Frank Bisignano is likely to be confirmed as Social Security Commissioner tomorrow. What do you expect from him?
More than anything else I’m expecting harshness towards the public and Social Security employees. We may see novel interpretations of the Social Security Act to end benefits for whole categories of people. We may see basic refusal to provide categories of service to the public. We may see targeted firings of employees on the theory that doing so will somehow increase the productivity of those not fired — the “pour encourager les autres” theory. I’m almost certain there will be a lot of thrashing about attempting to look audacious. Those are my very general guesses. What are yours?
29 comments:
I agree with you. Key question : Is frank doge? Or will frank rein in doge?
I’m predicting big things from Mr. Bisignano. Look first for him to clean up Leland’s mess and illustrate the differences in leadership between a world-class CEO and a lifelong bureaucrat. With AI, I expect him to get call center wait times below ten minutes. He will also whip employees into shape with incentives to do more with a leaner staff. If you need proof of what he can do just look to Fiserv’s stock price. Social Security employees are eager to welcome him and start working.
1112? One can be optimistic without your odd framing. Is 1112 white house intern?
“World class ceo??” No one talks this way
“”Start working “. Ssa folks are currently working.
- stock price is not an indicator of good. Especially over short run.
- 1112. if you are less pollyannish and less weird, people may listen to what you have to say. Even propagandists have to be savvy and subtle to be effective
Ssa already has a lean workforce
Are we talking about the same individual?
For most people, Frank Bisignano is known for two things: being the president and CEO of Fiserv, and now President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Social Security Administration (SSA). Within Fiserv he’s known for something else: overseeing a pitiless program of rolling layoffs in the name of cutting costs
Maybe no part of the Trump administration’s program of dismantling federal government agencies has generated as much concern as its drastic cuts to the SSA, the agency responsible for trillions of dollars’ worth of payments to retirees, people with disabilities, and millions of other Americans, and which is already seeing its workers laid off en masse, its offices shuttered, and some of its core services ended.
If Bisignano is confirmed, the White House may soon have an ideal ally in this effort: as chief executive of both Fiserv and First Data before that, he has been responsible for cuts to worker benefits, branch closings, and thousands of layoffs.
Since Bisignano took over as CEO of the payment processing firm in July 2020, Fiserv has been steadily shedding jobs in the face of rising costs, though it has been cagey about revealing exactly how many. As reported by trade publication Payments Dive, the company claimed for years in public filings and statements that it still has “about 44,000” employees worldwide, while also disclosing that its number of foreign employees had increased — suggesting that jobs had been offshored from the United States — and that its termination costs had jumped from $32 million in 2019 to $131 million in 2020, the year Bisignano took over.
Speak for yourself. Some of us as least are not eager to welcome him, a person who is known to get a lot of joy from slashing and burning things.
I expect Frank to be essentially Leland. Frank has been directing via DOGE most of Leland's actions. Frank could be greatly surprised that SSA customers are more difficult to satisfy than the financial transactions he processes.
We will see. One needs to recall that Frank has been the wizard behind the curtain guiding Leland's actions via DOGE.
All of that plus more. Arbitrary cessation of benefits for categories of politically disfavored groups. Even more warfare against SSA employees. 50% RIF. The full scale collapse of the agency. Impossible to be too pessimistic. Frank will be far worse than even Leland was.
@11:12 is a Trump supporting troll, not a rational person who can be reasoned with. I’d recommend ignoring them. Your responsiveness is what feeds them and makes them do things like s**t-post and vote for Trump and people like him (he loves “drinking your liberal tears.”). Ignore these trashy outcasts and they’ll start disappearing again.
He'll probably get in there and realize very quickly that it isn't run like a business. He'll try to apply those concepts to it, but will run up against wanting to execute ideas that cost money and not receiving appropriations from congress to do so. He'll attempt to cut costs and redistribute the "savings" to implement his ideas and will run into the reality of how bureaucracy works. There no lines of credit, venture capital or loans to take out to retool. If services suffer he will be on the receiving end of the ire of 10s of millions of citizens and if things go sideways the administration will pin all the issues on him. He'll be mired in lawsuits from many trying defend the program and those that work for it. I doubt he'll serve the full 6 year term.
