STATEMENT BY
MAX RICHTMAN
PRESIDENT AND CEO
NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO PRESERVE SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE
TO THE SUBCOMMITTEES ON SOCIAL SECURITY AND WORK & WELFARE COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
HEARING WITH THE COMMISSIONER OF SOCIAL SECURITY
FRANK J. BISIGNANO
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 2026
On behalf of the millions of members and supporters of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, I submit the following for the record for the hearing of the House Ways and Means Committees’ Subcommittees on Social Security and Work and Welfare with the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Frank Bisignano. The National Committee is a grassroots advocacy and educational organization, and our members come from all walks of life and every political persuasion. What unites them is their passion for protecting and strengthening Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the other programs that are so vitally important to older Americans.
The ability of hard-working Americans to access their earned Social Security benefits is directly related to the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) ability to provide adequate customer service. Unfortunately, SSA has been seriously underfunded for many years, an intolerable situation at a time when over 10,000 Americans are reaching age 65 every day.
Exacerbating this chronic underfunding, the Trump Administration, under Elon Musk and his DOGE initiative, drove SSA’s staffing to its lowest levels since 1967, when the agency was not yet responsible for administering Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and served 52 million fewer beneficiaries. The result has been significant deterioration of customer service, which continues to plague the Agency. The Washington Post reported in December 2025 that record backlogs at SSA are delaying service, appointments take longer to get, and new service restrictions make it harder for people to get help. Widows and children who have lost parents face some of the longest delays, with months-long waits to receive benefits while many struggle to pay bills, food, and rent. And a study based on interviews with dozens of organizations working with disability applicants found applicants faced problems that included calls that were dropped or answered by people who couldn’t provide help, difficulties accessing walk-in services or making appointments in local offices, and applications that “take longer, are denied more often, with more errors along the way.”
Despite the rosy picture painted by SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano, SSA has clearly not recovered from the DOGE-driven purge of the Agency’s most experienced and knowledgeable staff in 2025. The 14 percent staff cut was the largest in SSA’s history, and has forced the Agency to triage operations, moving staff from one part of SSA to another as public demands reached critical levels: some days answering phones, other days staffing field offices, with only a bare minimum of training to adequately meet the new job requirements. And although no field offices have officially been permanently shuttered in the chaos, reports abound of ‘ghost’ field offices where staffing levels are low or non-existent – leaving only a hollow shell where previously a robust office operated.
As thousands of staff abruptly left key roles, SSA service reached a crisis point in the spring of 2025. News reports described lines snaking out the doors of local offices, website crashes, and callers waiting up to two or three hours to get help on SSA’s 800 number if they got through at all. In May 2025, the last month for which SSA posted detailed customer-focused performance metrics, callers had to wait about an hour and 45 minutes on hold or for a call back, fewer than half of callers eventually got through to a representative, and most retirees and survivors waited more than 28 days for an appointment.
In response, SSA’s leadership focused intensively, and with some success, on shortening the time that callers to SSA’s national 800 number spend waiting on hold, the metric known as average speed of answer or ASA. They reassigned 1,000 field office staff to the phone lines beginning in July 2025, boosting the number of call center agents by 25 percent, and subsequently reassigned additional staff from across the agency to aid the effort. The Commissioner has frequently cited progress on this metric as his response to complaints of continuing delays and difficulties accessing benefits. But the progress has not been as dramatic as they have claimed, with SSA’s inspector general finding that average total waits on the phone ranged from 45 minutes to two hours in 2025. In addition, the reduction in phone answer times doesn’t necessarily mean callers are ultimately getting the help they need faster. Many of the reassigned staff have no experience directly serving the public and may not have expertise in SSA program rules relevant to answering calls. Yet they receive only a few hours of training for their new role before interacting with callers, so they may not be prepared to address all of the difficult issues they may encounter.
Focusing on ASA also gives an incomplete and misleading impression of what callers to SSA actually experience, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has repeatedly reported.
First, ASA only measures the average speed of answer for those callers who are able to connect to an agent, excluding the millions of callers each month who do not get through before hanging up, being disconnected, or receiving a busy signal. An Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report found there were 25 million such callers in 2025, but the time they spent waiting unsuccessfully for help is not counted in ASA.
