Tag Archive for: SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

Social Security Administration Offers Receipts To Dispute WaPo Hit Job

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The Social Security Administration is disputing a Washington Post report that claims the agency and system got worse under President Donald Trump.

The Washington Post published a story on Tuesday based on “internal documents and interviews with 41 current and former employees, advocates and customers” about how the system has suffered in both “responsiveness and trust” under the Trump administration. According to email correspondences and statements shared with the Caller, the Social Security Administration disputed much of the “findings” to the outlet.

“After our transparent and thorough responses, it is disappointing that the Washington Post was unwilling to include any facts that contradicted the politically-driven narrative against the Trump Administration,” a Social Security spokesperson told the Caller.

“The Social Security Administration under President Trump’s leadership is serving more Americans than ever before at quicker speeds, and meeting customers where they want to be served. Through technology improvements and modernization, more Americans are choosing to easily and quickly manage their benefits online or over the phone.”

The spokesperson added that the article disregarded “the historic improvements” the administration has made to help customers via the internet and by phone.

“The average speed of answer for the National 800 Number has been in the single digits the last five months,” a spokesperson continued, adding that sixty-five percent more calls were answered in FY 2025 compared to FY 2024.

The Washington Post report states that phone service by the SSA “improved in the second half of the year but is still subpar.” Ahead of publication, the SSA provided an audit to the Post showing how the “average speed of answer for the National 800 Number has been in the single digits the last five months.”

The audit also shows that nearly 90 percent of customers were satisfied with the SSA, a fact that a spokesperson said disputes the Post’s reporting.

The article also highlights worsening “bottlenecks,” noting that the agency argued those bottlenecks had improved. The SSA told the Caller that they actually made “massive improvement” which was “buried.”

“Reducing the backlog at processing centers, enabling 24/7 website access after inheriting 29 hours of weekly downtime, and serving more Americans at faster speeds is not something to be thrown in after undermining SSA,” a spokesperson told the Caller in a statement.

For the story, the Washington Post also interviewed Sen. Elizabeth Warren who has called for a request for an audit.

“We’ve kept up the pressure and held Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Frank Bisignano accountable for the chaos they’ve caused,” Warren said in the interview.

The SSA responded to Warren’s quote in a statement to the Caller, telling the outlet that Commissioner Bisignano has responded to Warren’s request for an audit in previous letters.

The Washington Post also reported that the audit published by the Social Security inspector general’s office on Dec. 22 “confirmed that millions of callers requesting callbacks were counted as zero-minute waits by the agency.”

The SSA noted to the Caller that the methodology used to measure Average Speed of Answer (ASA) is key to understanding the data.

“It is calculated as follows: for customers who choose to wait in the queue for an agent, it is the total time spent in queue divided by the number of calls answered by agents. For customers who choose the convenience of a callback, we count only the time the customer waited in queue before electing a callback divided by the number of callbacks answered by agents. The combined result is the average speed of answer,” SSA told the Caller.

“Omitting that this methodology has existed for more than a decade is dishonest and undermines the work of the dedicated career public servants who provide the data. Moreover, the average wait time to callback has been nearly cut in half under President Trump as the IG report confirmed,” the agency noted.

The Washington Post also reported that one benefits authorizer in a processing center was told by management during an all-staff meeting that there was a backlog of six million cases. The outlet added that management added that the staff would be expected to work overtime to lower the number to two million.

The SSA pointed out to the Post prior to publication, according to emails reviewed by the Caller, that the agency explained in a letter to Congress that there were 6.2 million pending cases at the beginning of June. By the end of the fiscal year, the SSA reduced that number by more than one million, the letter writes.

“Today, there are 850,000 less pending actions in the processing centers compared to the same time last year, which contrary to the article, shows improvement,” the SSA shared with the Caller.

The SSA also took issue with the Post’s framing of Bisignano’s plan to close half of the agency’s field offices. The outlet reported that more than 31 million people visited field offices in the last fiscal year.

“It is disappointing yet unsurprising that the fake news media is eager to ignore the truth to scare seniors. The truth is simple: field offices are, and will always remain, our front-line, serving the approximately 75 million Americans who receive monthly payments and more than 330 million Americans with Social Security numbers,” the agency told the Caller. The SSA added that Commissioner Bisignano has “pledged to have the right level of staffing to operate at peak efficiency and deliver best-in-class customer service to the American people.”

The Washington Post also reported that in previous weeks there have been hundreds of employees who were transferred to customer service operations and have now been recalled to the roles they were hired to fill in the beginning. The outlet added that others have been placed in a new “digital engagement” office.

The SSA told the Caller that after they introduced new technology this year, they “recognized streamlined workloads in field offices that allowed us to deploy approximately 850 field office employees daily to assist with calls to the National 800 Number.” The agency told the Caller that none of these field office staff have been reassigned to the National 800 Number. Selected staff are now  Customer Service Representatives (CSR), “and the assistance they are providing is consistent with their position descriptions,” the agency shared.

