From a press release:
U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) announced the Committee will hold a nomination hearing on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, at 10:00 AM ET to consider Arjun Mody to be Deputy Commissioner of Social Security …
Mody has been the Senate Republican Conference staff director. He’s also been a lobbyist and served on the Trump transition team,
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?
The Senate has invoked cloture to advance the nomination of Frank Bisignano to become Commissioner of Social Security. It was a party line vote with some absences. I don't know how much longer it will take to finally approve the nomination.
A party line vote on this is a bad sign for Social Security and for the country.
From a summary of expected action on the floor of the U.S. Senate prepared by Senate Democrats:
During Tuesday’s session cloture was filed on Executive Calendar #60, Frank Bisignano, of New Jersey, to be Commissioner of Social Security Administration for the term expiring January 19, 2031. Cloture is expected to ripen during Thursday’s session.
This has to be a sign that the nomination is moving forward but don’t ask me to predict when to expect final action.
From a piece in Business Insider on Leland Dudek and Frank Bisignano:
… Bisignano's confirmation is awaiting a full Senate vote, which is expected after the chamber votes on nominees for multiple diplomatic positions. …
Some who spoke with BI expressed surprise that he would join the Trump administration. An archived biography from First Data, where he served as chair and CEO, said he's "a strong supporter of diversity" and helped create affinity groups for women and LGBTQ+ employees at the company. He's donated to candidates on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, records show. In May 2019, Bisignano gave $125,000 to the Trump Victory PAC and another $83,900 to the Republican National Committee. …A person who has spoken with Dudek said they believed some of his bluster might be a smoke screen. They said Dudek, like previous commissioners, said he feared that the system was on the brink of collapse and worried about people not receiving their benefits — a similar sentiment to what Dudek expressed in a recording obtained by ProPublica. They feel that he thinks he's doing damage control and running interference between DOGE and everyone else.
"It felt like a bunch of 6-year-olds with too much sugar had been put in charge of the agency and were just kind of running all over the place, randomly disconnecting and reconnecting things in different ways," the former SSA manager said.
Some of the decisions at Fiserv that played out on Bisignano's watch appear to have rankled some of his employees. A former Fiserv client project manager said that return-to-office policies rolled out late last year under Bisignano contributed to his decision to leave. The former manager described the culture as "a bit of a sweatshop." …
Bisignano "loves his reputation for fixing things," said one person who worked closely with him, "not for burning things down." …
I’m pretty sure that if he knew now what’s he’s going to learn in the next few months that Bisignano would not want to be Commissioner of Social Security. The impressive knowledge and skill which he has demonstrated in his previous career will be completely inadequate to the task because he’s faced with a truly impossible task.
The Bisignano nomination to become Commissioner of Social Security advanced out of the Finance Committee on a narrow 14-13 party line vote. Not a rousing endorsement.
The Bisignano nomination to become Commissioner of Social Security has advanced. The Senate Finance Committee has reported out the nomination favorably. We will see how soon the entire Senate will act on this. There may be a desire to put an adult in charge as quickly as possible.
We don't know how much control Bisignano will have over the brats from DOGE or whether the Office of Management and Budget will order arbitrary staffing cuts that Bisignano will be unable to resist. Of course, we don't know what Bisignano himself wants. I'd like to project upon him my desire that he act responsibly or that, at the least, that he try to avoid presiding over a disaster but it's more than possible that Bisignano is a true believer who cannot imagine that there's a connection between staffing levels and public service. He may even believe that public service doesn't matter.
I have no idea what happened yesterday with the Bisignano nomination. The Senate Finance Committee held a session to consider the nomination but recessed without a vote after some member statements on the nomination. Maybe it had something to do with Senator Booker’s filibuster. In any case, they’re scheduled to meet again to consider the nomination at 2:15 Eastern today. This session won’t be televised,
In the Bisignano confirmation hearing there was reference to correspondence from a current or former Social Security employee concerning Bisignano's contacts with agency personnel. I haven't seen that correspondence until today. We still don't know who this is from but here it is and, as always, click on the images to view full size:
The Senate Finance Committee has scheduled a meeting for 10:00 Eastern for April 1 to advance the Bisignano nomination to become Commissioner of Social Security.
From Wired:
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.
The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months. ...
SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.
“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.
You may recall that Frank Bisignano testified at his confirmation hearing that COBOL was still widely used in business and that its presence at Social Security was nothing to be too concerned about.
I have finally watched the Bisignano confirmation hearing. I found it tedious. For the most part, it wasn't a job interview. It was a performance by all parties. I understand that there are private meetings between nominees and Senators. I hope those are more substantive.
Anyway, here are a few thoughts:
From the Washington Post:
Frank Bisignano, President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Social Security Administration, testified under oath at his confirmation hearing Tuesday that he has had no contact with the Elon Musk cost-cutting team that is directing a major downsizing of the agency.
But Sen. Ron Wyden (Oregon), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the claim is “not true,” citing an account the senator said he received from a senior Social Security official who recently left the agency. The former official — whose detailed statement was shared with The Washington Post — described “numerous contacts Mr. Bisignano made with the agency since his nomination,” including “frequent” conversations with senior executives.
The nominee “personally appointed” Michael Russo, the chief information officer leading Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team at Social Security, and the two speak frequently about agency operations, the former executive said.
The Post confirmed the former official’s account with two people, including another former senior official who heard Russo speak regularly about his interactions with Bisignano over policy changes. The other, a disability advocate, said she was told by acting commissioner Leland Dudek that the nominee and Russo “spoke multiple times a day” about Social Security operations. The advocate requested anonymity to preserve her relationship with the agency, while the former official did so because they were not authorized to disclose internal details….
The former official said in their statement to Wyden that after Russo had trouble persuading the career staff to expedite the hiring of a DOGE software engineer named Akash Bobba, “Mr. Bisignano personally intervened … to instruct SSA staff to onboard Mr. Bobba and give him immediate access” to the agency’s private data systems. Bisignano did not address what role he may have had in helping Bobba gain access. Bobba and Russo did not respond to requests for comment. …
From a New York Times piece on the Bisignano nomination:
… Because of Mr. Dudek’s self-admitted bumpy tenure, he said he did not expect to last much longer.
“I can’t imagine the nominee would want to keep me after the way I’ve been doing things here,” Mr. Dudek said, adding that he had had no contact with Mr. Bisignano. …
Remember, the Senate Finance Committee hearing on the Bisignano is set to begin at 10:00 Eastern time today. Watch it online.
I wouldn’t shed many tears for Dudek. The wingnutosphere always takes care of its foot soldiers.
There are so many news articles coming out about Social Security that it's hard to keep up. Let me share a few that seem notable to me:
The Senate Finance Committee has scheduled a hearing at 10:00 on March 25 on the nomination of Frank Bisignano to become Commissioner of Social Security.
Two Senators have some tough questions for Social Security Commissioner nominee Bisignano.
