There are around 75 million individuals across the country who rely on the Social Security program month after month. Since January, the program has been undergoing a number of changes and updates, some aimed at bettering the processes of the agency at large, while others sparked major backlash. In May, Frank J. Bisignano had officially been appointed to the role of commissioner at the Social Security Administration (SSA). Amongst his first tasks as SSA commissioner, Bisignano was charged with overseeing the roll out of the Social Security Fairness Act and its accompanying retroactive payments. Bisignano has also been working on improving customer service at the SSA through the implementation or new or updated technology.
As the 2025 year begins wrapping up, Bisignano has now written an end of year letter to Congress outlining his numerous achievements in his first six months as SSA commissioner. Here is what you need to know.
SSA commissioner outlines achievements in letter to Congress
At the beginning of the year, the presence of DOGE at the SSA sparked major concern in beneficiaries and advocates alike. The DOGE-implemented cutbacks resulted in a reduction in force of around 7,000 SSA employees, as well as the closure of several field offices. Subsequently in May when Bisignano became SSA Commissioner, he shared a desire to make the SSA a “digital-first” organization and began updating the technology used at the agency so as to improve customer service.
“Following my confirmation in early May, I learned that SSA’s online portal, my Social Security, had scheduled downtime of 29 hours a week, leaving Americans without instant access to their benefit information. As a result of the quick actions taken by my leadership team this past summer, Americans now have 24/7 access to their Social Security information online…The growth in new account holders, combined with our increased engagement on the value of doing business online, enabled a nearly 20% increase in online transactions in Fiscal Year 2025 compared to the prior year,” Bisignano wrote in the letter.
In recent months, the SSA has also touted its reduced wait times on the telephone line as well as in field offices.
“Through the use of technology and proper allocation of resources, we have been able to reduce the year-over-year average speed of answer from 28 minutes in Fiscal Year 2024 to 15 minutes in Fiscal Year 2025, while serving 65% more callers than the previous year. In addition, nearly 90% of calls are now resolved via self-service or convenient callbacks, methods Americans frequently use when contacting organizations in both the public and private sector,” Bisignano further outlined.
He also added that, “In-office wait times are down almost 27% to 22 minutes from 30 minutes at the end of last year. Visitors who had a scheduled appointment only waited around 6 minutes on average to receive assistance. This has been made possible with changes to the field office phone systems now allowing for nearly 30% of calls to be handled instantaneously through technology, which gives our teams more time to focus on customers needing help in-person.”
The backlog of disability claims has also been a point of contention recently with the number of pending claims reaching a record high in mid-2024. The fortunate news for disability applicants is that this backlog is slowly being cleared and the number of pending cases has since dropped significantly.
“The disability claims backlog was at an all-time high in June of 2024 with over 1.26 million pending claims. I am proud to share that we have reduced the backlog this year by over 25% to 865,000, a level that hasn’t been seen since 2022. We also decreased the initial claim average processing time by 13% to 209 days, down from 240 days in January 2025, and maintained historic lows of disability hearings pending, with average wait times reduced by nearly 60 days since the last fiscal year,” Bisignano wrote.
Another milestone achievement from Bisignano would be the rapid processing of all 3.2 million Social Security Fairness Act claims. The SSA initially estimated this task would be completed by early November, however, all claims were successfully processed by the first week of July — five months ahead of schedule.
“In July, we announced that we completed sending over 3.1 million payments, totaling over $17 billion, to beneficiaries eligible under the Social Security Fairness Act (SSFA), 5 months ahead of schedule,” the letter read.