The Washington Post did not respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House Correspondent

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: SSA Rejects Whistleblower Claims, Slams Alleged Release Of Sensitive Data As ‘Highly Irresponsible’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is repubished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: Social Security Fraud Just Tip Of The Iceberg, Trump’s New Commissioner Says

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Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Frank Bisignano said Social Security numbers are vulnerable to exploitation and fraud across multiple government agencies, from the DMV to Medicare.

The former Wall Street executive, confirmed earlier this month after the agency cycled through five leadership changes in five months, said the problem extends far beyond Social Security benefit fraud to encompass the entire federal system where the numbers are used for identification.

“Fraud can happen in many ways. It doesn’t just have to be through Social Security,” Bisignano said in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It could be on the many ways people use a Social Security number to get access …  the Social Security number needs to be a lockdown number.”

Bisignano also warned that because social security numbers are used by multiple federal agencies, fraud risks can balloon beyond the social security system. He said he would be trying to find coordinated solutions to head off fraud.

“The job is about building the largest level of integrity, the highest accuracy rate,” he said.

The commissioner said he is implementing artificial intelligence systems and operational overhauls to address these vulnerabilities across the agency’s 500 million annual interactions with Americans. He said current systems fall short of acceptable security standards.

The agency currently operates with a 1% error rate, he said, but Bisignano aims for “five nines” accuracy — 99.999% — comparable to private sector standards.

“If you’re running at something below that, it will give way to mediocrity at best, and will give way to failure and opportunity for bad things to happen,” he said.

Bisignano has been visiting field offices nationwide to assess operations firsthand, including recent trips to New Jersey locations. He emphasized the importance of understanding ground-level operations before implementing changes.

“I always believed that I need to go see the word to understand the work,” he said. “My job is to help them do their job better and bring the tools.”

In addition, Bisignano rejected Democratic criticism that the Trump administration seeks to cut Social Security benefits, citing his personal background as the son of a World War II veteran and federal agent.

“The idea that I’d be doing anything other than trying to bolster it up is just crazy,” he said.

The commissioner also announced the agency expects to complete Fairness Act payments by the end of June, delivering benefits to 3.2 million Americans ahead of the initially projected timeline of one year.

“This organization will learn how to execute with excellence,” Bisignano told the DCNF.

AUTHOR

Thomas English

DCNF Technology Reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Congress Set to Roll Back Social Security Gun Ban

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Next week, Congress is expected to begin the review and potential repeal of a host of Obama Administration regulations put in place during the last 60 days of Obama’s tenure under the Congressional Review Act (CRA).  Among the regulations specifically targeted for action is the Obama-era Social Security Administration (SSA) gun grab, enacted in the waning days of the anti-gun president’s tenure.

As we reported last month, the rule would for the first time in the nation’s history co-opt the SSA into a gun control apparatus by labeling certain Supplemental Security Income and Disability recipients as “mental defectives” and reporting them to the FBI’s gun ban database. Possession of firearms by these individuals would then become a federal felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The rule, as the SSA itself has admitted, has nothing to do with the individuals’ propensity for violence or self-harm. Rather, the affected persons would be mostly law-abiding individuals singled out because they receive benefits for any of a wide-range of mental disorders (e.g., anxiety, bulimia, obsessive compulsive disorder, etc.) and have a representative payee assigned to help them manage their SSA funds. The Obama White House estimated that some 75,000 people would be reported each year under the new guideline.

While the rule would require reported beneficiaries to be notified of their banned status, it would not give them a chance to defend their suitability to exercise their Second Amendment rights until after they had already been prohibited. At that point, they would be required to file a petition, at their own expense, for “relief from disabilities.” The rule requires petitioners to obtain an expensive and time-consuming mental health evaluation and to disprove risks to the public safety and interest the government never established, or even tried to establish, in the first place.

More than 91,000 comments were submitted on the rule, the overwhelming majority of them in opposition to it. Comments submitted by mental health professionals and advocates for the mentally ill pointed out that the proposal was not supported by evidence or science, added to the stigma of mental illness, and created disincentives for mentally ill persons to seek help and benefits to which they are entitled.

Yet the SSA brushed all these concerns aside in rushing the rule to completion before Barack Obama left office. Confronted with evidence that the rule was illegal, unconstitutional, counter-productive, and would do nothing to further public safety, the SSA simply asserted it was necessary to fulfill a bureaucratic imperative urged on the agency by the Obama Department of Justice.

It’s a shame that the already crowded congressional calendar has to be burdened simply with clearing the minefield Barack Obama intentionally laid to stall and hinder his successor. But it’s encouraging that Congress is taking such swift action to do exactly that.

NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris Cox praised the move in statements to the press on Wednesday. “Congress’ decision to review the Obama administration’s back-door gun grab is a significant step forward in protecting a fundamental constitutional right for law-abiding gun owners,” he said.

You can help by contacting your Congressional representative and urging him or her to vote “yes” on the joint resolution to overturn the SSA’s gun ban rule under the Congressional Review Act. Use the Write Your Federal Lawmakers feature on the NRA-ILA’s website or call the Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.