For all the talk about Social Security being in crisis, what hasn’t been stressed enough is the leadership crisis. From December of 2023 to until the current leader’s Senate confirmation of May 6, a parade of four commissioners and acting commissioners cycled through the position. These chiefs departed fast in part because they got frequent hammerings in Congress over the agency’s poor phone and face-to-face service to beneficiaries.
Enter Frank Bisignano. The Jamie Dimon protegee had a storied career in banking, and was appointed to lead SSA last spring (he has since added the job of IRS CEO to his resume, which you can read about here.)
But the changes he has quickly enacted at SSA—drawing heavily on his time in the private sector—are real, and they’re impressing even the Administration’s fiercest critics.
One of Bisignano’s first moves was to ensure that people could access the My SSA.gov website 24/7. “When I took over, I learned that the site was down 29 hours a week or 17% of the time,” Bisignano told Fortune in a lengthy interview. “It was supposed to be ‘off hours.’ But it wasn’t off hours for our recipients in Hawaii or the West Coast.” Bisignano quickly rallied his engineering team to get the site running around the clock.
Another huge priority: Shrinking the notoriously long phone wait times that brought a flood of complaints to members of Congress, and sparked their demands at those acrimonious hearings that the Commissioners get it right, which they typically failed to do. In just a few months, Bisignano improved the automated phone system so that it could successfully handle a far larger share of inquiries, freeing the agents to take the in-person calls much faster. Result: For June, the average time people waited on hold before speaking to an agent dropped to 13 minutes, versus 20 in June of last year. The trend continued in July (24 minutes to 8), and August (21 to 9), and in September, the interval dropped to an all-time low of 7 minutes, around half the delay registered a year earlier The SSA phone service worked far quicker while handling 65 million callers, 67% more than in FY 2024.
Bisignano also pushed hard to ensure that the field offices remained open during the 43 day government shutdown that ended in late November, so that new applications and appeals kept getting processed, though at a slower-than-normal pace due to fewer workers. Callers even got their inquiries answered on the days bracketing Christmas. Though December 24 and 26 were federal holidays, the new Commissioner marshalled the staff at the more than 1,200 community service outlets to work those days in exchange for overtime payments. Around 66% showed up, and as Bisignano puts it, “That’s like a landslide vote!” In another win, the Commissioner orchestrated new workflows that reduced the time for processing disability claims from 240 to 209 days, and curbed the backlog to 865,000 from 1.26 million.
According to an SSA press release, at a meeting with Bisignano in July, Senator Warren “expressed disbelief about the data” provided by the Commissioner and his staff showing a quick, substantial reduction in wait times for callers on the national SSA 800 number. The legislator and Commissioner agreed to an audit of the reported stats by the Office of the Inspector General. In a report published on December 22, the OIG backed Bisignano, concluding that “The SSA’s publicly reported metrics were accurate, and its overall telephone performance improved during FY 2025.”
No matter what your political party, few could argue that an agency in need of efficiency finally has a leader at the top who is moving the needle.
