soon, if ever. My question is, what’s your backup plan, Mr. Bisignano?

Visiting Offices In New Jersey

 

Dudek Pens Op Ed

      Former Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek has written an Op Ed for the New York Post about the “media’s Social Security hysteria”. It’s about what you’d expect.

Recording Of A Small Part Of Bisignano’s Talk To Staff Surfaces

     If this was the worst issue with Bisignano I wouldn’t be concerned but here’s the part where Bisignano talks about googling his new job. There are worse things than sounding a bit goofy. I’m afraid we’ll see those worse things.

Bisignano Doesn't Like Leaks But They're Sure Happening

     ABC News has obtained an audio recording of the meeting that Frank Bisignano had with Social Security staff yesterday. They have posted excerpts. It sounds like it was a rambling performance. I'll offer a few quotes here but if you weren't part of that meeting you probably want to look at the whole ABC piece.

... "So, I get a phone call and it's about Social Security. And I'm really, I'm really not, I swear I'm not looking for a job," Bisignano said, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by ABC News. "And I'm like, 'Well, what am I going to do?' So, I'm Googling Social Security. You know, one of my great skills, I'm one of the great Googlers on the East Coast."

"I'm like, 'What the heck's the commissioner of Social Security?'" said Bisignano, who now oversees one of the largest federal agencies that's responsible for distributing retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to more than 70 million Americans.

"Put that as the headline for the Post: 'Great Googler in Chief. Chief in Googler' or whatever," said Bisignano, who throughout the meeting repeatedly bemoaned media leaks from within the agency. ...

 "Are we having fun yet? Are we OK?" he asked those on the call. ...

Bisignano told the managers that they needed to believe that DOGE was "helping to make things better" even if "it may not feel that way." ...

"Did you guys know there was a protest against me? Who knows there was a protest against me?" he said. "I like that protest -- I want to prove them so wrong, man, this is going to be most fun I ever had." ...

     By the way, does anyone know whether Bisignano had any briefings from career people at Social Security between the time he was nominated and confirmed? I don't have any experience with these things. I would like to think that would be standard but Bisignano sounds like he came into the job cold.

Bisignano Repeats What He Knows To Be Outrageous Bull

      This is unbelievable. Just watch and listen to this interview with Frank Bisignano on Fox “News”. Never in my life did I imagine that a Social Security Commissioner could behave like this. He deserves no benefit of the doubt from anyone after this shocking performance.

     Note to Bisignano: If you’re still at Social Security when the 2026 election rolls around, which I doubt, don’t even think about hanging around if the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives. It won’t be pretty for someone who has engaged in such behavior. In fact it won’t be pretty when Bisignano does a hearing with House Ways and Means now.

This Guy Is A Star Manager?

      From Federal News Network:

… SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano told managers in a largely unscripted 90-minute address Wednesday that he has no plans for a Reduction in Force, but said AI will be a “great enabler” that helps employees handle a growing workload with its lowest headcount in 50 years.

“I have no intent to RIF people,” Bisignano told managers. “If I wake up and find out we can do all our work with 20,000 people — which I can’t see that right now — we’ll be 20,000. If I wake up and say, ‘We need 80,000,’ we’ll be 80,000. I’ve got to determine what the right staffing level is.” …

“We’ve got a lot of turmoil. I think we reassigned a lot of people,” Bisignano said. “I guarantee you, we’re going to get the job done, and my dream is to not have to let people go,” Bisignano said. “If we can’t get the job done, that’s a different problem. You guys don’t want people who don’t give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, do you?” …

When it comes to rolling out new tools, Bisignano said his first tech priority is to deploy AI on the agency’s phone lines.

“The phone has to have artificial intelligence to do the work. We can all do this in a year, and then your jobs will be more enriching,” he said. “The reason we get so many phone calls is because half the people have to call twice.” …

Bisignano said he’s open to asking the Trump administration money for IT modernization, or more employees to lead his tech modernization plans, if the agency doesn’t already have the resources to do it. …

“A previous commissioner likes to talk about why we’re going to break this thing — why this thing can’t work. ‘It’s like the least amount of people we’ve ever had, it must break,’” Bisignano said. “You can’t just throw stuff out with me and make something up.” …

     There’s a lot one could say about this. There’s the casual assumption that technology will save the day when’s there’s zero proof that it will or that you can afford it if it can. I’ve had the misfortune of trying to deal with a couple of large financial institutions lately. Whatever AI they were using was little more than annoying. Want to know account balance or payment due? They may be able to help you with AI. Anything else, forget it.  Can anyone point me to ANY large institution that has a well functioning AI system that really does the job of answering their phones for anything other than the simplest transactions?  He completely underestimates just how complex the calls coming in to Social Security actually are. The insinuation that employees aren’t giving an honest day’s work doesn’t endear you to agency employees who are working their tails off. He’s spouting off as if he understands the work and the workers when he doesn’t. 

