The Commissioner of Social Security has sent a letter to the Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee claiming that “service is better than ever” at Social Security. The letter includes selected statistics. The definitions and significance of some, if not all, of the numbers given are unclear to me.
As Mark Twain said, “Figures don’t lie but liars often figure” or, as WC. Fields is alleged to have said, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
Senators Bernie Moreno and Elizabeth Warren have penned an op ed in the New York Times recommending that the wage cap on the FICA tax that feeds into the Social Security trust funds be removed. This would prevent the trust funds from running out of money for many years into the future.
It’s no surprise that Senator Warren would express this opinion. What’s remarkable is that Senator Moreno would feel the same. He’s a Republican from Ohio. I wouldn’t say the dam is breaking but there’s a tiny crack in it.
The Washington Post has already run an editorial about the Moreno-Warren op ed. They’re aghast. It’s what I would expect from a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest people on Earth.
From People:
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., ducked questions about the possibility of House Speaker Mike Johnson making cuts to Social Security by appearing to fake a minute-long phone call outside the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, June 9.
After he was approached by a reporter for the liberal outlet MeidasTouchand asked about “Mike Johnson’s secret plan to cut Social Security,” Wittman, 67, put his phone to his head and appeared to have a one-sided conversation as the device remained lit up and cycled through apps while he pressed it against his face. During the encounter, the visible phone screen never showed sign that a call was in progress.
“Hey, how you doing? I'm good. I'm good with that. Yeah, I'll be there in just a few minutes,” Wittman said into his phone as soon as the question was asked. …
This doesn’t sound like someone who would vote to cut Social Security benefits. The GOP can talk about the impending “bankruptcy” of Social Security as if they’re eager for cuts in benefits to happen but they’re not or, at least, they know the voters will not countenance this. Democrats need do nothing other than call the Republican bluff. Dems certainly shouldn’t vote for any cuts in benefits. The GOP will fold in the end. Of course, folding will probably mean funding Social Security out of general revenues rather than a tax increase on the wealthy but that’s way better than any cuts in benefits.
From FEDweek:
As many as several million people have not received full back payments related to the repeal of the government pension offset and windfall elimination provision due to how the SSA interpreted the retroactive payment eligibility under the GPO-WEP repeal law, a bipartisan group of senators has said. …
The GPO had reduced, and in many cases eliminated, spousal or survivor Social Security benefits of such persons. The WEP has reduced the personally earned Social Security benefits of such persons based on other earnings—such as employment before, after or on the side during, a federal career—for which they did pay into Social Security (unless those earnings exceeded an annual threshold for at least 30 years). …
The ongoing issue relates to those who had not applied for Social Security benefits while the GPO was in effect because it would have eliminated them. Organizations such as the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association last year encouraged such persons to file for benefits. However, citing a general provision limiting retroactive payments for new Social Security applicants, the SSA said they would be eligible for only six months of retroactive payments at most. …
They urged the SSA to “follow the plain text of the SSFA and provide one-year of retroactivity (beginning in January 2024) to all applicants regardless of application date.”
The President’s budget for the fiscal year beginning on October 1st of this year is out. It calls for a flat appropriation for the Social Security Administration, neither increased nor decreased from the current fiscal year. However, considering inflation, which is heading up significantly over the next year this would amount to a significant cut in the agency’s effective operating budget.
Don’t get too excited about the President’s budget proposal for it's merely a proposal. It’s up to Congress to pass appropriations acts. The problem with Congress is that Republican Congressional leaders aren’t all that much more interested in adequately funding the Social Security Administration than the President. The silver lining is that there probably won’t be an appropriation act covering Social Security until after the first of next year when a new Congress will be seated. That Congress may be more sympathetic to SSA than the current one.
From NEXTGOV/FCW:
Twelve Democrats want answers from the Social Security Administration about its decision to shift employees that normally perform other jobs to its phone line last month with only hours of training, a move employees have said risks adding to backlogs.
SSA pushed out over 7,400 employees last year, including 1,387 contact representatives, as the Trump administration sought to reduce the size of the government’s workforce.
Since last summer, the agency has moved over a thousand employees from its field offices to answer its phone line, and last month, Nextgov/FCW
reported that the agency was shifting employees from its processing centers, technology office, financial unit and other offices to the phone line, too.
