As Wall Street veteran Frank Vignano chose to lead the Social Security Agency before Congress on Tuesday, he will face questions about how to suddenly run the agency in a turbulent hand.
Over the past few weeks, billionaire Elon Musk has been charged with a stable but important job of providing retirement, survivors and disability payments to 73 million Americans each month.
Musk claims a huge number of Americans are fraudulently drawing profits from institutions, experts say it's clearly wrong. Regarding the dissenting views of civil servants in long careers, government efficiency in the agency moved quickly to deploy at least 10 staff members, including Musk's longtime confidants, internally, and to deploy an internal database.
At the same time, former mid-level manager, Deputy Commissioner Leland Dudeck made many head-spurt moves. On Friday, he threatened to shut down the system used for all Social Security Agency work in response to a judge's order.
Canceling is wary of many seniors and Americans with disabilities who rely on Social Security payments, and worries that it will make them difficult to access.
“It's a lot of confusion, frankly a lot of confusion,” said Bill Sweeney, Vice President of Government Affairs at AARP, representing older Americans. “People are afraid of what is going on with Social Security. There is a level of anxiety about this among members who say that Congress, policymakers and those who need to take it seriously.”
Some Democrats say they are so concerned that they sent a letter on Sunday asking Visignano to promise not to privatize its components as the Trump administration sets it up to fail the agency.
“We are concerned about the current trajectory of the SSA, more specifically, that those charged with leading it could benefit from the destruction,” wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ron Wyden of Oregon.
It remains to be seen how Visignano, who described himself as “basically a Doge guy” in an interview with CNBC, will navigate these questions.
Bisignano has recently been at the helm of the huge Fiserv in payment processing, and has spent much of his career as a fixer at major financial institutions, hoping to improve his backend processes. In an interview with CNBC, he said he plans to bring the same approach to social security.
“The purpose is not to touch on profit,” he said. “The goal is to understand that there can be fraud, waste, abuse there. And we're building AI to find fraud, waste, abuse for our livelihood. That's going to be technical.”
Bisignano has held positions at several Wall Street marquee companies, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Jpmorgan Chase. He won $100 million in 2017. More than 2,000 times the salary of his company, First Data Corporation, at the time, employees more than 2,000 times more than 2,000 times more than it was later merged with Fiserv.
A spokesman for Vignano declined to comment. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement: “Americans who receive Social Security benefits will continue to receive them. Doge's sole mission is to identify waste, fraud and abuse only.”
Some of the agency's more than 50,000 employees hope that Bisignano can restore a measure of their job certainty, paying about $1.6 trillion in retirement and disability benefits each year. Current and former staff say they know that agencies aren't perfect, but they know that over the years, Americans have access to benefits that drive more people out of poverty than any other federal program.
The changes the Trump administration made under the name of fighting the risk of fraud have already exacerbated customer service, according to multiple employees who spoke about terms of anonymity to explain internal concerns.
For example, Americans who want to sign up for benefits or change their bank account information immediately cannot do so over the phone. That change will encourage more people to visit field offices, just as they would when agents prepare to abandon workers.
At a meeting Monday with supporters to address the changes to mobile phones, Dudek said the quick rollout was a White House request and called for an urgent time slot. He said that such changes usually involve far more plans. According to people who attended the conference, the process usually takes two years, not two weeks.
Dudek admitted in an interview with the New York Times Friday that he was concerned about what would happen if fast change caused problems that undermine the agency. He told supporters during the meeting that agencies would roll them back in that they would not be accepted if they interrupted citizens.
In another example, the Social Security Administration temporarily terminated a contract that allowed parents of newborn babies in Maine to sign their children to their hospital Social Security numbers and instead asked them to do so directly in the office. Dudeck said he ordered the move after seeing Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills clash with Trump in the White House. He not only reversed that decision immediately, but also reversed another decision to end the state's electronic death report.
“I was checked by the governor of Maine for not being really sincere to the president,” Dudeck said in an interview. “I ruined it. I admit I ruined it.”
Due to Dudeck's self-promotional, bumpy tenure, he said he doesn't think it will last that long.
“I can't imagine a candidate wanting to protect me after doing something here,” Dudeck added that he had not had contact with Visignano.
In the meantime, he continues to push the administration's demand for cost reductions, prepares to cut staff and restructure local offices.
The Trump administration has taken a similarly aggressive approach to government-wide bureaucrats, but intrusions into social security carry singly political risks.
The program is a major source of retirement income and an important voting block for many older Americans. Trump has spent his entire political career pledged to protect Social Security, and has even proposed eliminating taxes on benefits during his campaign. While some Capitol Hill Republicans have moved to protect their local field offices from closures, Democrats are trying to capitalize on the opposition's decision to grab what has long been the third railroad in American politics.
“Haystack needle”
The worry is so serious that daily hiccups, such as changing the dates of payments and website issues, seem to be a sign of deeper problems for many beneficiaries.
Michelle Owlett, a 67-year-old former California lawyer, applied for benefits online in January without success. Over a month later, she tried out several different phone lines and eventually reached someone.
“If it was so hard for Trump to get help before he cut Social Security, what would that be like?” she said. “I think Trump wants to be so burdened that he doesn't bother him signing up.”
At social security offices across the country, workers say concerns like Ullett's have risen significantly. Over the past few weeks, employees said they had heard that beneficiaries had repeated allegations about fraud and expressed fear about the mask team looking at personal data.
It adds stress and workload for staff that the Trump administration plans to shrink by 12%.
Field office workers are already spreading thinly. Billing experts often wear many hats. Working on the front windows, staying on the phone, completing all your own assigned caseloads. It can take years to speed up complex systems and policies. Attrition for the main reasons is particularly problematic at agents, workers say.
Chris Delaney, a federal union official who also works as a claims specialist in Hudson, New York, said there was a “creepy cloud” looming in his office.
“The people calling the shots don't seem to have any clue what the field office really is, or how we all want to be massacred,” he said.
What makes the series of changes is Musk's persistence on the notion that dead people and undocumented immigrants are fraudulently claiming benefits from Social Security. Experts say that relatively small amounts of inappropriate Social Security payments (estimated to be less than 1% of paid benefits) have little to do with undocumented immigrants, who often pay taxes to the system without claiming benefits and often pay taxes to the system without improving financial health.
Nevertheless, Musk's team was given priority as one of the first projects to mark people as dead in a critical database if they were listed as over 120, along with other standards. The team's engineers work with career civil servants to collaborate on their efforts. This is intended to remove a database of failed records and is not expected to be affected by those receiving the payment.
Separately, Musk's best friends, private equity investor Antonio Gracias and Aide Doge, requested information on whether undocumented immigrants are receiving benefits, according to these people.
A federal judge cast the mask team's fraudulent work in order and banned access to sensitive personal information. “We have begun searching for the Haystack proverb needle, without any specific knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack,” wrote judge Ellen Lipton Hollander.
Due to an order at some point last week, Dudek threatened to shut down the system that controlled the agency, but later retreated. Members of Musk's team have no longer access to sensitive agency data, he said.
Other initiatives by Dudek and Doge are still in progress. During the Biden administration, agencies said they will no longer withhold full monthly profits in order to recover overpayments caused by agency errors, but instead will hold them down up to 10% until the balance is repaid. The goal was to leave Americans with access to what is often a critical source of cash. Dudek overturned the policy and resumed pulling back the entire check until the excess is paid back.
Dudek said he has in mind the greatest benefits of the social security system, which his family was a beneficiary of as a child.
“Unless the government uses brute force, it will stop,” Dudeck said.
Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac and Eli Murray contributed the report.
