In partisan letter, Bisignano shifts blame on 1-800 call times, cites dated stats

Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano this week penned an unusually partisan letter to a Democratic senator aimed at refuting concerns over the agency’s customer service crisis, but current and former officials warn the document conceals more than it reveals.

Bisignano’s letter came in response to a July information request from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., regarding perceived discrepancies between the agency’s published average wait time on its 1-800 number—18 minutes, not including customers to elect to wait for a callback rather than stay on hold—and a June survey of the service stream conducted by her staff, which clocked the average wait time at nearly two hours.

In the letter, Bisignano accused Warren of “discrediting” SSA workers by questioning the provenance of the data, although when he was first confirmed to the position, he removed an array of live data measuring the agency’s various customer service metrics.

“With a new administration in office and across-the-board improvement in the performance data due to strong leadership, world-class management and a new approach, which leverages technology, you now declare there is a customer service crisis at SSA,” Bisignano wrote. “You further question the long-standing methodology behind the performance data, which is prepared by SSA’s dedicated career workforce and regularly reported to Congress across administrations. The unfounded criticisms you have directed at SSA discredit the dedicated public servants working to turn the agency around and deliver outstanding service to the American people.”

He said the 18.5 minute average wait on SSA’s website is out of date, and that in fact, the average wait time on the 1-800 number was down to 4.6 minutes during the week of July 21. But officials told Government Executive that stat shouldn’t be trusted, noting that SSA has involuntarily reassigned field office workers to help supplement teleservice center staffing and that Bisignano has begun excluding the time people wait for a representative to call them back.

“He’s not fooling anyone,” said Jessica LaPointe, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 220, which represents field office staff. “The public knows how long it’s taking and the workers know how long it’s taking due to the staffing cuts and the reassignment of field office workers. Any metric he claims to have achieved on the 1-800 number has been driven by the infusion of staff, not technology.”

Some officials also fear Bisignano has begun including the time it takes for a member of the public to reach the 1-800 number’s new AI-powered chat bot, rather than the time it takes to reach a live agent. Indeed, a footnote within SSA’s fiscal 2026 budget justification, dated May 30, notes that the agency is “currently developing an alternative performance measure to supplement [average speed to answer].”

Throughout the letter, Bisignano cites poor service metrics from early 2024 or citing a fiscal 2024 average as the baseline to measure his own reforms—field office wait times were 32 minutes in February, the disability claims backlog hit an all-time high in June 2024 and the 1-800 number’s average wait time was 42 minutes in November 2023. These citations hide the gains made under former Commissioner Martin O’Malley—by the end of 2024, 1-800 number average wait times dropped to under 13 minutes, the wait for a disability hearing fell to a 30-year low and over 2024 the agency saw overall productivity increase by 6.2%, the biggest annual hike in a decade.

Though Bisignano doesn’t mention O’Malley by name, he accuses his predecessor of overruling career staff to eliminate a “workforce management system,” which he said has since hamstrung the 1-800 number’s performance.

“He made this decision against the objections of career staff, who advised that it was worth the investment of additional time and money,” Bisignano wrote. “Over my career, I have managed large organizations that have had call centers that handle hundreds of millions of calls annually, and I can confidently tell you that the career staff were right. We will soon fix the prior commissioner’s mistake and expect the performance on the national 800 number to further improve.”

But that isn’t true. When O’Malley ordered the move to a new phone system provided by Amazon Web Services last summer, he did eliminate Verint, a workforce scheduling tool, because AWS offered its own analog within the new phone system.

“When we shifted to AWS, we made the decision that we’d go with AWS’ integrated solution, rather than delay the switch for 90 days to get Verint ready,” O’Malley said. “There were some SES-ers who said, ‘If we do something as scary as switching phone providers, we can’t do it unless we keep the scheduling app that we had before.’”

O’Malley said that the AWS system initially lacked some customizations to align with SSA’s needs, but when he visited employees in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., who had been running an AWS pilot program on around 5% of calls to the 1-800 number, they had already started work on that independently. The former commissioner said he suspects the agency’s effort to get AWS’ scheduling tool up to speed was derailed by the arrival of the Department of Governmental Efficiency and the shuttering of the Office of Transformation.

Asked to explain this discrepancy, a Social Security spokesperson seemed to walk back the commissioner’s claims slightly.

“Commissioner Bisgnano’s statement was intended to clarify the current capabilities of our 1-800 number platform,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “While AWS Connect may have some workforce management-like features, it does not have key integrated workforce management capabilities critical to effective call center management. As a result, while some basic functionalities exist, the system is not yet fully equipped to support all aspects of real-time workforce management.”

LaPointe said the letter's claims and comparisons related to field office wait times are also misleading because of the agency’s move toward appointment-based service.

“If you take enumeration for example, say you need a replacement Social Security card,” she said. “Last year, you would have waited 30 minutes in the lobby and then you’d get your replacement in the mail in around two weeks. But now, you wait 21 minutes in the lobby to get to the window, at which point you’re given an appointment 35 days on average from now. End-to-end, the public is now actually waiting months, rather than roughly 10 minutes less. He’s cherry-picking stats to mask the actual issue of understaffing.”

Last month, a group of investors sued Bisignano and payments processor Fiserv, where he served as president and CEO prior to his nomination, accusing the company of misleading stockholders about the growth of its point-of-sale system Clover, using forced migration of existing customers to mask a lack in new business. Fiserv has disputed the allegations, while SSA did not answer questions related the lawsuit.