American marketing legend Al Ries is remembered for his crisp comparison of the difficulty inherent in changing the course of an aircraft carrier with the challenge of turning around a large corporation, saying “it takes a mile before anything happens. And if it was a wrong turn, getting back on course takes even longer.”

Frank Bisignano, the 18th Social Security Administration (SSA) commissioner, was never a captain in command of one of the U.S. Navy’s awesome aircraft carriers, but he can probably relate to it, thanks to his experience at the helm of America’s biggest and oldest benefits program.

When he was confirmed by the Senate in May 2025, Bisignano took over SSA as it reeled from a constant flow of news reports about dead people getting Social Security checks, disability aid going to perfectly healthy individuals, elderly applicants dying before their applications were processed, and countless other varieties of waste, fraud, incompetence, and abuse.

During a 2024 congressional hearing, his predecessor as commissioner, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, attributed all of the agency’s ills to “the growing gap between record high numbers of customers and 50-year lows in staffing,” with a result that “the customer service that Americans have already paid for has been allowed to decline to crisis-level lows.” After leaving SSA, O’Malley claimed the agency was “on the brink of collapse” due to policies linked to President Donald Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Even so, months after the DOGE controversy receded from the headlines, troubling reports continued to appear, like the recent one from the SSA Inspector-General (IG). Central to the IG’s report was the watchdog’s finding that “as of January 29, 2026, there were 183 unimplemented audit recommendations — 94 open unimplemented and 89 closed unimplemented. The cumulative estimated Questioned Costs are almost $2.7 billion. The cumulative estimated total Funds to be Put to Better Use are over $2.2 billion. The approximate total cost savings are over $4.9 billion.”

The report made it appear Bisignano’s SSA team was ignoring or slow-walking dozens of impartial cost-saving recommendations from the IG. Fortunately, for SSA beneficiaries and taxpayers alike, Bisignano’s career preparation for SSA culminated in his years as chairman and CEO of Fiserv, the world’s largest financial services company.

According to his official SSA biography, during his tenure at Fiserv, the firm “processed over 850 million transactions daily, totaling more than $2.5 trillion, handled more than 400 million phone calls annually, and fundamentally touched every American household.” By comparison, the SSA processes checks every month for more than 75 million beneficiaries and daily fields millions of telephone calls and emails with questions and requests from current and future beneficiaries.

When The Washington Stand asked SSA for a response to the IG report, it quickly became evident that those unimplemented recommendations took on an entirely different appearance when viewed in the context of Bisignano’s largely as-yet unheralded successes in rebuilding and transforming the agency.

For starters, Bisignano meets weekly with his management team for evaluations and analyses on the status and progress of all unimplemented recommendations. According to SSA Spokesperson Natalie Ihrman, “[A]s a result of his relentless efforts to make the agency work better for the American people, the average audit age has gone from two years to 1.4 years … as of today, SSA has 94 open recommendations and 60 are expected to be implemented this fiscal year. The number of open recommendations is the lowest it has been in nearly 40 years.”

There is also more to the closed and unimplemented recommendations from the IG. A senior SSA official speaking on background told TWS that the 89 closed unimplemented audits “reflect recommendations that SSA has already addressed, and the OIG has yet to close out. That could be for a number of reasons — SSA disagreed with the recommendation or OIG is assessing our implementation of the audit recommendation.”

Bisignano’s efforts have also resulted in dramatic improvements in SSA’s ability to provide timely service to beneficiaries, including one in particular that O’Malley often bewailed. During his November 2024 testimony, O’Malley told Congress that “Americans calling Social Security’s national 800 number last year routinely experienced wait times of an hour or more. While we have now driven that average wait time down from 42.2 minutes last November to 12.8 minutes in October, customers who do not opt for the callback option are waiting far longer than the average, due to our historically low staffing levels.”

Under Bisignano, the wait time is down to six minutes, an achievement that Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) refused to accept, claiming the Trump administration was misrepresenting the facts. When Bisignano suggested an audit by the IG, Warren agreed.

The IG report that followed concluded that “SSA’s publicly reported national 800-number telephone metrics were accurate and its overall telephone service performance improved in FY 2025. In FY 2025, SSA served — either by an SSA employee or automation — 68 million callers, a 65-percent increase from FY 2024. … One of SSA’s performance goals was to improve customer experience by reducing the Average Speed of Answer (ASA) telephone metric. According to the agency, ASA is the average amount of time callers actively wait on hold before they speak with SSA employees. In FY 2025, ASA was approximately 13 minutes in October 2024, peaked at 30 minutes in January 2025, and ended the year at 7 minutes in September 2025.”

Other measures of significant improvement in SSA performance include the addition of more than 12.4 million individuals aged 120 years or more to the agency’s Death Master File, and worked with the Department of Homeland Security to update 275,000 illegal immigrant individuals and end improper payments to such people.

And the senior SSA official speaking on background also cited the following improvements in how the agency processes disability benefits:

• Reduced initial level pending backlog by over 30% — from 1.27 million in June 2024 to less than 830,000 now.
• Average processing time (APT) at the initial claims level is shorter by almost 45 days from January 2025.
• Issued 2.3 million initial claims clearances in fiscal year 2025, a 10% increase in production over the prior year.
• Reduced average processing time at the hearing level to 265 days, the lowest level of any time in the last 20 years.
• Issued 10,000 more Administrative Law Judge dispositions to date in FY26 compared to the same period last year with fewer judges overall, by leveraging digital tools and process improvements.

Among the reasons for such improvements are the agency’s adoption of Bisignano reforms that removed multiple siloes in SSA’s traditional bureaucratic system and brought them together in a new Disability Adjudication (DA) structure that includes 50 state-level disability program administrators and 160 sites for federal Administrative Law Judges (ALJs).

“This new DA ecosystem is organized under a single Chief of Disability Adjudication who reports directly to Commissioner Bisignano,” the senior SSA official told TWS. The official also pointed to “stacks of medical texts” that were converted to digital processing, “making it much easier to evaluate and adjudicate claims.”

Further strengthening comes, according to the senior SSA official, from Bisignano’s emphasis on the importance of increasing cooperative efforts among state-level officials involved in the disability adjudication process. “A total of 18 states are either actively assisting or have formally committed to assist other states in processing initial claims, reconsideration cases, or Continuing Disability Review (CDR) cases. This level of participation represents the largest number of state-to-state partnerships in the history of the program,” the official noted.

Bisignano has only been at SSA for 10 months since the Senate confirmed him May 6, 2025, but the record to date suggests the problems and challenges that prompted O’Malley’s most dire assessment are largely in the past.