For all the talk about Social Security being in crisis, what hasn’t been stressed enough is the leadership crisis. From December of 2023 to until the current leader’s Senate confirmation of May 6, a parade of four commissioners and acting commissioners cycled through the position. These chiefs departed fast in part because they got frequent hammerings in Congress over the agency’s poor phone and face-to-face service to beneficiaries.
Enter Frank Bisignano. The Jamie Dimon protegee had a storied career in banking, and was appointed to lead SSA last spring (he has since added the job of IRS CEO to his resume, which you can read about here.)
But the changes he has quickly enacted at SSA—drawing heavily on his time in the private sector—are real, and they’re impressing even the Administration’s fiercest critics.
One of Bisignano’s first moves was to ensure that people could access the My SSA.gov website 24/7. “When I took over, I learned that the site was down 29 hours a week or 17% of the time,” Bisignano told Fortune in a lengthy interview. “It was supposed to be ‘off hours.’ But it wasn’t off hours for our recipients in Hawaii or the West Coast.” Bisignano quickly rallied his engineering team to get the site running around the clock.
