Pointing to the findings of a phone survey conducted by her staff, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on Wednesday accused Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano of potentially misleading the public when it comes to call wait times at the social safety net program.
" Donald Trump and [the Department of Government Efficiency] took a chainsaw to Social Security, leaving Americans waiting hours just to get help—and that's if their call is answered at all," said Warren, a Democrat, in a statement published the day after.
In a letter to Bisignano dated Wednesday, Warren highlighted that the Social Security Administration's (SSA) website states that average speed of answers, excluding callback wait times, is 19.2 minutes.
That metric is measured by "fiscal year to date (through the last month completed)," which Warren argues means it is "wildly out of date" because it is an average capturing a long period of time. SSA has also recently taken down several real-time performance metrics that were previously on its website.
Warren noted that earlier this year, Bisignano said he thought it would be possible to get agency phone wait times to "under a minute," partly through making use of artificial intelligence. What's more, Warren highlighted that an SSA official told the outlet the Federal News Network that monthly average call wait times were down 12 minutes in May, when excluding callers who took advantage of the callback option and did not remain on hold.
According to Warren, a phone survey conducted by her office from June 12-20 found that average wait times for calls was higher. The average wait time for calls that were answered was 102 minutes, and of those that were answered, 32% had wait times of over two hours, according to the survey results. Her staff made 51 calls to SSA.
More than 50% of calls made to SSA were not answered by a human and the majority of calls concluded when the caller was put on hold and then the call was dropped, according to the survey results.
USA Today reporters ran a similar experiment and found wait times to be consistently over an hour, according to reporting from the outlet published Thursday.
"This represents a catastrophic customer service failure under your watch at SSA. I write to demand answers about this attempt to cover up the truth—which is that the Department of Government Efficiency's efforts have made it harder for America's 70 million Social Security recipients to access their hard-earned benefits," wrote Warren in her letter.
During the first few months of Donald Trump's second presidency, billionaire Elon Musk, who was tapped to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and his allies fanned a false narrative alleging rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration, and used those "claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans," according to June reporting from the The New York Times.
Due to pressure from DOGE, nearly 50% of the Social Security Administration's executives and thousands of employees there have left, either by retiring or taking buyouts. Per the Times, as much as 12% of staff may leave because of DOGE's cost-cutting efforts.
Warren alleged these cuts, as well as "DOGE-led initiatives" like the now-reversed "anti-fraud" checks, have downgraded the SSA's services.
Warren concludes the letter with a list of queries for Bisignano, including asking him what the average wait time was for a caller who called in SSA's National Help Line in the past week.
