Commissioner Bisignano was on Fox Business channel this week talking about all his accomplishments at Social Security.
There's no word on the results but Senator Elizabeth Warren is reported to be meeting with Social Security Commissioner Bisignano sometime today.
This is from a couple of posts on Bluesky from @altssa.altgov.info who purports to be a current Social Security employee. I cannot vouch for this person but this fits in with what I’ve heard elsewhere:
Deputy Commissioner of Operations Stephen Evangelista will reportedly be back at work on Monday after having a confrontation with commish Frankie over changes being made to operations and changes they want to make to operations that Evangelista is almost certainly correct about being bad for … [post one]
SSA operations and staffing. Frankie apparently doesn’t like being told he’s wrong, so his reaction to being given data and facts about why his ideas are 💩 was to call Evangelista a “fucking liar.” Allegedly, of course. Sounds like a guy you definitely want to work for, amiright???? 😑😑😑😑 [post two]
Here are some interesting messages from the Secretary of Homeland Security to then Acting Commissioner of Social Security Leland Dudek back in April. Note the stern, commanding tone of the messages. Note also the complete lack of legal underpinning for what is being demanded. These were posted by Social Security itself. By the way, Dudek, who apparently has a Twitter account, liked and retweeted my tweet about this. As always, click on the images below to view full size.
A Twitter post by the Social Security Administration yesterday:
Today, Commissioner Bisignano spoke at the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) event to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Social Security alongside James Roosevelt III, grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rep. Danny Davis, and Rebecca Vallas, CEO of NASI.
From Government Executive:
In recent days, the Social Security Administration and its newly confirmed commissioner Frank Bisignano have celebrated “key milestones” in its quest to improve customer service, citing its implementation of the Social Security Fairness Act and addition of new automated service lanes on the agency’s 1-800 number and website. …
But workers at the agency say that as the agency shrinks by an aspired 7,000 workers this fiscal year, management is simultaneously scrambling to triage escalating workloads, causing a communications whiplash akin to being “gaslit,” one said. …
Beginning last week, the agency involuntarily reassigned 500 field office customer support representatives to handle calls to the 1-800 number indefinitely and without notice. By Tuesday, that number had risen to 1,000 reassignments. …
They’re robbing Peter to pay Paul,” [said the leader of the union that represents most Social Security employees].“And it really invalidates [Bisignano’s] whole theory and vision that SSA doesn’t need any more staff and that AI—or other technology—will solve the customer service problems at the agency and on the 1-800 number.” …
Bisignano’s email to staff on Monday included an additional bit of news: performance bonuses will be distributed next month. Though Bisignano said he “directed” their distribution, the bonuses were originally slated to go out earlier this year but were delayed during the tenure of then-acting Commissioner Leland Dudek. …
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.
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. …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. …
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?
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.
