On Social Security’s 90th birthday, the Trump administration continues to tout faulty stats

President Donald Trump and Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano on Thursday celebrated the 90th anniversary of the creation of the Social Security Administration by misrepresenting the health of the agency and lying about instances of fraud.

At a ceremony in the Oval Office commemorating the signing of the 1935 Social Security Act, Trump and Bisignano, who himself celebrated his 100th day since being confirmed to his post, touted the “miraculous” turnaround at the agency since Trump returned to office in January. But that praise was undercut by the recitation of a series of misleading statistics regarding the agency’s customer service initially listed in a letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., last week.

“The four years of Biden were very, very destructive—Social Security was going to be destroyed,” Trump claimed. “The average call wait time reached an all-time high of 42 minutes, field office wait times were at 32 minutes, and the disability claims backlog was the longest ever in recorded history. It was run just like the country was run, it was run really badly.”

But those numbers aren’t from the end of the Biden administration. While SSA struggled under the highest workloads in history and amid a 50-year staffing low, an infusion of money as part of the Inflation Reduction Act and a series of reforms undertaken under Commissioner Martin O’Malley, average call wait times on the agency’s 1-800 number fell to under 13 minutes by the end of 2024, the disability claims backlog hit a 30-year low, and agency productivity improved by more than 6% that year.

Under Bisignano’s leadership, the agency has changed how it calculates average call wait times to exclude the time that customers who use the callback feature wait for that call back. Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that 90% of callers elect to use the callback feature rather than wait on hold, but both sets often still wait hours before reaching a representative.

“They say that the stat is the ‘average speed to answer,’ but that includes the average speed to speak to a human being and the average speed to a self-service option. As soon as you’ve pressed ‘3’ for whatever service, you have stopped waiting for the purposes of [Bisignano’s] stat and none of the rest of it counts,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Bisignano also touted that the agency’s website is now online 24 hours per day, bemoaning that it was down for maintenance 29 hours per week.

“I think the most staggering number is that we had a website down for 29 hours per week,” he said. “This will be a digital-first agency . . . We want to be a digital presence to answer and serve the American public.”

But that downtime refers to routine maintenance to SSA.gov that occurred between the hours of 2 and 5 a.m., when few people actually tried to access the website, sources at the Social Security Administration told Government Executive.

Trump and Bisignano also continued to warn of the specter of fraud among beneficiaries. They said the agency has “kicked nearly 275,000 illegal aliens” off of the Social Security system. While around 6,000 people were reportedly impacted by Elon Musk’s error-prone effort to declare immigrants as dead in the agency’s database, Romig said they likely were referring mostly to legal immigrants who lost legal status as part of Trump’s rescission of temporary protected status for migrants from more than half a dozen nations.

And while most immigrants cannot collect Social Security benefits—short of becoming a permanent resident or citizen—they still contribute to the program’s trust fund through payroll taxes, making Trump’s deportation push more deleterious to the system’s solvency.

“The depletion date of the trust fund has accelerated because of his leadership and his actions,” she said. “[The most recent] trustees’ report didn’t account for the plummeting levels of immigration, and immigrants contribute a sizeable amount.”

Ultimately, Romig said the repeated falsification of SSA’s performance will only further deteriorate the agency’s customer service.

“I think that when the president of the United States and his leadership team repeatedly lie about the biggest program in the federal government and the most important program for older people in this country, over and over again, doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on lies like dead people collecting benefits, it undermines trust in the program and undermines support for the program,” she said. “That’s really scary, because its important that people can believe what the government is telling them about where their tax dollars are going and about the stability of the program they will or already do rely on to support themselves and their families.”