By Alex Moore
This July, the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that it had made progress on one of its biggest priorities: Improving its customer service. According to a press release from the agency, SSA reduced its average speed to answer incoming phone calls from beneficiaries and applicants from 30 minutes in 2024 to just six minutes by the middle of 2025.
That’s not the only progress the agency has claimed to make, either. The SSA says it has also driven down its disability backlogs by about 25 percent and improved field office waiting times by about 23 percent.
Doubts in High Places
The SSA’s former commissioner, Martin O’Malley, has publicly called those numbers into question. As originally reported by the Ohio Capital Journal, O’Malley (who is also the former Democratic governor of Maryland) suggested the improvements reported by SSA are unrealistic after it implemented a 13 percent cut to its workforce this year. He also accused the administration of misleading the public.
“The [SSA] has become like the Hermit Kingdom, only the happy story gets told,” said O’Malley. He pointed to several metrics that are no longer publicly available as evidence: The weekly reports Congress receives from the agency have stopped, he claims. Additionally, the agency has stopped sharing its performance center backlog, which is a measure of how much overflow work field offices are receiving.
O’Malley also believes the SSA might be manipulating some of the metrics it does report, specifically those related to phone waiting times, by changing the definition of a good result. When measuring time to answer a call, O’Malley said that an answer “would appear to be anytime a person calls and hangs up after hearing a recording, or calls and gets run around the barn three times by a chatbot and has their call dumped … None of it bears any reality to what people are experiencing.”
What’s really going on?
To put the claims from SSA and O’Malley to the test, TSCL decided to run some quick numbers. We launched a rapid one-question poll on our website this August, asking seniors how long it took to reach a representative the last time they called Social Security.
In total, 48 seniors who had recently called Social Security completed our poll. As shown in the chart below, 29 percent waited more than 30 minutes to reach a representative, while 35 percent never even spoke to anyone, giving up after waiting 30 minutes or more. Only about one in five seniors (19 percent) reached someone at the SSA within 10 minutes of calling.
While this poll is a small sample, the numbers suggest that O’Malley is probably correct, at least to some extent. This is absolutely an issue that TSCL will be studying in the future, and in the meantime, we’re calling on the SSA to dramatically increase transparency around its performance metrics. While we know that we and the SSA share the same goal—improving Social Security’s customer service—we’re also quite sure that fudging the numbers won’t get us there.