Second, roughly three-fourths of callers seeking to talk to an agent use the option, introduced in 2024, to receive a call back once an agent is available rather than remaining on hold. But while the typical wait for a call back is over an hour, SSA records the wait as zero minutes, reducing the reported average speed of answer well below callers’ actual experience. (SSA no longer publishes time spent waiting for a call back; it was last reported for September 2025 by the OIG.) ASA also doesn’t capture what happens to people who call a local field office rather than the national 800 number; they make up roughly 4 in 10 callers to SSA overall.
Finally, ASA sheds no light on other documented challenges callers to SSA have faced over the past year, including struggling to get through AI bots to speak to a human and never receiving a promised call back.
As a reaction to the public outcry over the deterioration of its services, SSA stopped publicly releasing regular monthly updates of many customer-focused service metrics. Although SSA restored the public release of some of its critical measures over time, certain key metrics have remained unreported. For example, SSA no longer shares how long callers to the 800 number wait on hold or for a call to be returned, how long it takes applicants to get an appointment, or how many unfulfilled requests languish in the processing backlog. And in May 2026, SSA failed to publish any updates to its monthly performance measures.
The lack of transparency has raised legitimate questions for members of the public who can see that the improvements SSA is advertising bear little resemblance to their own experience: phone wait times are much longer than publicly advertised; lengthy waits for appointments particularly harm widows and children who have lost parents; local offices often struggle to operate with shrinking staffs; and record-high processing backlogs create longer waits for needed help.
I will share with you my own experiences in this regard. I recently attended a town hall meeting in Medford, Massachusetts, which was held in the parking lot of a local Social Security Administration office. Inside, the office was packed with people waiting for service – which was being provided by a single employee. In addition to the crowded office, there was a line of at least 70 people outside waiting to get inside. This situation was not an anomaly but a regular occurrence in this office. And similar long lines being served by overwhelmed staff can be seen in field offices all around the country. I urge the members of this Committee to visit the field offices in your own districts and talk to your constituents. I also suggest you do not limit yourselves to offices selected by SSA, which have had focused staffing attention to provide photo opportunities for the Commissioner to showcase his successful management. Drop in to your local field office unannounced and witness the situation firsthand.
I also urge you to not to take the SSA press releases about service improvement and reductions in wait time on the Social Security 1-800 number at face value but verify them yourselves. I called the national number myself as a test and finally hung up after over 40 minutes sitting on hold. If you or your staff have not done so already, I suggest you try calling SSA and experience these delays. Then imagine how it would feel to be a widow who just lost a beloved husband and is trying to reach a field office to claim a survivors’ benefit. Your husband’s check was essential to pay the rent and buy food, and being forced to wait for hours just to make an appointment, which might not be scheduled for months, to claim a benefit your husband earned through his payroll contributions with each and every paycheck, simply adds insult to injury.
Even as waits on the 800 number have seen some improvement, other retirees, disabled workers, and bereaved families who need help from local offices are facing delays, with thousands fewer workers available to take appointments or follow through on requests. While SSA doesn’t publish data on staffing by field office, 40 states and Washington, D.C. each saw a decline of more than 10 percent in the overall number of SSA staff in the state between January 2025 and January 2026. In fact, some offices have been so short-staffed that they have been forced to close their doors to people seeking in-person service, sometimes for hours and sometimes for weeks or even months, leaving “ghost offices” which are technically open but not able to provide needed services.
As a result of the overall shortage in staff, filling holes in one critical area inevitably leaves gaps in others, and the consequences of this staff inadequacy are felt by consumers who continue to report alarming delays and logjams as they attempt to access their earned benefits. These long waits can be particularly harmful for people of color, low-income applicants, and others who on average are less likely to have savings or other resources to fall back on. Thousands are dying while waiting for a decision on whether they are eligible for disability benefits, and many more have endured years without income, in the process often exhausting their life savings and even losing their homes.
Relying on ‘digital services’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ efficiencies to pick up the slack has proven to be unreliable at best, as the most ambitious of the Commissioner’s initiatives – the creation of national, centralized systems for scheduling appointments and handling cases – have had to be significantly scaled back due to inadequate planning and poor preparation. As we understand it, the centralized appointment system is currently being tested in two states as a pilot project, and the centralized case handling system is well behind its advertised schedule. Although a third initiative, the shifting of Continuing Disability Reviews (CDRs) from state offices to a centralized location is apparently underway, it’s not clear whether any of these projects will result in improved customer service as overall staffing levels appear not to be increasing to accommodate the demands on the agency.
