My trip to KC Social Security office did not begin well, but now I think I know why | Opinion
My Monday at Kansas City South’s Social Security office did not get off to a smiling start. I arrived at about 8:45, and just before the place opened at 9, a snappish man in uniform came out and said that those of us without an appointment should go right on back home again. What is this, Oz?
You don’t have to bark at us, the woman behind me in line said. Hor-ri-ble, said a man who had been sent away before. Officer Grumpy handed me a sheet of paper and said I should call the number printed there. I’ve called that number many times, I told him, and no one ever answers. Not true, he said; he called it just the other day and got right through.
If you do decide to stay, he warned me, you will be here for hours and they still won’t help you, but will just schedule an appointment. Great, I said, then I’m definitely staying, because no one ever answers the phone.
Inside, I met other muttering people who had, like me, been unable to get help otherwise. One guy said he was there because the answer to his security question had mysteriously been changed, even though the state where he was born was still Tennessee, and always would be.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I thought maybe our greeter was out of sorts because SSA employees are under so much more DOGE-y pressure these days. Well, I had no idea.
‘There are just too many calls’
Until I talked to Garth Stocking, who works for Social Security and is secretary of the Kansas City-based American Federation of Government Employees Local 1336. He filled in the worse-than-I-thought picture later in a phone interview; I did get through to him, even though he’s on vacation and was bird-watching when he picked up. With the workforce shrinking and the workload exploding, “there are just too many calls” now, he said, to the point that the SSA recently stopped publicly reporting call answer times and other key performance metrics.
In March, after overloaded servers caused the SSA website to crash 4 times in 10 days, the Washington Post reported that “office managers have resorted to answering phones” because “so many employees have been pushed out. … And the phones keep ringing, and ringing.” In my experience, they still are.
In an email, an SSA spokesperson said that there have been no cuts and no problems: “Commissioner (Frank) Bisignano has been clear that he is evaluating the agency and is committed to having the right staffing to deliver Americans their hard-earned benefits.”
Of 53,000 employees, the statement said, only 800 had taken deferred resignation and “over 3,500” had left voluntarily, about the same as in the previous year, while service had only improved: “There have been no disruptions to service in fact when comparing our January 2025 to our May 2025 performance data, we have increased in almost all measures.”
Which we can’t see because they hate to show off?
‘They’re creating all these bottlenecks’
Locally and nationally, “we’ve had a whole lot of retirements,” Stocking told me, “and people in management have left on principle.” Employees have been reassigned and the operation “reorganized in ways that don’t make a lot of sense to us” because they are inefficient and require “lots of retraining.”
People feel disrespected, he said, which is at bottom why they’re leaving work they love. Isn’t that always the case?
The workload for those still hanging in there is increasing for a constellation of other reasons: For one thing, the Social Security Fairness Act that Joe Biden signed into law in January will require the SSA to adjust benefits for about 3 million public workers. Many of those cases are complicated and take extra time.
On top of which, according to Stocking’s wife, Susan Stocking, who works as an SSA teleservice center representative and also got on the phone with me, “they’ve stopped hiring, and you’re dealing with a severely demoralized workforce. They’re creating all these bottlenecks” on purpose.
For instance, some 3 million people who have immigrated to the U.S. legally “now have to contact Social Security over the phone and make an appointment. And now anyone with SSI who wants direct deposit has to go into an office. They’re creating points of pain, and all of these things are being done to drive down the service. People cannot get it, and they need to understand why that is.
We are working our butts off. We take calls back to back to back all day every day and are really good at what we do. The people who are there are die-hard employees hanging on by our fingernails. I love my job. I love helping the public. I deal with life and death issues. Is AI going to have a discussion with a man about how many weeks he has to live?”
The point of this administration is that such a discussion, and anything else touching on our common humanity, is a literal waste of time.
I started this column by talking about an SSA employee who was maybe just having a bad day, but I want to end it by saying how much I appreciated the complete professionalism of the courteous woman who helped me, only about an hour after I checked in. So going to the office was actually a great investment of my time.
And I even walked out laughing, because one of the other guards checking people in was excited to see a person with an actual physical newspaper, and when I gave Monday’s Star to him on my way out, he said, “Wow! There’s a lot in here that’s relevant to me.” (OK, full disclosure, he was digging into the Sports section as he said this.)
Don’t let them scare you off
Takeaways:
That thing they’re saying about how service won’t be impacted already is not true.
But it’s not the fault of these public servants, who are working harder than ever.
I would say that you should call Frank Bisignano, the former Wall Street exec now running the Social Security Administration, who when Donald Trump offered him the job said he had to Google to find out what the job even was. “And I’m like, ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ So, I’m Googling Social Security. You know, one of my great skills, I’m one of the great Googlers on the East Coast.”
So I would say you should call him, but of course, you’d never get through. The White House still has a switchboard, though: 202-456-1414.
Consider this my survey at the end of the call that’s never been answered.
