Key Point: “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. … 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.”

USA Today: How long will you wait for Social Security help? Why it’s anybody’s guess.

By Sarah D. Wire

• 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.

• [T]he 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• [M]ore than 50% [of calls] 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.

###