The Buffer and the Bridge

 

For years, I believed the Social Security Administration was protected by its laws, its technology, its cybersecurity, and the extraordinary depth of its workforce. Those protections were real, I felt them in my day-to-day work, and they remain important. Yet I increasingly believe we misunderstood what was actually keeping large parts of the institution functioning. It was not simply the organizational structure or the thousands of pages of policy governing the work. It was a culture in which experienced employees continually compensated for the limitations of the institution around them. That culture both protected SSA and helped conceal institutional challenges.

For decades, SSA employees have often acted as both a buffer and a bridge. They buffered the public from inadequate resources, broken processes, staffing shortages, aging technology, organizational silos, inconsistent instructions, and management decisions that did not always survive contact with reality. They bridged those gaps through experience, relationships, judgment, overtime, workarounds, and an extraordinary sense of responsibility for the mission. Because the work continued moving, the institution could appear healthier than it actually was. Continually feeding and rewarding heroic efforts to keep something afloat is not organizational success. Heroic effort is what people provide when the normal operating model is no longer enough.

The evidence that SSA's problems predated the latest period of upheaval is difficult to ignore. SSA reported that FY 2022 staffing had fallen to its lowest level in more than 25 years because of prior years of insufficient funding, while also saying employees were carrying more than their share of the burden. [1] By November 2024, Commissioner Martin O'Malley told Congress that SSA was serving more than seven million additional beneficiaries with about 6,300 fewer permanent employees than in FY 2015. He described staffing as among the lowest levels in 50 years, while SSA's operating overhead had fallen below one percent of annual benefit outlays. [2] In separate September 2024 testimony, SSA said congressional administrative appropriations for FY 2022 through FY 2024 totaled almost $3 billion less than the President's budget requests. [3] These conditions were not created in 2025, and any serious examination of SSA has to begin with that fact.

The old culture compensated for those weaknesses remarkably well, but it created weaknesses of its own. Too much knowledge remained in people's heads instead of becoming an institutional resource that anyone could find, understand, test, and use. Processes survived because experienced employees remembered why they existed, until eventually the people performing the work no longer knew the reason themselves. I sometimes described this as a friends-and-family system, by which I mean a who-you-know operating model rather than nepotism or improper preference. Someone in operations knew somebody in systems, somebody in systems knew somebody in policy, and somebody knew the executive or technical specialist who could finally move the issue. That network could be incredibly effective, but a strong national institution should not require personal relationships to make ordinary processes function.

There is objective evidence of how deeply familiarity and informal knowledge became embedded in the operating model. A 2025 SSA Inspector General review found that 117 of 881 field-office managers interviewed or surveyed said written training materials did not help them manage workloads. Managers told auditors that they generally learned workload management through on-the-job training with another manager or mentor. The OIG also found more than 60 reports, systems, and tools supporting field-office workload management, with many redundant, outdated, or scattered across different locations. Of the 881 managers, 306 said those resources needed to be consolidated and updated. [4] That does not prove the existence of a who-you-know culture, but it demonstrates an organization in which accumulated local knowledge and familiarity were sometimes doing work that standardized systems, documentation, and training should have been doing.

Disability operations provide an even clearer example of the value hidden inside experienced people. In July 2025, the Inspector General reported that from FY 2019 through FY 2023 Disability Determination Services lost key technical staff, including experienced disability examiners, while productivity declined 21 percent and average processing time increased 81 percent, from 121 to 219 days. The number of pending determinations nearly doubled, while the number of disability determinations completed fell 15 percent. The OIG specifically said losing experienced examiners was detrimental because it represented a significant loss of institutional knowledge. [5] Those workers were not simply interchangeable units of labor in a staffing table. Their experience was part of the operating capability of the disability system itself.

That distinction is central to understanding SSA because its employees were not merely its workforce. In many places, they had become part of its operating architecture. Management could tolerate an imperfect process because an experienced employee knew how to repair it, while an incomplete policy could survive because someone remembered how it was supposed to work. Congress could provide less than the agency requested while employees absorbed more work, and organizational boundaries could remain because people developed informal bridges around them. The bridge kept holding, so the institution could mistake continued operation for evidence that the structure underneath it was sound. Successive generations of employees became human infrastructure without SSA ever fully accounting for the capacity they were providing.