Employees told Nextgov/FCW at the time that it made little sense for those processing benefit claims to answer calls, many of which may be about the status of those very claims. …
The senators want an array of details about the reassignments, including how many employees have been moved and from what posts, the training they received, why the agency moved them, how the agency’s reassignments have impacted its functioning and any hiring SSA is doing. It recently had open jobs listed for contact center representatives.
The letter’s signatories include Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., Patty Murray, D-Wash., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore. …
There are at least three problems with this report. First, there is zero reason to trust OIG. It no longer enjoys any independence. It doesn't report to the Commissioner but it does report to the White House. It is now clear that there can be no OIG reports at any agency which criticize the Administration. The release of such a critical report will be blocked and those who drafted it summarily fired. (Thank you, Supreme Court.) Second, the report admits that 25 million callers to Social Security became so frustrated by Social Security's answering system that they hung up. It didn't add these callers in to the phone answering metrics. If you do add them in you find out that they comprise a whopping 40% of calls to Social Security. That's a lot of frustrated callers. Third, many of the calls were handled by Interactive Voice Response (IVR) rather than a human. How effectively did IVR respond to requests for customer service? The agency reported a big jump in telephone calls this year. How much of that was due to failed IVR? Failed IVR also contributes to customer dissatisfaction.
Senator Warren is already accusing the Social Security of lying.
When a member of the public has an issue accessing a federal benefit or service, they often contact their member of Congress for help. That assistance is called constituent casework.If an agency receives a lot of requests from lawmakers on behalf of their constituents about a specific issue, or if there are multiple constituent cases coming from the same area, that could be a signal to officials that there’s a problem.But actually using this data to pinpoint systemic problems with agency operations is difficult because there’s no database to collect such information from across Capitol Hill offices. The House of Representatives, however, could soon change that.House Digital Services, a tech team within the chamber’s support office, has been working since 2024 on Case Compass, which is a dashboard that will display anonymous constituent casework data from across participating Capitol Hill offices. On Sept. 9, the House unveiled a framework to aggregate such information. …
The Commissioner probably isn’t interested in seeing a database tracking increases in complaints about his agency
From Government Executive:
A Social Security Administration office tasked with resolving beneficiary issues brought to its attention by federal legislators has shrunk from about 50 employees to as few as three, according to an agency employee.
In addition to constituent casework, employees in SSA’s Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs provide technical assistance to lawmaker offices when developing Social Security legislation and answer questions from Capitol Hill staffers, among other legislative and regulatory responsibilities. …
[After recent cuts] OLCA was left with just three staffers, two of whom were brought over from a different office. …
SSA did move a congressional casework team to a different component and remaining OLCA staffers have been instructed to contact other offices to help with their responsibilities, according to the employee. …
[An] employee said that some OLCA staffers were asked to return, potentially increasing the number of workers in the office …
From Axios:
The Social Security Administration — under pressure from Senate Democrats —is on track to finish an internal audit of the agency's call wait times by year's end, Axios has learned. …
Remember that Social Security’s Office of Inspector General is no longer independent. This could easily be a whitewash.
From a letter to Senator Ron Wyden from Karen Glenn, Social Security's Chief Actuary:
... We estimate that implementation of the OBBBA [One Big Beautiful Bill Act] will result in net increased program cost starting in 2025. Over calendar years 2025 through 2034, the total net increase in OASDI [Retirement, Survivors and Disability] program cost is estimated to be $168.6 billion. In addition, the timing of combined OASI [Retirement] and DI [Disability] Trust Fund reserve depletion is accelerated from the third quarter of 2034 under the 2025 Trustees Report baseline to the first quarter of 2034 following implementation of the law. Considered alone, the reserve depletion date for the OASI Trust Fund is accelerated from the first quarter of 2033 to the fourth quarter of 2032. DI Trust Fund reserves are not projected to become depleted during the 75-year projection period. ...
Government Executive goes through the counter-arguments against the letter that Commissioner Bisignano wrote to Senator Warren claiming that service is rapidly improving at Social Security.
I deal with Social Security. I know things aren’t going well and the future looks grim. Service is currently improving in some ways and worsening in others. The only reason service isn’t worse is the generous use of overtime. I expect there will be significantly less OT in the next fiscal year.
