Since the beginning of the year, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has been undergoing a variety of changes under the country’s new leadership. Amongst the more notable changes has been the appointment of Frank Bisignano as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration after being nominated for the position by President Donald Trump.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its role within the SSA also sparked some controversy. Whilst DOGE was created with the purpose of cutting down federal spending, its decision to enact cutbacks at the SSA had sparked concerns from many. There had been complaints of lengthened wait times at field offices, as well as website crashes.
Now that the SSA has officially appointed a new commissioner, lawmakers now want to know what the plans for the future of the agency are. Here is what Commissioner Frank Bisignano hopes to achieve.
Cutbacks at the Social Security Administration
Earlier in the year, the SSA reduced its workforce by 7,000 employees as a result of the cutbacks enacted by DOGE which had been headed by tech billionaire Elon Musk at the time. Several field offices were also closed and employees had also been reassigned to field office positions.
The SSA currently has its lowest headcount on record in the last 50 years, however, Commissioner Bisignano feels confident that the agency will still function well through the implementation of technology. “Increased staffing is not the long term solution,” Bisignano said to lawmakers. “We will do this by becoming a digital-first, technology-led organization that puts the public as our focal point.”
Additionally, in the grander scheme of things, if no changes are made to the Social Security program soon, the Old Age and Survivors trust fund is projected to be depleted by 2034, at which point only 77% of scheduled payments will be able to be covered, according to the latest annual report from Social Security trustees. In the 2024 report, the projected trust fund depletion date was projected to be 2035, meaning that it has now been pushed up a year.
Commissioner Bisignano pursues AI
Having a “highly motivated workforce” is a “personal goal” of Bisignano’s, along with raising the consistently low employee satisfaction ranking held by agency for the past three years. Beginning in 2026, Bisignano has shared that the agency will “focus our hiring efforts on highly skilled IT staff and field offices with staffing gaps that impact our ability to deliver.”
“I have no intent to RIF people,” Bisignano assured managers in an unscripted address last month. “If I wake up and find out we can do all our work with 20,000 people — which I can’t see that right now — we’ll be 20,000. If I wake up and say, ‘We need 80,000,’ we’ll be 80,000. I’ve got to determine what the right staffing level is.”
Another goal of Bisignano is to grow the SSA into a “digital first organization”, and he hopes to achieve this through the use of AI, or Artificial Intelligence, at the agency in order to streamline work.
“We’re never going to be client-first if we’re not digital-first in this era,” he said. “That’s the only way we’re going to win. You’re competing with experiences that people have with Amazon. If I can get something done at Amazon, why can’t I get something done the same way with Social Security? That’s how people think.”
The initial plan is to implement AI on the agency’s phone lines — which are said to have had notoriously long wait times due to the recent cutbacks.
“The phone has to have artificial intelligence to do the work. We can all do this in a year, and then your jobs will be more enriching,” he explained. “The reason we get so many phone calls is because half the people have to call twice.”
“We’re not going to get everything done in a week, but if we need to spend more money on tech, I’ll do it. I’m not sure I need to. We spend a boatload of money on tech. But we can make our technologists better, too,” Bisignano said.