Social Security is rerouting staff to man the phone lines — and hiding how long callers are waiting

A Social Security office in New York City.Allie Kelly/BIThe Social Security Administration is reassigning up to 1,000 field office employees to teleservice work.The staffing switch-up is meant to "meet the most pressing service demands."Publicly available data on wait times and other live data has vanished.Social Security is switching things up to answer your calls faster, while data showing wait times has disappeared from its website.The agency is temporarily reassigning up to 1,000 field office employees to teleservice work, per an internal union document obtained by Business Insider. The document shows the agency is changing staff responsibilities to address areas in need, and told employees only 4% of those currently working in field offices will be affected.An SSA official confirmed the change. The official said that "this initiative supports the agency's broader customer service strategy by enabling more flexible, real-time allocation of staff to meet the most pressing service demands."The reassignment comes as workers and recipients alike fret over the state of a pared-down Social Security Administration. The agency has already said it wants to reduce staffing, and has fielded concerns from recipients about portals going down or documents becoming inaccessible. For some employees, the most recent changes are another example of the tumult that has enveloped the agency this year."Forget about the duties that they were accustomed to in their field office, now they'll be answering phones and strictly answering phones," field office employee Edwin Osario told BI."Employees are continually feeling demoralized and disaffected," he added."Whatever cuts they're making or whatever they're doing — I've dealt with Social Security before, and I never had these long wait times," 72-year-old Robert Zeidler previously told BI, adding, "You have to go through some major hoops to get anything done."At the same time, it has become harder to gauge what call wait times actually look like; as of publication, previously publicly available metrics no longer appear on the agency's website. Laura Haltzel, a former SSA executive, told BI that she and her fellow former executives noticed the metrics disappearing. She said the group was "intimately familiar" with the metrics, and some had even generated them or been evaluated on them."If these numbers are accurate, why not keep them posted on the website?" Haltzel said. Have a tip? Contact these reporters via Signal at alliekelly.10 and julianakaplan.33 or email at [email protected] or [email protected]. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Customer service challenges continueThe staffing shuffle and disappearing data follow months of chaos within the SSA.The White House DOGE office prompted a staff reduction of 7,000 workers from the agency's previous 57,000, beginning in February, pushing historically low employee numbers even lower. This led to beneficiaries flooding customer service lines, anxious that the checks that they rely on each month could be disrupted.The percentage of callers who received a pre-recorded disconnect message skyrocketed to 28.4% in March from less than 4% over the previous year.Current and former Social Security employees have also told BI morale is tanking in their offices as workloads rise. When BI spoke with field office workers this spring, several said they were constantly anxious about being fired and feel overrun with paperwork, phone calls, and meetings everyday. One said it is "the most chaotic period in my 40-plus years that I've been here."Employees like Osario worry that a July 8 Supreme Court ruling could pave the way for additional staff cuts at the agency, though none have been announced. The court decision will allow the Trump administration to continue its reduction of the federal workforce."Our performance metrics have gone downhill in recent months based on actions already taken," Jessica LaPointe, a union president who represents SSA workers, told BI, adding that cuts would reduce service. "We are at historically low staffing levels compared to the number of beneficiaries we serve. We simply can't afford to lose any more workers."Public data is vanishingAs workers and beneficiaries raise alarms about understaffing, wait times are becoming more difficult to track. The SSA used to display metrics showing live data on wait times, callback times, and historical data, per an archived version of a webpage from April.Now, the site shows aggregated data from the fiscal year and no longer displays the live wait times. Per the Washington Post and Internet Archive snapshots, the webpages seem to have shifted around early June."It's just recently that some really key data elements in terms of wait times for their 800 service and details about the disability processing wait times are not readily available," Jack Smalligan, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Center and an SSA alum, told BI. He added: "It's really disconcerting."Former SSA commissioner Martin O'Malley also told BI that he had noticed the agency has removed a slew of public-facing metrics, which he believes "undermines credibility.""Even the thickest businessman can figure out that if you have an all-time high number of customers growing, growing, growing every day, every day, every day, and you reduce the staff to a 50-year low, customer service is going to suffer," O'Malley said.The publicly accessible data available under SSA's Open Data platform does show that the average speed to answer 800-number calls did get quicker in May, falling from around 17 minutes in April to around 11.5 minutes in May.The SSA official told BI that new Commissioner Frank Bisignano continues to evaluate the agency, and "we are updating our performance metrics to better reflect the real experiences of the people we serve and highlight the fastest ways our customers can get service."Read the original article on Business Insider

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