07/10/2025

Social Security Pulls Field Office Staff to Answer Overwhelmed Phone Line

The agency has struggled to improve customer service amid recent cutbacks

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is rapidly increasing staffing 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, a Trump appointee, 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 ill-planned cost-cutting tactics by the U.S. DOGE Service, a nongovernmental task force created by the current administration.

But Jessica LaPointe, president of Council 220 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), 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. The union said it has heard from workers at several offices that no longer have customer service representatives available due to the change.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.