Glitchy Social Security chatbot faces backlash

While it handled nearly 41% of calls in July, some say it’s making things harder.

- By Darius TAHIR

PRESIDENT TRUMP with Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano.

John McGing couldn't reach a human.

That might be business as usual in this economy, but it wasn’t business; he had called the Social Security Administration, where the questions often aren't generic and the callers tend to be older, disabled, or otherwise vulnerable Americans.

McGing, calling on behalf of his son, had an in-the-weeds question: how to prevent overpayments that the federal government might later claw back. His call was intercepted by an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.

No matter what he said, the bot parroted canned answers to generic questions, not McGing’s obscure query. “If you do a key press, it didn’t do anything,” he said. Eventually, the bot “glitched or whatever” and got him to anagent.

It was a small but revealing incident. Unbeknownst to McGing, a former Social Security employee in Maryland, he had encountered a technological tool recently introduced by the agency. Former officials and longtime observers of the agency say the Trump administration rolled out a product that was tested but deemed not yet ready during the Bidenadministration.

“With the new administration, they're just kind of like, let’s go fast and fix it later, which I don’t agree with, because you are going to generate a lot of confusion,” said Marcela _ Escobar-Alava, who served as Social Security’s chief information officer under President Biden.