How long will you wait for Social Security help? Why it's anybody's guess.

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2 days ago

Members of Congress and advocates say the Social Security Administration is providing the public with misleading information about how long it will take to resolve their problems.
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.
Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano told members of Congress June 25 that three out of four people who call that 1-800 number use a call-back feature so they are not waiting on the phone. He said he took the wait time metric off the website because he thought it kept people from calling.
"If you show that you got an hour and a half wait time, well people are going to be discouraged and not call," he said.
When California Rep. Judy Chu asked him to reinstate the metrics so members of Congress and the public can have an accurate barometer of the agency's performance, Bisignano avoided answering the question until Chu's time to ask questions expired.
"How can you know how the Social Security Administration is doing with regard to answering calls or processing benefit applications unless you have these metrics? You have to compare them over time so it is shocking that they would just remove that data if they are so confident about all of these metrics that he was talking about," Chu told USA TODAY after the hearing.
Social Security staffing was already at a ten-year low when President Donald Trump took office in January. Meanwhile, the number of new applicants has skyrocketed as Baby Boomers retire.
That meant wait times to reach employees by phone, email or in person were already high when the Trump administration began to slash staff amidst efforts to downsize government.
In February, the agency announced plans to cut 7,000 of the agency's 57,000 employees ‒ more than 10% of staff ‒ in response to President Trump's executive orders. At least 3,000 employees have already accepted buyout agreements.
Average wait times to reach a live person by crept up to 90 minutes by early May. A May 22 screenshot of the Social Security website's live metrics, preserved by the Internet Archive, shows that call wait time was 1 hour and 46 minutes, and call back wait time was 1 hour and 44 minutes. It also showed the number of people on hold and current number waiting for a call back.
Along with the 1-800 wait time information, the Social Security metrics page also included processing time for retirement, survivor, and Medicare benefits. For disability benefit applicants, which can take more than a year to get a decision, there was information about processing time, reconsideration time, and appeals adjudication time.
The average speed of answer was shown as 20.3 minutes, based on an average of monthly data from the last year. That speed is similar to data the agency previously made public. Then, on June 6 the comprehensive dashboard showing live metrics was removed from the Social Security Administration's website, showing as 'under maintenance' until June 16.
When the dashboard page went back up on June 16, it no longer included the live call wait time data or information on the number of people on hold or waiting for a call back, instead just listing the average speed of answer excluding call-back wait time as 19.2 minutes over the last year.
"We are updating our performance metrics to reflect the real-life experiences of the people we serve and highlight the fastest ways our customers can get service," Social Security spokesperson Stephen McGraw said in a statement to USA TODAY. "It is critical that the agency measures what matters most to improve customer service while providing all Americans the information they need to select the service channel that works best for them."
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.
Warren leads Senate Democrat's Social Security War Room, which seeks to draw attention to changes the Trump administration is making to Social Security.
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.
"These delays are unacceptable ‒ and made even worse by your misleading claims that service has actually improved under your watch," she wrote in her letter, shared first with USA TODAY. "Service disruptions and barriers make it harder for beneficiaries to receive their Social Security benefits ‒ payments which are the primary source of income for more than half of America's seniors."
More: Social security employees warn of delays: What the new priorities means for your benefits
Warren accused Bisignano of lying about improving wait times at the agency in a separate statement to USA TODAY.
"Donald Trump and DOGE (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. Instead of owning that failure, Commissioner Bisignano and his team are trying to cover it up," she said.
Taking data offline makes it harder for Congress and Americans to know what the agency is doing, said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group that wants to expand the agency.
The information that is now on the website is an "apples to oranges" comparison to what was previously available, she said. Along with the call wait time, there is less detail on how long it will take for new applications to be processed and for disability claims to be appealed, and less about how wait times vary geographically, she said.
There is "zero" evidence that wait times have suddenly gone down, she said. "It would defy logic for it to get easier given how they've hollowed out the agency, every part of the agency."
Altman said the agency's lack of transparency about wait times raises questions about other information they are making public.
And, if the website says the average hold is 19.2 minutes, but they are on the phone for much longer, it is hard for Americans to tell how widespread the problem is, Altman said.
"The American people are getting frustrated, but they don't know if it is just happening to them," she said.
More: Social Security wait times were already long under Biden. They're even longer under Trump.
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. More importantly, we're having a hard time resolving issues because of SSA training issues when we do reach staff," she told USA TODAY.
We want to hear from people affected by or who have knowledge of the Trump administration's efforts to reshape the government, including actions by DOGE.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How long will you wait for Social Security help? Anybody's guess.