That is one reason the regional reorganization and movement toward more standardized national service delivery can be more consequential than an organizational chart makes them appear. SSA announced in February 2025 that it would reduce its ten-region structure to four regions, while the OIG later documented the extensive collection of regional and field-office reports and tools that had grown around the older operating model. [4][6] Standardizing work nationally can make differences in capacity more visible because performance, resources, skills, and outcomes can be compared across boundaries that once separated them. It can also reduce dependence on local relationships by creating processes that are supposed to work the same way regardless of geography. Nationalization makes more consistent treatment possible, but it does not guarantee fairness, good management, or good decisions. Centralization becomes an improvement only when it replaces informal dependency with better process rather than merely replacing local knowledge and discretion with distant control.

Congress is part of this institutional story as well. Congressional constituent casework is legitimate and can be essential when a person becomes trapped inside a federal bureaucracy. The problem arises when congressional escalation becomes one of the reliable ways to make an ordinary administrative problem receive extraordinary attention. In November 2024, the SSA Commissioner told the House Appropriations Committee that it was Social Security's first hearing before that committee in nearly ten years, even as SSA was describing historically low staffing and severe service pressures. [2] Congressional offices could still help individual constituents through casework and established escalation channels while the broader institution continued operating under conditions that produced the need for those escalations. That helped the person fortunate enough to reach an effective congressional office, but it did not repair the underlying service model.

This created an unhealthy equilibrium that extended beyond Congress. SSA employees rescued cases through personal relationships, managers shifted people toward whatever workload had become a crisis, congressional offices escalated constituent problems, and advocates learned which channels could get attention. Each intervention could produce a good result for an individual person, making the workaround appear valuable and even necessary. Yet the repeated success of the workaround reduced the pressure to build a system in which the workaround was unnecessary. The people rescuing the institution became evidence that the institution worked. In reality, their heroics were often evidence of how much assistance the formal operating model required.

The telephone system provides a useful example of why institutional honesty matters more than a headline metric. SSA currently reports that the National 800 Number's average speed of answer fell from eight minutes in July 2025 to 0.6 minutes in July 2026, while its reported answer rate increased from nearly 78 percent to nearly 99 percent. [7] Those are the numbers produced by SSA's current measurement system, and there is evidence that telephone service improved in important respects. The December 2025 OIG audit concluded that SSA's publicly reported FY 2025 telephone metrics were accurate and that overall telephone performance improved, in part because of a new telecommunications platform and staffing realignments. [8] But the same report documented important limitations in what the most prominent metric actually measured. A technically accurate metric can still provide an incomplete description of what a customer experiences.

Average speed of answer, or ASA, measures the time a caller actively waits on hold before speaking with an employee. If a caller accepts the initial callback offer, SSA counts that call as having zero wait time for purposes of the ASA calculation, and the time spent waiting for the callback is not included. OIG found that callers receiving callbacks during FY 2025 waited an average of 108.6 minutes for those callbacks. It also reported that about 25 million calls ended without service because callers disconnected, callbacks were unsuccessful or canceled, or the telephone system could not connect the caller to an employee. [8] Those waits are not captured in the headline ASA measure. Calling the ASA accurate is therefore different from saying it completely represents the customer's experience.

Questions about the OIG review itself make caution even more important. In March 2026, The Washington Post reported that an unpublished draft of the telephone audit contained another measure called “total wait time,” which was intended to capture the overall period before a caller connected with an SSA employee. According to the draft reviewed by the Post, that measure ranged from about 46 minutes to more than two hours during 2025. The Post reported that the information was removed after SSA reviewed the draft and that the document's revision history showed the deletion. Neither SSA nor OIG explained to the Post who requested the change or why the material was removed. [9] That is not enough evidence to state as fact that OIG falsified or manipulated the audit, but it is enough to conclude that the published audit did not settle the dispute over whether the public was seeing the fullest measure of customer experience.