We urge the Administration to publish detailed plans for addressing its customer service challenges, identifying the specific steps it will take to improve customer service. It also needs to increase transparency by publishing the type of regular, detailed customer service metrics it used to release to the public. Taking these basic steps can help restore confidence in the agency and hold it accountable for delivering on its promises.
The American public has earned and deserves a Social Security Administration that is fully functional and meets their needs, as the Agency’s operations are almost entirely funded by the FICA contributions workers make with each and every paycheck. Denying Americans the service they have paid for is tantamount to denying them the Social Security benefits they have earned. Only a decade ago, Congress routinely allowed a customer service funding level that represented 1.2 percent of benefit outlays, an amount which allowed the Agency to provide the service the American people paid for and deserve. We believe it is imperative that Congress provide the highest possible funding for SSA in FY27, with a goal to restoring full funding to 1.2 percent of outlays.
In addition to the chaos at SSA caused by staffing shortages, Congress must investigate the continuing misuse of American’s personal data by this Administration. SSA maintains troves of personal information on virtually every American, and over the years Congress and SSA have worked to protect that data from misuse and theft with long-standing restrictions on who is allowed to access the data and how it is used. As is becoming increasingly evident from a slow trickle of public disclosures, this Administration has no respect for the importance of keeping this data secure. From the beginning of Elon Musk’s DOGE invasion of SSA, whistleblowers and investigative reporting continue to unearth improper and, in some cases, illegal misuse of SSA data files. Examples include what appeared to be unrestricted and unsupervised access to all SSA databases by DOGE acolytes, data copied to an unsecure cloud server, attempts to share data with third-party political operatives to overturn election results, and repeated efforts to weaponize the SSA Death Master File by classifying as dead persons known to be living.
Despite Congress’ oversight responsibility, little has been done by the majority to investigate these disclosures, or to determine whether SSA has been party to additional data exposures which have not yet come to light. Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch is a fundamental element of our Constitution and an essential part of the checks and balances that allow our Nation to thrive. It is imperative that this Committee investigate the SSA’s handling of American’s personal data, report your findings to the American people and pursue legislation to ensure that American’s data is not misused again in the future.
Finally, on June 9, 2026, Social Security’s Trustees issued their annual report on the financial status of the program’s Trust Funds. This report is a clarion call for Congress to strengthen the program now, before the looming depletion of the Trust Funds becomes a full-blown crisis. If Congress fails to act, the combined retirement and disability reserves will run dry in 2034 and beneficiaries will suffer an automatic 17% cut – a scenario few want to see happen. Lawmakers should not wait until the last minute when options become proscribed and remedies more costly.
This does not mean that Social Security is going ‘bankrupt’ or ‘broke.’ As long as people are working and paying into the system, Social Security will continue to pay benefits. For the program itself to go ‘broke,’ there would have to be 100% unemployment — a highly unlikely scenario.
Nor does the Trustees Report mean that benefits must be cut to maintain the program’s fiscal health, as some have repeatedly claimed. The American public has made it abundantly clear that they reject that approach, regardless of age or party affiliation. Recent surveys conducted by AARP show that 81% of adults disagreed with the idea of cutting Social Security in order to save it, and 58% said the average Social Security benefit of just over $2,000 is too low.
Instead, Congress has the tools to close the funding gap while protecting the Social Security Americans have earned through a lifetime of hard work. Adjusting the $184,500 payroll wage cap and subjecting some of high earners’ investment income to Social Security taxes would keep the system solvent well beyond the 2030s and provide funds for long-needed benefit improvements. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to achieve this goal, reflecting exactly what the public, overwhelmingly, wants to see happen. In response to those who claim America can no longer afford Social Security and Medicare, including President Donald Trump who recently stated that it is “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicaid, Medicare, and day care because the U.S. is “fighting wars” and needs to prioritize “military protection”, I would remind you that Social Security does not contribute a single dime to the federal debt. I would also point out that, while Social Security accounted for 23% of federal spending last year, it also accounted for 25% of federal revenues.
For more than 90 years, Social Security has provided basic financial stability for generations of retirees and their families. The government made a promise to workers who contribute to Social Security with every paycheck. In the wake of the new Trustees report, the people and their elected leaders must ensure that the promise of Social Security remains unbroken.