The Claim

Reduced the average speed of answer for customer calls to the Social Security Administration to single digits.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

That the administration reduced the “average speed of answer” (ASA) — a specific SSA metric measuring the average time calls spend in queue before being answered — to below 10 minutes for the National 800 Number. The claim uses SSA’s technical metric name, and SSA’s own data does show the ASA reached 7 minutes in September 2025, down from a peak of 30 minutes in January 2025.

What is being implied but not asserted?

That Social Security callers now wait less than 10 minutes to speak to a representative. That the administration improved the experience of millions of seniors and disabled Americans trying to reach the agency. That this represents a genuine improvement in government service. The phrase “single digits” is designed to impress — it suggests near-instant service compared to the long waits that have plagued SSA for years.

What is conspicuously absent?

Six critical facts that fundamentally change the meaning of this claim: (1) The “average speed of answer” metric counts callers who accept a callback as having zero wait time, which dramatically deflates the reported number. When a caller presses “1” for a callback, SSA records their wait as zero minutes — even though the SSA Inspector General found those callers waited an average of 51 minutes to actually receive the callback in FY 2025 (peaking at 2 hours 32 minutes in January 2025). (2) For callers who stayed on hold rather than accepting a callback, the actual average queue wait time was 51 minutes in October 2024, peaked at 1 hour 40 minutes in January 2025, and was still 19 minutes at its September 2025 low — not “single digits.” (3) Approximately 25 million calls in FY 2025 ended without callers receiving any service at all, and these abandoned calls are excluded from SSA’s wait time calculations entirely. (4) The ASA improvement was achieved partly by reassigning approximately 1,000 field office employees per day to answer 800-number calls, directly degrading disability claims processing, field office service, and in-person appointment availability (which dropped from 87% within 30 days to 66%). (5) SSA lost approximately 7,000 employees — 12% of its workforce — through DOGE-driven cuts in 2025, the largest staffing reduction in SSA history. (6) This claim restates the same SSA phone service topic as item 248 using a different metric.

Padding Analysis: Same SSA Phone Service as Item 248

Item 248 claims SSA “answered 65% more calls” compared to the prior year. Item 249 claims the “average speed of answer” was reduced to “single digits.” Both describe the same SSA phone service improvement initiative during the same period. Item 248 frames it as a volume increase; item 249 frames it as a speed improvement. Together they present a single operational change — increased call handling on the National 800 Number in FY 2025 — as two separate “wins.” Item 250 further extends the pattern by claiming the administration “enhanced Social Security” broadly. The three SSA items (248-250) form a cluster that inflates a single topic into three claimed achievements.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

SSA’s official “average speed of answer” metric did reach single digits by the end of FY 2025. SSA’s open data shows the ASA for the National 800 Number was 13 minutes in October 2024, peaked at 30 minutes in January 2025, and declined to 7 minutes by September 2025. The FY 2025 annual average ASA was 15.9 minutes, down from 27.9 minutes in FY 2024. Commissioner Bisignano reported a weekly ASA as low as 4.6 minutes during the week of July 21, 2025. These numbers are technically accurate as measured by SSA’s methodology. ¹

The ASA metric systematically undercounts actual caller wait times by recording callback requests as zero wait time. The SSA Inspector General’s December 2025 audit (Report A-03-25-17), conducted at Senator Elizabeth Warren’s request, found that when a caller accepts an initial offering of a callback, “SSA considers the caller as not actively waiting on hold and counts the call in the ASA calculation as having zero wait time, which reduces the average.” The OIG confirmed this methodology dramatically deflates the publicly reported number. For callers who accepted callbacks in FY 2025, the actual average wait for the callback was approximately 51 minutes, peaking at 2 hours 32 minutes in January 2025 and reaching its lowest at approximately 1 hour 2 minutes in September 2025. Even at the September low, callback callers waited over an hour. ²

For callers who stayed on hold rather than accepting callbacks, average queue wait times were far higher than “single digits.” The OIG report found the average queue wait time for hold callers was approximately 51 minutes in October 2024, peaked at 1 hour 40 minutes in January 2025, and reached 19 minutes at its September 2025 low. A CNN investigation in August 2025 found actual average hold time was 22 minutes while callback wait was 59 minutes. Senator Warren’s office survey in June 2025 found average wait times of 102 minutes. The IG report for the period covered by item 230 found actual wait times of 51 minutes with callbacks averaging 1 hour 51 minutes. ³