I know the agency has a huge problem with what I call the “Now now, not later, not ever” backlog, cases that present complications that take time to sort out, time that just doesn’t exist now. The employees are sorting out the easy cases first to create stats. The complex cases aren’t worked and under current circumstances they’re never going to be worked. They just keep piling up. I don’t think anyone is even counting them. I’m an attorney. Of course I raise complications. That’s my job. I know when the workers compensation offset is wrong. I know to ask for a protective filing date based upon a prior claim when the agency took an SSI only claim when they should have also taken a Disabled Adult Child claim. I know to point out that the agency missed a date first insured issue. I’m not the only one. Social Security employees themselves spot many of these things but have no time to act on them.
From The Hill:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is asking Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Frank Bisignano to provide additional information about the wait times for phone calls, amid reports of discrepancies in data.
In a letter sent Sunday evening to Bisignano, provided exclusively to The Hill, Warren followed up on her meeting with the SSA chief last Wednesday, when, the senator said, she secured a commitment from Bisignano “that SSA would undergo a public audit by the Inspector General regarding your phone call wait time data reporting and that you would publish additional wait time data.” …
She asked Bisignano to provide data by Aug. 11, including on the total number of calls received; details about the calls taken by an artificial intelligence tool — including the percentage of calls dropped, transferred, or ended without resolving the issue; the same details about the calls taken by a human customer service representative. …
Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano has agreed to have the agency’s inspector general audit SSA’s performance data and to publicly report a broader list of data, Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Wednesday after meeting with the longtime financial services businessman who took over the agency in May.
SSA changed what data it reports publicly last month, removing many metrics on the agency’s phone line — such as current call wait times, callback wait times, the number of people waiting on hold and the number waiting for a callback — and processing times for some benefits.
“More accurate data is absolutely essential to oversight,” said Warren. “So we've gotten commitment to an independent audit of those data and much more transparency about the data that will be posted.” …
Of course, the IG will take many months to do anything and may shade its report since it’s no longer truly independent.
There's no word on the results but Senator Elizabeth Warren is reported to be meeting with Social Security Commissioner Bisignano sometime today.
Democratic Senators Wyden and Warren have written the Commissioner of Social Security asking for answers about the sudden reassignments of front line agency employees to answering 1-800 phone calls at about the same time that many metrics of agency functioning have been removed from public view.
From Politico:
A group of House Republicans is sounding the alarm over recent staffing cuts and plans for more cut-backs across the Social Security Administration — a target of the Department of Government Efficiency’s rampage across the federal bureaucracy.
In a new letter to President Donald Trump’s newly-confirmed social security chief, Rep. Nicole Malliotokis of New York and 14 other House Republicans are pressing Frank Bisignano to hold off on any further agency cuts that could “further deteriorate customer service that has been subpar in recent years.” ...
Republicans who signed the letter to Bisignano include Reps. Jeff Hurd of Colorado, Don Bacon of Nebraska, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, Gabe Evans of Colorado, David Valadao of California, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Mike Ezell of Mississippi, Mike Turner of Ohio, Zack Nunn of Iowa and Mike Lawler of New York. Three Pennsylvanians were also among the Republicans who added their names to the missive: Reps. Ryan Mackenzie, Brian Fitzpatrick and Rob Bresnahan.
From Newsweek
Two Republican Senators voted against the GOP and President Donald Trump last week in favor of an amendment that would have reversed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts at the Social Security Administration (SSA). The vote took place late Friday night as the Senate voted on Trump's multitrillion-dollar tax breaks and spending cuts framework. …
On Friday, Republican Senators Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski, both from Alaska, voted in favor of an amendment that sought to reverse "cuts to the Social Security Administration, which may include cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency or any other cuts to seniors' services." It failed to pass in a 50-49 vote. …
From The Hill:
Senate Republicans want Elon Musk to stop talking about Social Security, and the Department of Government Efficiency to leave it alone. …
They warn that Social Security reform is known as the “third rail” of politics for a reason: Any party that touches it is likely to get zapped come Election Day.
And Republicans fear that reductions in staff and field offices will boomerang on them, predicting constituents will grow frustrated if it becomes more difficult and time-consuming to address problems related to benefit claims.
They warn that Social Security reform is known as the “third rail” of politics for a reason: Any party that touches it is likely to get zapped come Election Day.
“It doesn’t help the president when you have somebody who clearly is not worried about whether or not Social Security benefits are going to be there for him” leading the effort to shrink the Social Security Administration, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), referring to Musk, the world’s richest person. …
