Social Security Pulls Field Staff To Answer Flood Of Calls

The Washington Post reports:

The Social Security Administration is surging staff to its customer service phone operations in the latest effort to address a massive influx of calls that has overwhelmed its struggling 1-800 number.

The agency said it is temporarily reassigning about 1,000 customer service representatives from field offices to work on the swamped toll-free phone line, increasing the number of agents by 25 percent. Social Security’s new commissioner, Frank Bisignano, is attempting to reduce phone wait times after customers complained of dropped calls, the website has repeatedly crashed and thousands of workers left the agency under the cost-cutting U.S. DOGE Service.

But Jessica LaPointe, president of Council 220 of the American Federation of Government Employees, said the move will slow responses to the complex cases that the field office employees handle and be only a temporary bandage for the phone problems.

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