According to Social Security Administration Commissioner and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano, the agency under President Donald Trump is taking major steps to modernize its systems and root out waste and fraud.
“I would say I’m bringing an operational focus to it that I … honed in all my years of being at the top of the largest financial institutions of the world,” Bisignano told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” host Jan Jekeliek.
Before entering politics, Bisignano had built a career in helping to downsize and restructure businesses, and describes himself as a supporter of the Department of Government Efficiency initiative; however, he’s expressed support for keeping Social Security intact, and indicated that his reforms have focused on modernizing the systems and making payments more efficient.
“Getting payments right is the most important thing, being able to—given the amount of money that we’re flowing—and that’s what we’ve had a maniacal focus on while delivering customer service at a level that they’ve never seen before,” Bisignano said.
Bisignano currently serves as commissioner of the Social Security Administration, in which capacity he reports directly to Trump.
He’s also the first-ever CEO of the IRS. He was appointed in October 2025 by the Treasury Department to manage daily operations and modernize the tax collection agency. Bisignano said that in the role, he reports directly to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
As Social Security commissioner, Bisignano oversees outlays of around $1.7 trillion. In his role as IRS CEO, meanwhile, he’s overseeing cash inflows that total around $5.6 trillion a year.
At both agencies, Bisignano said he’s worked to modernize systems and clean up records to cut down on waste and fraud.
“One very simple thing was, at Social Security, we had a website that you could have a digital account on, but it was down, you know, almost 20 percent of the time—by design, 29 hours a week,” Bisignano said.
He said that through correction of “control-related issues,” he has overseen changes that have “saved tens of billions of dollars.”
Bisignano also suggested that his oversight had found no indication that active Social Security numbers attached to dead people—those aged 120 or older—had been receiving payments from the federal government.
“I 100 percent believe … it wasn’t that people who weren’t alive any longer were getting paid social security. It was that there was a live social security number which could be used throughout the whole system,” Bisignano said. “So, you know, that’s where you’re going to have fraud, waste, and abuse.”