Frank will be horrified to learn that so many front line employees SSA recently took the separation incentives and retired. Other employees are going to have to be retrained to go into these front line jobs. It will take years to get them up to fully proficient levels, and public service will suffer.
Backlogs and waiting times will grow. No longer can telework be blamed either, as there is no telework for most SSA employees.
Nice arrangements of the deck chairs as the ship slowly goes under the waves.
Not much else to slash or burn - running on fumes now that DOGE is running the show.
My local office now has AI inspired chat bot asking me to explain what I need. Apparently "I need to speak to a manager about a case that has not been processed for a year and has been the subject of numerous calls" is not something their Speech recognition software can recognize. Instead, I am asked again to tell them what I want, what I really really want.
Chat bot responses only work for simple requests. It will not be adequate for anything out of the ordinary or complicated which is the only reason a representative should be calling. Therefore, for me, until it can transfer to a "live agent" upon request the first time, it is useless or worse than useless.
The new COSS has experience with processing payments. It is all back office stuff that only requires pre-set inputs and no decision making. think after the benefits are calculated and transmission to Treasury for payment. He has no experience with how benefits are either determined for the disabled or dealing with any of the issues such as Windfall offset, WC offset, in kind support, auxiliary benefits, or the myriad of issues that require someone who knows to ask the right questions. Maybe he can learn.
We can hope. But my guess is that nothing will change for the better and it will probably just get worse.
Frank is going to be shocked to learn that a large cohort of retirement age Boomers have lots of time on their hands, are generally well connected and well organized. I predict that if he messes with retirement benefits in any way, he is going to get his azz kicked. BTW the disabled community is also no slouch in these areas.
He can make history as the COSS who oversaw the dissolution of Social Security (and in certain circles, he'd be a hero) or counterbalance the trend across gov and keep it going. But his skill set is wrong for this environment and it's unlikely he will have time to unlearn them.
Yeah. As Luigi demonstrated, there can be real consequences for being a massive asshole, even (perhaps especially) if you’re richer than any human should ever be.
You are cruel my friend. Frank is leaving a nine figure job to man the agency. Surely he’s not doing it for nefarious purposes. I predict he brings back telework, introduces technology to whittle down the 1-800 number, closes buildings we don’t need and invests the money into better infrastructure, and develops SSA from a slouch agency into one of the most sophisticated in history. You’ll see.
Charles should post a new poll - how long will Bisignano last as commish.
Expect the same we're getting now but accelerated.
Forget Frank, what happens to Leland?
What happens to Dudek? If he's a good boy Trump gives him a preemptive pardon!
Well, unlike Dudek, he seems to grasp object permanence. And he realizes that the real goal of the agency is "stay out of the news". So first off, most of these changes will be done under cover of far less news coverage than Dudek's ham-fisted herky-jerk swings of the ax.
Second, his remit is to cut. Level 2 field offices? Bye. Teleservice? Automated to a large degree. Internet claims will be AI "assisted". We'll see a sprinkling of AI injected into the still-unchanged basic IT infrastructure at SSA, meaning creeping calculation errors and disappearing records.
I wouldn't doubt that he also decentralizes things at the PC, farming out benefit and claims authorizers to the field offices, where they can finally do god's work- ignoring a stack of work on their desk to explain to an angry Karen that no, the website was wrong, you cannot just waltz into our office and get your step-nephew's SSN with an iPhone picture of his birth certificate.
This guy lied to Congress and been dictating to Leland all the changes we have already seen. Another wealthy power weilding mediocre project 2025 heartless person. Government provides service, business makes money - they are about taking gov money for themselves. America won’t be good until gov gets back to public service
Wow some of you are still fooled by these monsters - they only care about themselves
He'll probably get Louis DeJoy's old job.
RIFs for sure. Schedule F will make it much easier for him. And we already heard during his confirmation hearing what he thinks about SSA employees; they’re just lazy losers who need to be “properly motivated.”
Good luck with that. My staff and I are already being pushed to our limits, working hard all the time without even taking the breaks we’re legally entitled to. After months of progressively worse overwork, dwindling staff, and psychological torture, there is nowhere left for most SSA workers to be pushed. Most people I know at this point certainly don’t embrace potential firing, but are also prepared for it. We can’t be slave driven anymore.
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