Approximately 25 million calls ended without callers receiving any service in FY 2025, and these calls are excluded from SSA’s wait time metrics. The OIG audit found that callers abandoned 21.3 million calls (disconnecting while on hold or during the callback process), with the remainder consisting of failed callback attempts and busy signals. SSA’s publicly reported metrics do not include the wait times associated with these unserved calls. This represents roughly 27% of the total 93 million calls (68 million served plus 25 million unserved). ⁴

The phone wait time improvement was achieved partly by reassigning approximately 1,000 field office employees per day to answer 800-number calls, directly degrading other SSA services. Starting in July 2025, SSA began redirecting field office staff to phone duty. NPR reported in July 2025 that union representatives said staff stress was “at a maximum” and that claims specialists were being removed from disability processing to answer phones — a move union leaders called “directly harmful to the public.” The CBPP found disability appointment availability within 30 days dropped from 87% to 66%, 6 million cases were backlogged in processing centers, and 12 million transactions were backed up in field offices. Kathleen Romig of CBPP described the situation as “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” ⁵

SSA lost approximately 7,000 employees — 12% of its workforce — in 2025, the largest staffing reduction in the agency’s history. The OIG audit confirmed that at the start of FY 2025, SSA had approximately 4,700 employees available for 800-number calls; by June 2025 this had fallen to just over 4,000, a 13% decrease. The overall agency experienced the departure of over 7,350 employees through DOGE-driven buyouts, early retirements, and terminations. The staffing crisis that created the phone wait time problem was of the administration’s own making. ⁶

Strong Inferences

Commissioner Bisignano’s public claims about wait times appear to have involved selective metric presentation and cherry-picked baselines. Government Executive reported in August 2025 that Bisignano’s letter to Congress cited poor service metrics from early 2024 or FY 2024 averages as baselines, hiding gains made under former Commissioner Martin O’Malley, who had already reduced the 800-number ASA to under 13 minutes by end of FY 2024. Officials also expressed concern that Bisignano may have begun including AI chatbot interactions — not just live agent connections — in his response time calculations. In May 2025, Bisignano told employees the “single digits” goal was aspirational, yet by July he was citing 4.6-minute weekly figures that officials said “shouldn’t be trusted.” ⁷

The “single digits” achievement represents metric optimization rather than genuine service improvement. When you combine three factors — counting callbacks as zero, excluding 25 million abandoned calls, and reassigning disability specialists to phone duty — the resulting ASA number reflects a statistical artifact rather than the lived experience of SSA callers. A senior who calls, accepts a callback, waits 62 minutes for the return call, then speaks to a former IT help desk employee reassigned from another department, has not experienced “single digit” service. The metric was optimized; the service was not. ⁸

What the Evidence Shows

The “single digits” claim is technically accurate in the narrowest possible sense: SSA’s official Average Speed of Answer metric for the National 800 Number did drop below 10 minutes in the latter months of FY 2025, reaching 7 minutes in September. But the claim is designed to create an impression that is fundamentally untrue — that Social Security callers now wait less than 10 minutes to talk to a person.

The SSA Inspector General’s own audit, released in December 2025, revealed what the ASA metric actually measures and what it excludes. When a caller is offered a callback and presses “1,” their wait time is recorded as zero — even though the IG found those callers waited an average of over an hour for the callback. Callers who stayed on hold waited an average of 19 minutes at the September 2025 low point — better than the 51 minutes in October 2024, but still not “single digits.” And 25 million calls simply ended without service — callers who gave up, whose callbacks failed, or who got busy signals. These abandoned calls are invisible to the ASA metric.

Even the real improvement that did occur came at a steep cost. To bring down phone wait times, SSA reassigned approximately 1,000 field office employees per day to answer 800-number calls starting in July 2025. This meant pulling claims specialists away from disability processing and field office service. The result was predictable: 6 million cases backed up in processing centers, 12 million transactions backed up in field offices, disability appointment availability plunging from 87% to 66%. The phone metric improved because the administration chose to sacrifice other services to achieve a single reportable number. As CBPP’s Kathleen Romig put it, this was “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” — an agency that lost 12% of its workforce was simply shifting an inadequate staff pool from one overwhelmed function to another.

The baseline comparison is also misleading. Under former Commissioner Martin O’Malley, the ASA had already dropped to under 13 minutes by the end of FY 2024. Then it spiked to 30 minutes in January 2025 — during the Trump administration’s own transition period and DOGE disruptions. The administration’s “single digit” achievement is partly a recovery from a crisis it created.