There is another reason to be cautious about treating improved telephone numbers as proof of overall organizational health. The OIG found that SSA had about 4,700 employees available to handle National 800 Number calls at the beginning of FY 2025, falling to just over 4,000 by June. In July 2025, SSA began assigning roughly 1,000 field-office employees each day to the National 800 Number, and those employees did not perform their regular field-office work on the days they handled national calls. The improvement was immediate, with ASA falling from 13.3 minutes in June to 7.5 minutes in July. The OIG specifically said it did not audit field-office workloads or services and therefore did not determine what effect those reassignments had elsewhere. [8] Improving one queue by moving human capacity from another queue can be necessary in a crisis, but it is not the same thing as increasing the underlying capacity of the institution.

By June 2026, the Associated Press reported that roughly 2,000 SSA employees had been reassigned into direct-service positions, including employees whose regular jobs did not normally involve answering telephone calls. Critics argued that some recent improvements were being achieved by shifting staff and bottlenecks around the agency rather than resolving the underlying staffing problem, while Commissioner Frank Bisignano rejected that criticism and pointed to substantial improvements in customer service. [10] Both facts can exist at the same time. Telephone service can improve significantly while the method used to produce the improvement imposes costs elsewhere in the institution. The relevant management question is therefore not whether a metric improved. It is whether the improvement is sustainable and what the organization had to consume, defer, or move in order to produce it.

Metrics are necessary because an institution as large as SSA cannot be managed by instinct, anecdotes, or personal relationships alone. Leaders need to know how many cases are pending, how long people wait, what employees produce, where errors occur, and whether reforms are improving outcomes. The danger begins when the indicator becomes the objective and employees learn that satisfying the number matters more than understanding the work behind it. The OIG documented that SSA changed the telephone measures displayed on its public performance website during FY 2025 as agency leadership changed and different leaders decided which metrics were most important to present. [8] A number can be technically accurate and still be incomplete, just as dramatic improvement in one channel can be purchased by shifting resources from another. When employees become afraid to explain that distinction, the dashboard stops helping leadership understand the institution and starts helping the institution reassure itself.

It is therefore too simple to suggest that SSA was strong before the recent upheaval and suddenly became fragile afterward. Parts of its operating model were fragile already, and experienced employees prevented much of that fragility from reaching the public. They fixed problems before they became statistics, moved cases through personal relationships, translated conflicting instructions, remembered undocumented history, and absorbed work that formal structures could not handle. Recent restructuring, staffing losses, and workload shifts may well have created additional fragility in some parts of the agency, and that possibility should not be minimized. At the same time, it is a mistake to assume that every weakness now visible was created by those changes. Some of what the public is seeing today is the exposure of limitations that employees had been buffering for years.

That distinction matters because otherwise we will spend our time arguing over which culture was better instead of asking what actually worked. The old culture could be slow, territorial, opaque, dependent on relationships, and deeply resistant to legitimate change. The emerging culture can become overly centralized, metric-driven, fearful, and too willing to treat production as a substitute for professional judgment. The old culture could answer a challenge by saying something could not change because outsiders did not understand why it existed. The new culture can answer by saying there is no reason to understand it because the dashboard says the change is working. One can confuse institutional memory with wisdom, while the other can confuse measurement with truth.

I do not know which failure mode is worse, and I am increasingly convinced that this is the wrong question. Both can fail beneficiaries, employees, taxpayers, and the institution itself. A system that requires knowing somebody who knows somebody is not equitable or scalable, even when the people inside that network are motivated entirely by public service. A system that removes discretion and frightens employees into chasing numbers is not healthy merely because its metrics improve. The goal should not be to restore the old SSA or reflexively defend the new one. The goal should be to understand what each model gets right and what each one gets dangerously wrong.

The first requirement for doing that is institutional honesty. Before another reorganization, transformation program, staffing model, technology investment, or performance initiative, SSA needs to understand what the organization can actually do without extraordinary intervention. It must distinguish between processes that function normally and processes that function because an experienced employee knows how to rescue them. It must distinguish sustainable productivity from output created through overtime, deferred work, workarounds, management intervention, or the constant shifting of employees from one crisis to another. It must understand where the organization has real capacity and where people are functioning as human shock absorbers. Without that baseline, leadership can improve a number while unknowingly moving the underlying problem somewhere else.

