'A vicious cycle': Trump official ripped for hiding agency evidence

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15 July

President Donald Trump holds a Cabinet meeting, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in the Cabinet Room. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)

As the Trump administration pushes to cut 7,000 jobs held by federal employees at the Social Security Administration, the agency that oversees the crucial anti-poverty program for senior citizens and people with disabilities has made numerous efforts to disguise the customer service crisis that the cuts have caused—and Democrats on Monday demanded answers about what one progressive lawmaker recently denounced as a "cover up" to hide long wait times.

U.S. Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) led 18 Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee in writing to Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, urging the former Wall Street executive to explain why several customer service metrics were deleted from the SSA's website just as Americans were facing longer wait times and a reduced ability to speak with customer service representatives rather than having their claims and questions handled through automation.

Chu spearheaded the letter weeks after the SSA stopped publishing more than 30 metrics related to the performance of its 1-800 number, retirement claims processing times, and disability decision reconsideration wait times.

"Early last month SSA abruptly removed that comprehensive menu of data from its website and replaced it with a new webpage that provides much more limited and sometimes misleading information on the agency's customer service performance," wrote the Democrats. "We are concerned that this new menu is far less helpful for our constituents in knowing what to expect when interacting with SSA."

In addition to omitting crucial information about how long retirees and people with disabilities can expect to wait to receive their benefits or to talk to a representative, Chu noted that the metrics that are currently shown "seem designed to pressure beneficiaries to use online tools instead of talking to live people, an option that simply doesn't work for all beneficiaries, especially the very old and people in rural areas with poor Internet access."

"The agency's removal of comprehensive customer service data calls into question whether this administration seeks to hide from the public the negative customer service impacts of its staffing cuts," reads the letter.

The letter was sent days after The Washington Postreported that the SSA is pulling staff from its field offices to act as customer service representatives for its 1-800 number following a surge in complaints about dropped calls and website crashes.

That change is likely to slow down responses to complicated claims cases that are often handled by field office staff, Jessica LaPointe, president of Council 220 of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the Post.

"So it's just going to create a vicious cycle of work not getting cleared, people calling for status on work that's sitting because the claims specialists now are going to have to pick up the slack of the customer service representatives that are redeployed to the teleservice centers," LaPointe said last week.

Alex Lawson, executive director of the advocacy group Social Security Works, told the Post last month as the metrics were deleted from the SSA website that the Trump administration's attempts to conceal the effects of its mass layoffs would not succeed.

"People notice when they can't get an appointment because their local field office has lost half its staff. When checks and decisions are delayed. When they get the runaround from an AI chatbot on the phone, instead of getting to talk to a real person," said Lawson.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized the agency for "playing musical chairs to try and fill in the gaps" and suggested Bisignano "stop gutting the critical workforce that helps Americans every single day."

Chu and the other Ways and Means Committee Democrats emphasized that the agency recently restored one metric to its new website: a chart showing the six-year trend of disability determination processing times.

"That the agency chose to cherry pick and restore only this metric," they wrote, "and not any of the others that had been removed, only deepens our concern about why your agency continues to keep hidden certain metrics that had previously been publicly available."

The Democrats demanded that the SSA restore "all the robust public data that the agency had previously reported prior to June 2025, including historical data, and to regularly update that data."

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