There is a peculiar and particularly American form of madness festering along the nation’s telephone wires, a quiet crisis conducted to the tinny soundtrack of a five-second electronic loop:
Your call is very important to us. Please continue to hold while we ignore you…
It is a trial endured not in the public square but in the private solitude of our homes, a bureaucratic purgatory where the nation’s promise to its elders and its most vulnerable is left to wither on hold.
According to a damning report from The Washington Post, to dial the Social Security Administration’s 1-800 number is to enter a labyrinth of automated platitudes and abandoned hopes, where the simple act of seeking help becomes an exercise in profound frustration.
Consider, if you will, the ordeal of the citizen caller.
They are people like Keith Shearer, 73, with a broken leg and a simple question, who found his call dropped without a whisper of explanation not once, but three times.
Or Susan Kunkel, 70, who after two hours of that infernal hold music began to wonder if she was the subject of some newfangled psychological torture.
They are people like Katrina Stirn, 65, facing down terminal cancer, who after six failed attempts to arrange her final affairs simply gave up, her spirit broken by a system that could not be bothered to answer.
“I just can’t deal with it anymore,” Stirn said, a statement that should shame every official drawing a breath in Washington.
The agency, of course, speaks a different language, one of “significant advancements” and “improved processes.”
They point to charts and percentages with the dry confidence of accountants, while out here in the real America, a 72-year-old retired schoolteacher named Kathy Stecher spends four days in a row calling, only to be told each time that the wait is “over 120 minutes.”
The official narrative and the lived experience have divorced entirely, and it is the people who paid into this system with a lifetime of labor who are left holding the bag.
The technological “solutions” offered are often just new ways to fail.
The callback feature, hailed as a modern convenience, has become a cruel joke.
One anonymous worker confessed that they often call back people who no longer remember placing the call, having resorted to a local office weeks prior.
And then there is the return of the “polite disconnect,” a term of such Orwellian genius it could only be conceived in a government office. This is the practice of informing a citizen who has waited for hours that the line is too busy, before hanging up on them with automated finality.
It is the bureaucratic equivalent of a slap in the face, delivered by a machine.
“What we are witnessing is the slow, systematic dismantling of a covenant,” said anti-establishment progressive Democrat Lisa McCormick. “The men and women who built this country, who fought its wars and taught its children, are now told to wander their homes with a phone glued to their hip, missing callbacks because they dared to keep a doctor’s appointment, their lives put on indefinite hold by a system that treats them as an inconvenience.”
McCormick said people are told to go online, as if the digital world is a universal cure-all, ignoring the reality that for many older citizens, the telephone is the last, fragile tether to the services they require and have earned.
“This is not merely a story of long wait times. It is a story of a fundamental breach of trust,” said McCormick. “It is a quiet, grinding indignity that speaks volumes about what we value.”
“We live in an age of technological marvels, where fortunes are made in minutes and information travels at the speed of light, yet we cannot manage to connect a sick 65-year-old woman to a human being who can help her die with a measure of peace,” said McCormick, referring to terminally ill cancer patient Katrina Stirn.
The music loops on, a maddening anthem for a government that has, it seems, forgotten the people it was created to serve.
The promise of security in old age, a cornerstone of a civilized society, is being eroded, one dropped call, one endless wait, one polite disconnect at a time.
Social Security is financed through a dedicated payroll tax. Employers and employees each pay 6.2 percent of wages up to the taxable maximum of $176,100 in 2025, while self-employed people pay 12.4 percent.
In 2023, total income to the Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) trust fund was just over $1.35 trillion. This income came from three primary sources: payroll tax $1.23 billion (91%), interest on trust fund assets $66.9 billion (5%) and OASDI benefit taxation $50.7 billion (3.8%). The trust fund assets at the end of 2023 totaled slightly less than $2.8 trillion.
That year, the Social Security Administration paid almost $1.4 trillion in benefits to 67 million Americans, at an administrative cost of about $14 billion. As spending exceeds revenue, the trust fund is being drained.
McCormick has previously criticized Congress for neglecting the crisis that’s just six years away, when Social Security’s cash reserves run out and automatic benefit cuts take effect.
Although beneficiaries will see a 2.8 percent cost-of-living adjustment in January, McCormick explained that the COLA will not keep up with inflation, so older Americans will continue to struggle to make ends meet.
“The long telephone wait times are only the latest problems to plague an agency that is a financial lifeline for more than 75 million Americans,” said McCormick, who is known for challenging disgraced former US Senator Bob Menendez in the 2018 Democratic primary. “Some of us have been demanding action to avert financial disaster for several years.”
“From the sound of it, nobody in charge is even listening,” said McCormick.
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