'Shocking': Social Security callers wait hours before being 'disconnected with no warning'

Wait times for people calling the Social Security Administration (SSA) have reportedly skyrocketed in the first few months of President Donald Trump's second term.

That's according to a Thursday article in USA TODAY, which reported that Social Security beneficiaries are being out through a particularly arduous and time-consuming process whenever they try to reach the agency by phone. In early May, the outlet reported that average wait times had increased to 90 minutes per caller, and the average speed of an answer excluding call-back wait time was roughly 20 minutes.

"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," the report read. "Multiple times they did not reach a live person before the line disconnected with no warning."

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The poor customer service at the agency also came up during a recent hearing in a House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing, with multiple House Democrats bringing up exceedingly long wait times to SSA commissioner Frank Bisignano. While the SSA used to display real-time performance metrics showing callers the average wait time and expected number of days for a benefits application to be processed, Bisignano took those metrics down. Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) slammed Bisignano over that decision, after he defended it by saying he felt the metrics would discourage people from calling.

"How can you know how the Social Security Administration is doing with regard to answering calls or processing benefit applications unless you have these metrics?" Chu told USA TODAY. "You have to compare them over time so it is shocking that they would just remove that data if they are so confident about all of these metrics that he was talking about."

Even prior to the Trump administration's across-the-board mass firings at multiple federal agencies, staffing levels at the SSA were already at a 10-year low, according to the paper. Earlier this year, acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek ordered mass layoffs at the agency that ultimately amounted to shedding 7,000 of SSA's estimated 57,000-person workforce. And USA TODAY reported that roughly 3,000 SSA workers have already accepted buyout offers.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who leads Senate Democrats' "Social Security War Room," called the long wait times "deeply troubling." When Warren's office called Social Security's 1-800 number, wait times were as long as three hours, and averaged roughly one hour and 45 minutes. Her office also found that more than 50% of all calls were never answered by a human being, and that a majority of calls ended after a caller was inadvertently disconnected after being on hold.

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Click here to read USA TODAY's full report.