Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano will serve in a newly created CEO role at the Internal Revenue Service.

Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano will serve in a newly created CEO role at the Internal Revenue Service. MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Bisignano to lead IRS in addition to SSA duties, raising questions about the Senate confirmation process

Experts warned that the move could further facilitate the consolidation of Social Security and IRS databases for use in immigration enforcement.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Monday that he had named Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano to serve in a newly created CEO role at the Internal Revenue Service, raising concerns both about Bisignano’s newly split priorities and the Trump administration’s effort to consolidate government databases of Americans’ personal information to aid in its mass deportation efforts.

In addition to his duties running the Social Security Administration, Bisignano will be responsible for “overseeing all day-to-day IRS operations,” the Treasury Department said in a press release Monday.

“Frank is a businessman with an exceptional track record of driving growth and efficiency in the private and now public sector,” Bessent said in a statement. “Under his leadership at the SSA, he has already made important and substantial progress, and we are pleased that he will bring this expertise to the IRS as we sharpen our focus on collections, privacy and customer service in order to deliver better outcomes for hardworking Americans.”

Bisignano has touted massive gains in customer service metrics like hold times on SSA’s 1-800 number. But those boasts are not backed up by the facts, as the commissioner frequently misstated the state of the agency’s customer service metrics at the start of the Trump administration and changed the methodology of some metrics to incorporate when a member of the public reaches an AI agent rather than a human representative, or elects to receive a call back rather than wait on hold.

Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, described the creation of a new job title for Bisignano, rather than nominating him or naming him acting IRS commissioner—a job ostensibly being performed by Bessent—as an effort to bypass the Senate.

“Apparently this CEO job is responsible for the ‘day-to-day’ operations of IRS, but those are the statutory duties of the IRS commissioner,” Romig said. “It’s hard to imagine the Senate would say OK to having one person run both the largest federal program in Social Security and then implement the huge tax bill that they just passed over at IRS.”

Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, a progressive nonprofit that advocates for more funding for SSA and protection of Americans’ Social Security benefits, described making Bisignano a “part-time commissioner” an insult to beneficiaries.

“The Trump administration has already plunged Social Security into crisis by pushing out thousands of the most experienced, knowledgeable workers,” she said in a statement. “They are creating chaos and real harm, including ending paper checks for Americans who have previously shown they need them. Now, Bisignano’s divided attention will create a bottleneck that makes the inevitable problems that arise even harder to correct.”

Romig said Bisignano’s appointment atop IRS is particularly worrying from a privacy perspective, given recent reporting by Wired that the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency has been working to consolidate data from IRS and SSA to better track and surveil undocumented immigrants.

“This raises serious questions about data access at both agencies, after they already pushed out acting leaders at Treasury and SSA early on in the Trump administration over the issue,” she said. “Previously there were hurdles that the SSA and IRS commissioners would have to sign off on, but now it’s the same guy. It raises a lot of really important questions.”

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