Sens. Warren and Wyden demand info on SSA reassignments

SSA workers say the recent decision to involuntarily reassign 1,000 field office employees to man the 1-800 number flies in the face of leadership’s rosy pronouncements and further degrades service.

A pair of Democratic senators on Monday fired a bevy of questions to Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano about the agency’s decision last week to reassign 1,000 field office employees to help answer calls to the agency’s 1-800 number, despite purported gains in customer service metrics.

Bisignano has spent much of his first two months on the job heralding the advent of automated service options on both the Social Security Administration’s website and through its 1-800 customer service number. But last week, the agency involuntarily and with little notice reassigned 1,000 customer service representatives from the agency’s already understaffed field offices to help answer calls to the 1-800 number.

The agency said the reassignments reflect new capabilities thanks to the new technology, though it recently removed tranches of real-time performance data initially published by former Commissioner Martin O’Malley. But union officials said the reassignments belie the fact that the agency’s recent changes aren’t working—and the changes at field offices are actually degrading service delivery.

In a letter to Bisignano, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., questioned the provenance of the agency’s remaining public performance metrics and demanded information about the decision to reassign field office staff to supplement the agency’s teleservice centers alongside detailed metrics about the teleservice centers’ performance in the week prior to the reassignments.

“In June, Senator Warren released the results of her investigation of SSA’s phone wait time, showing that phone wait times on SSA’s AI-driven 1-800 number average over 1.75 hours—despite SSA’s claim of just 19.2 minutes,” they wrote. “These long wait times reveal the truth: the Trump administration’s cuts to the SSA workforce are disastrous—and any further staffing reductions will further degrade SSA and make it harder for seniors to get their monthly Social Security check or address other problems they may have with their benefits.”

The senators accused Bisignano of using the reassignments to “cover up the mess” of his addition of AI assistants to the 1-800 number and the aspirational 7,000-employee headcount reduction this fiscal year.

“The [reassignment] ‘pilot program’ would increase the number of staff answering calls to the 1-800 number by 25%,” they wrote. “But the employees you reassigned—with just a few days’ notice—were frontline customer service representatives who directly assisted recipients visiting offices. Reassigning customer service representatives left field offices short-staffed—forcing the backroom employees who are responsible for actually processing claims to pick up the in-person customer service responsibilities.”

• Print
• Email
• Tweet