That honest inventory should include things government traditionally has difficulty measuring. SSA should know where critical knowledge resides with only one or two people, where a process depends upon unwritten instructions, and where different offices accomplish the same work in fundamentally different ways. It should identify which workloads repeatedly require management escalation, which processes generate downstream corrective work, and which performance gains are being purchased by allowing another workload to accumulate. Quality, accuracy, employee judgment, customer resolution, and future workload creation need to be examined alongside speed and volume. This is not an argument against metrics because good metrics are essential to managing a national organization. It is an argument for measuring the institution we actually operate rather than the institution our dashboards make us comfortable believing we operate.

This also changes how we should think about individual leadership and blame. Large institutional failures are easier to understand when they can be attached to the name of one commissioner, one acting commissioner, one administration, or one reorganization. Structural explanation is not personal exoneration, and a leader remains responsible for the choices made while holding authority and for consequences that reasonably should have been anticipated. But a single-person explanation can also become an excuse for everyone else because it lets Congress, career leadership, previous administrations, organizational components, unions, advocates, and employees avoid examining the system they inherited or helped sustain. If decades of inadequate investment, undocumented knowledge, regional variation, technological debt, personal escalation channels, and heroic employee intervention created the conditions for failure, replacing one leader does not repair those conditions. Serious accountability asks not only who made a decision, but why an institution with so many supposed safeguards was so vulnerable to that decision in the first place.

The old culture should therefore not be romanticized, but neither should everything it protected be discarded. National workload management can reduce geographic disparities and dependence on local relationships, but it should preserve enough discretion for skilled employees to recognize when a case does not fit the standard path. Institutional knowledge should be documented and transferred so experience becomes an organizational asset rather than personal leverage. Processes should be required to explain their purpose, and those that cannot justify themselves should be redesigned or removed. Metrics should trigger questions rather than end discussions, with speed considered alongside accuracy, resolution, quality, and downstream consequences. Professional dissent should be treated as information leadership needs to evaluate rather than resistance that must automatically be overcome, and Congress must provide the resources necessary for those expectations to be realistic.

SSA's workforce has demonstrated extraordinary commitment for decades, and that commitment deserves respect. But we do employees no favor when we celebrate their heroics while continuing to operate systems that require heroics from them. Staff became the buffer that protected the public and the bridge that connected processes, organizations, technologies, and people that did not always connect on their own. Removing, weakening, or redirecting that buffer does not necessarily create every weakness that becomes visible afterward because sometimes it exposes what the buffer had been hiding. The first step toward meaningful reform is therefore neither defending the past nor celebrating the present, but being honest with ourselves about the actual state of the institution. Only after we can see SSA without the heroics, workarounds, personal networks, comforting narratives, and selectively presented metrics can we begin building the organization the public and its employees actually deserve.

References

1. Social Security Administration. (2023). Annual Performance Report, Fiscal Years 2022–2024. Washington, DC: Social Security Administration.

2. Social Security Administration. (2024, November 20). Testimony of Commissioner Martin O'Malley before the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. Washington, DC: Social Security Administration.

3. Social Security Administration. (2024, September 11). Testimony of Commissioner Martin O'Malley before the Senate Committee on the Budget. Washington, DC: Social Security Administration.

4. Social Security Administration, Office of the Inspector General. (2025, September 17). Workload Management for Field Offices (Audit Report No. 042316). Woodlawn, MD: Office of the Inspector General.

5. Social Security Administration, Office of the Inspector General. (2025, July 18). Staffing, Productivity, and Processing Times at State Disability Determination Services (Audit Report No. 072309). Woodlawn, MD: Office of the Inspector General.

6. Social Security Administration. (2025, February 28). Social Security Announces Workforce and Organization Plans. Social Security Administration.

7. Social Security Administration. (2026). Social Security Performance. Retrieved August 18, 2026.

8. Social Security Administration, Office of the Inspector General. (2025, December 22). Social Security Administration's Telephone Metrics (Audit Report No. 032517). Woodlawn, MD: Office of the Inspector General.

9. Kornfield, M., & Rein, L. (2026, March 19). Trump breaches fire wall between watchdogs and agencies they investigate. The Washington Post.

10. Hussein, F. (2026, June 9). After long waits at the Social Security Administration, its chief says things are getting better. Associated Press.