The Bottom Line

The claim that SSA achieved “single digit” average speed of answer is technically accurate by SSA’s own metric, but that metric is designed to produce flattering numbers. The SSA Inspector General found that the ASA counts callback requests as zero wait time, excludes 25 million abandoned calls, and does not reflect actual caller experience. Real hold times at the September 2025 low were 19 minutes; real callback times were over an hour. The improvement that did occur was achieved by reassigning disability claims specialists to phone duty, causing backlogs of 6 million cases in processing centers and 12 million transactions in field offices. This is metric optimization, not service improvement.

This is also padding of item 248, which claims SSA “answered 65% more calls.” Both items describe the same SSA phone service initiative. Presenting one operational change as two separate “wins” — while the underlying reality is 25 million unanswered calls, hour-long actual wait times, and catastrophic backlogs in disability processing — is the kind of statistical sleight-of-hand that the “365 wins” list relies on throughout.

Footnotes

1. SSA Open Data, “Average Speed to Answer for National 800 Number Network,” https://www.ssa.gov/data/800-number-average-speed-to-answer.html. SSA, “Social Security Gains Momentum: Meeting Customer Needs Online, on the Phone, and In-Person,” July 23, 2025, https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/press/releases/2025-07-23.html. Government Executive, “In partisan letter, Bisignano shifts blame on 1-800 call times, cites dated stats,” August 14, 2025, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/08/partisan-letter-bisignano-shifts-blame-1800-call-times/407307/ ↩

2. SSA Office of the Inspector General, “Social Security Administration’s Telephone Metrics” (Report A-03-25-17), December 19, 2025, https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/032517.pdf. Nextgov/FCW, “SSA phone wait times longer than publicly reported metrics, per OIG report,” December 22, 2025, https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2025/12/ssa-phone-wait-times-longer-publicly-reported-metrics-oig-report/410360/ ↩

3. SSA OIG Report A-03-25-17 (cited above). CNN, “Social Security says agents answer the toll-free phone line in 8 minutes, on average. Here’s why that’s misleading,” August 29, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/29/politics/social-security-phone-hold-time. 24/7 Wall Street, “Social Security Wait Time Jumps To An Hour,” February 19, 2026, https://247wallst.com/income/2026/02/19/social-security-wait-time-jumps-to-an-hour/ ↩

4. SSA OIG Report A-03-25-17 (cited above). The 25 million unserved calls and 21.3 million abandoned calls figures come directly from the IG audit. ↩

5. NPR, “Efforts to shrink Social Security’s phone wait times are putting a strain elsewhere,” July 22, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/nx-s1-5475151/social-security-phone-wait-staffing-crunch. CBPP, “Reassignment Won’t Fix the Largest-Ever Social Security Staffing Cut,” October 8, 2025, https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/reassignment-wont-fix-the-largest-ever-social-security-staffing-cut. Center for American Progress, “The Social Security Administration Is Bleeding Staff,” February 1, 2026, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-social-security-administration-is-bleeding-staff/ ↩

6. SSA OIG Report A-03-25-17 (cited above) — staffing figures for 800-number agents. Nextgov/FCW, “Accessing Social Security disability benefits became harder in 2025, researchers find,” March 2026, https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2026/03/accessing-social-security-disability-benefits-became-harder-2025-researchers-find/411887/. 24/7 Wall Street (cited above) — at least 7,000 SSA workers laid off, 12% of all SSA employees cut. ↩

7. Government Executive, “In partisan letter, Bisignano shifts blame on 1-800 call times, cites dated stats,” August 14, 2025, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/08/partisan-letter-bisignano-shifts-blame-1800-call-times/407307/. Federal News Network, “SSA will get call wait times down to ‘single digits’ using AI, commissioner tells employees,” June 2, 2025, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/it-modernization/2025/05/ssa-will-get-call-wait-times-down-to-single-digits-using-ai-commissioner-tells-employees/ ↩

8. Based on synthesis of OIG findings (callbacks counted as zero, 25 million excluded calls) and NPR/CBPP reporting on staff reassignment consequences. Empire Justice Center, “OIG Audit Reveals Gaps in SSA’s Public Metrics,” https://empirejustice.org/resources_post/office-of-the-inspector-general-oig-audit-reveals-gaps-in-ssas-public-metrics/ ↩