A technical issue at the Social Security Administration recently caused phone calls to various field offices to be routed to other offices that didn’t have jurisdiction over the claims, thus making service fulfillment difficult.
On Tuesday, NPR reported that the agency’s field offices were having difficulties connecting callers to the proper staff who could fulfill their requests. “If it’s someone else’s office, the jurisdiction is someone else’s,” Angela Digeronimo, a SS claims specialist in Woodbridge, N.J., told the news service. “You can’t take action on it because your office does not have the ability to clear that claim. You have to refer it over to the servicing office, which is what the member of the public thought they were doing. So, it gets a little bit cumbersome.”
SSA seems to have initially denied the allegations. “All SSA field offices are equipped to handle inquiries and resolve issues for callers, irrespective of where a caller lives or where their case originated,” a statement shared with NPR reads.
However, as of Friday, it appears that the agency has backtracked. In a statement published to its website on Thursday, the SSA admitted that it had discovered a service issue that resembled the one NPR had previously reported on. The statement reads:
“During another visit on August 1 to our New Brunswick, New Jersey field office, employees shared a specific challenge: sometimes, when answering calls from outside their office’s traditional service area, they were unable to fully assist a very small percentage of customers due to system constraints. We recognized that, to serve you better, we needed to ensure our employees had the tools to help every caller, no matter where they are located.”
The SSA subsequently “rolled out an important update to our key workload processing systems,” the agency says. The updates “now allow our employees to meet your needs, regardless of which office you call or where your case is located.” After the agency’s admission, NPR subsequently updated its story, noting that the SSA had sent it another statement that reads: “This critical update occurred immediately following feedback Commissioner Bisignano received from SSA employees while visiting field offices.”
Ever since the beginning of the year, when Elon Musk’s DOGE organization began monkeying with various federal agencies, concerns have spread that Trump’s wrecking ball crew would attempt to destabilize social security benefits for millions of Americans. Activists have warned that proposed changes to the agency could spur service disruptions that would have disastrous impacts on benefit recipients. Obviously, service issues like the one reported this week don’t inspire a whole lot of confidence in the agency. If the Trump administration is trying to make SSA more “efficient” (as DOGE’s supposed mandate), it doesn’t appear to be succeeding. A recent report from Axios shows that the agency may have lost some 20 percent of its staff since March.
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