Bisignano Getting Big Tax Break

      From Jacobin:

As the Trump administration hollows out the country’s safety net for retirees and those with disabilities, the agency’s new chief has just been approved for a massive tax break for his Wall Street riches, according to new ethics documents reviewed by the Lever. …

To comply with federal ethics law, Bisignano has agreed to sell his shares in Fiserv, which are currently worth roughly $484 million. Because of a special loophole in the tax code for government officials, Bisignano will be able to indefinitely defer any capital gains tax on the divestment — meaning he may never have to pay taxes on the enormous windfall.

The exact value of Bisignano’s tax break is not clear from the ethics disclosure, but previous tax breaks for comparable divestments have been worth tens of millions of dollars. …

O’Malley Cited For Hatch Act Violation

      From The Hill:

Former Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Martin O’Malley violated the Hatch Act during an interview with a local news outlet in North Carolina last year, a U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) investigation found Friday.  …

The complaint pointed to O’Malley’s seven-minute interview with WPTF Morning News based in Raleigh, N.C.  …

The former Maryland governor then claimed he “certainly can’t tell anybody who to vote for, but I can tell you that the proposals that are coming from Donald Trump would quickly deplete Social Security, and we wouldn’t be able to pass it on to our kids as our grandparents passed it on to us.”  …

The Office of Special Counsel wrote that the “only plausible conclusion to draw from Mr. O’Malley’s comments is that, while speaking in his capacity as SSA Commissioner, he explicitly told listeners that they must vote against President Trump to satisfy their responsibility to preserve Social Security.”  …

     This seems almost quaint considering what’s happened since but he wasn’t supposed to do it. 

LOL: “Bisignano Coming To Dislike DOGE.” AI Not Ready For Prime Time. Who Could Have Predicted?

       From the Washington Post:

The U.S. DOGE Service arrived at the Social Security Administration this year determined to slash staff and root out what it claimed was widespread fraud and wasteful spending — a mission Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team has pursued across the government.
But as of this week, many of the major changes DOGE pushed at Social Security have been abandoned or are being reversed after proving ineffective, while others are yielding unintended consequences and badly damaging customer service and satisfaction. The problems come as the agency struggles to cope with a record surge of hundreds of thousands of retirement claims in recent months. …

Social Security is poorly positioned to handle the influx [of new retirement claims], according to several staffers, as well as records obtained by The Post. Thousands of employees have taken the Trump administration’s early resignation offer or its early retirement offer, depleting the workforce and leaving some offices wholly bereft of staff, emails show. A DOGE-led move to slash staffing levels spurred many senior administrators scared of getting fired to accept reassignment to lower-level field office positions, slowing claims processing further as those employees are trained, according to employees and records. …

Bisignano is coming to dislike DOGE and hopes to minimize the team’s influence, the officials said. Another official, however, said Bisignano wants to “partner” with DOGE. …

DOGE staffers came to Social Security vowing to end fraudulent claims filed by scammers and grifters, and convinced that much of that activity was perpetrated over the phone, The Post previously reported. Career staff attempted to explain that wasn’t true, but to no avail, according to three current and former employees familiar with the matter. DOGE proposed ending phone service for retirement and disability claims, then narrowed its proposal after backlash from older claims recipients, advocates and lawmakers — then abandoned the idea.
Staff on the IT side developed a solution they hoped would pacify DOGE: A three-day hold on phone calls to allow extra checking for fraud, the employees said. Everyone, from rank-and-file career staff up to Dudek, knew the phone fraud check was not needed, the employees said. But they did it anyway.
“People lacked the fortitude to tell DOGE there was no fraud because they were afraid to lose their jobs,” one former high-ranking official said, referring specifically to claims filed by telephone. “They knew there was no fraud.” …

When a Post reporter called the [agency]phone line Friday afternoon, it took eight attempts to get transferred to an agent. The AI bot asked the reporter several times to end the call and gave unrelated information about a cost-of-living adjustment, Medicare Part B’s premium and benefits available to people after the retirement age.