Frank Bisignano will run both agencies, though Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will remain the acting IRS commissioner.
The Trump administration has found its seventh leader for the Internal Revenue Service since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term: the head of the Social Security Administration.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that Frank Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, will also serve as the IRS’s “chief executive officer,” a role that does not formally exist at the tax agency. The move sidesteps a potentially lengthy Senate confirmation process to fill a leadership vacuum at IRS as it prepares for filing season and tries to integrate massive changes to tax law from Trump and the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Any changes to the hierarchy of the IRS’s senior leadership are required by law to be vetted by the agency’s oversight board. That bipartisan body has been inactive for years because it lacks a quorum.
“I don’t see how you can do running Social Security and running the IRS,” said Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate, the agency’s consumer watchdog, from 2001 to 2019. “I don’t see how you can do it with the IRS being gutted the way it is, Social Security being gutted the way it is, the massive changes that they’ve got underway, and a massive tax law that you’ve got underway.”
