As Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano tells it, callers only had to wait an average of 8 minutes to speak to an agent on the phone in July.

“We had a bold goal of single-digit wait time on the calls when they were at 40 minutes,” he said in mid-August at an Oval Office event with President Donald Trump commemorating Social Security’s 90th anniversary , referencing a statistic from the prior fiscal year. “And we did that. This is my 100th day. We did that within 90 days.”

That claim, however, might raise some eyebrows among those who have actually tried to get through to a Social Security representative on the phone recently. The average speed of answer metric doesn’t truly show how long it takes to reach an agent, experts say.

There are multiple ways to measure the amount of

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