During a Senate Finance Committee hearing last week, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) questioned Frank Bisignano, President Trump's nominee to be Commissioner of Social Security Administration, about determining disability for Social Security benefits.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you, Senator Lankford.
00:01Chairman, thank you.
00:03Thank you for stepping into this role.
00:05Stepping in with the expertise and the experience that you have in the background,
00:08what you've done on the technical sides for so many different people,
00:13quite frankly, is a real asset to Social Security to be able to step in.
00:17This is a payment system at its core.
00:20That's something that you've specialized in for a long time.
00:22Grateful that you stepped out of the private sector and the public sector
00:25to be able to do this in this season on it.
00:28So let me just run several things past you, but I did want to be able to raise one thing
00:32that has been in process for a while.
00:34My state is one of the few states that has not been able to do the MySocialSecurity portal
00:41based on just the ID portion of that.
00:43That has been something Social Security and some of the career folks have worked on for a long time
00:47that has finally been checked.
00:50And I've been grateful to a lot of the career folks that have been engaged in Social Security
00:53for a while to be able to work with MyState to be able to get that.
00:56That's going to help a lot of the customer service issues in MyState in particular on this.
01:01But as Senator Cassidy was just raising on this as well,
01:04the call times, the response time, getting an appointment.
01:07It may be surprising to some people that there are a few 85-year-olds that aren't tech savvy,
01:13that they don't like using a computer.
01:16They want to actually talk to a person.
01:18And the challenge is still how do they get in to be able to visit with somebody,
01:22get an appointment, number one, get a time, and then get it done in a timely manner.
01:26So I know we're working a lot on the technology.
01:28That's a good thing for a lot of folks.
01:30We're working on the phone call side of it.
01:32What is your plan on the face-to-face portion of Social Security services as well?
01:36I think we have to meet beneficiaries wherever they want to be.
01:42And I think that includes field offices.
01:44It includes the phone.
01:46It includes technology on the phone.
01:48And it includes a live agent if they want to talk to somebody.
01:53And obviously, you know, the web is a place that we can also interact.
01:58But I think it's about a multi-channel system and giving the ability to use the
02:04channel that one wants to use in order to accomplish the chore they want to get done with us.
02:08That would be helpful.
02:09One of the things that you and I have talked about already in my office,
02:12and thank you for stopping by so we can get a chance to have a longer conversation,
02:15is about the disability determination.
02:18That process can be two to three years long.
02:21There's a lot of aspects of it that end up taking a very long time to just get an answer on it.
02:27The reconsideration process is certainly broken in the process and takes a tremendous
02:31amount of time on just the reconsideration for something they already know to be able
02:35to go through the same hoop again.
02:36There are a lot of challenges that are in this process.
02:39As you walk into this, I'm not going to ask you how you're going to fix it because
02:42you're walking and you've got to look at it to see what can be done.
02:45I would raise to you this as an issue.
02:47You said you were already aware of some of those issues as well.
02:50How do you begin the process of trying to reform the disability review so that disabled
02:56individuals don't have to wait three years to actually get into that process and people
03:01that are not qualified can get an answer faster?
03:05First of all, thank you for the time in your office.
03:09You enlightened me a lot in your dialogue with me around this process.
03:13And, you know, my first objective would be to process engineer it from front to back,
03:18understand really what is taking what amount of time.
03:22We also talked, you were kind enough to talk to me about the jobs and the fact that, you
03:27know, a person who maybe 30 years ago was determined to be disabled and wasn't highly
03:37motivated by the system to be able to work, today we could do something different.
03:41So one of the first things I'm going to look at when I get there is all of those
03:45elements that we talked about in your office.
03:47And, you know, I'm positive when you analyze something from front to back and you think
03:53about the age of today versus 30 years ago, that we could get a lot better answer for
03:59Americans.
04:00Yeah, we can.
04:01And there are folks that have great needs that qualify for disability, that Congress
04:09has actually said, hey, the American people are going to stand alongside of them, that
04:12it takes years to be able to get through that process.
04:14And there are others that are trying to game the system that need an answer faster to say,
04:20hey, you're able to work and we want you to be able to do that.
04:23We are Americans.
04:24It's what we do.
04:25Two areas that we talked about briefly, and I'll just bring them up briefly to you.
04:28The death master file, we've got about 915,000 people still listed in a bit of limbo on that
04:34that still need clarification on.
04:36That's from the inspector general's report from 2024.
04:39And we have on the opposite side of that, multiple people using the exact same social
04:45security number to apply for a job that then show up just as social security number in
04:50the process on it.
04:51So we've got some numbers being used multiple times.
04:53We've got 915,000 in the death master file that just need to be clarified.
04:58Are they alive or not in the process?
05:01So that's, again, a technology piece that we're going to count on you to be able to
05:04go chase down to be able to figure out how to be able to clearly identify that, make
05:08decisions, get it back out.
05:09So appreciate your time and your leadership and for your willingness to step in this role.