When the Wall Street veteran Frank Bisignano goes before Congress on Tuesday as President Trump’s pick to lead the Social Security Administration, he will confront questions about how he would run an agency suddenly in the grips of upheaval.
In recent weeks, the billionaire Elon Musk has zeroed in on the agency, which is charged with the staid but critical work of providing retirement, survivor and disability payments to 73 million Americans each month.
Mr. Musk has claimed that vast numbers of Americans are fraudulently drawing benefits from the agency, an assertion experts say is demonstrably false. Over the objections of longtime career civil servants pushed out of the agency, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency has moved swiftly to scrutinize its internal databases, deploying at least 10 staff members inside, including a longtime confidant of Mr. Musk.
At the same time, the acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, a former midlevel manager, has made a number of head-spinning moves. On Friday, he threatened to shut down the system used for all of the Social Security Administration’s work in response to a judge’s order — only to back down hours later.
The churn has alarmed many older and disabled Americans who rely on Social Security payments and worry it could become harder to gain access to them.
“It’s a lot of confusion, frankly a lot of chaos,” said Bill Sweeney, the vice president for government affairs at AARP, which represents older Americans. “People are terrified of what’s happening with Social Security. There’s a level of anxiety about this among our members that Congress, policymakers and the administration needs to take seriously.”
Some Democratic lawmakers say they are so concerned that the Trump administration is setting the agency up to fail that they sent a letter on Sunday asking Mr. Bisignano to promise not to privatize any of its components.
“We are gravely concerned about the current trajectory of the S.S.A. and more specifically, that those charged with leading it might profit off its destruction,” Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote.
It remains to be seen how Mr. Bisignano, who described himself in an interview on CNBC as “fundamentally a DOGE person,” will navigate those questions.
Mr. Bisignano, most recently at the helm of the payment processing giant Fiserv, has spent much of his career as a fixer for major financial institutions hoping to improve their back-end processes. In the CNBC interview, he said he planned to bring the same approach to Social Security.
“The objective is not to touch benefits,” he said. “The objective is to figure out, there could be fraud, waste and abuse in there. And we build A.I. to find fraud, waste and abuse for a living. It’s going to be a tech story.”
Mr. Bisignano has held positions at several of Wall Street’s marquee firms, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. He earned $100 million in 2017, more than 2,000 times the average employee’s salary at his firm at the time, First Data Corporation, which later merged with Fiserv.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Bisignano declined to comment. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement: “Any American receiving Social Security benefits will continue to receive them. The sole mission of DOGE is to identify waste, fraud, and abuse only.”
Some of the agency’s more than 50,000 employees hope Mr. Bisignano can restore a measure of certainty to their work of disbursing roughly $1.6 trillion in retirement and disability benefits each year. Current and former staff members say they know that the agency is not perfect, but that they have for years tried to better help Americans gain access to benefits that lift more people out of poverty than any other federal program.
The changes that the Trump administration has made in the name of fighting fraud risks make already-frustrating customer service worse, according to multiple employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal worries.
Americans who want to sign up for benefits or change their bank account information soon will not be able to do so over the phone, for example. That change will push more people to visit field offices just as the agency prepares to shed workers, a combination that could sharply increase wait times for an appointment.
During a Monday meeting held with advocates to address the phone changes, Mr. Dudek said that the quick rollout was at the behest of the White House, which demanded an urgent time frame. He said such a change would typically involve far more planning — a process that would normally take two years instead of two weeks, according to a person who participated in the meeting.
Mr. Dudek acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times on Friday that he had concerns about what would happen if the fast changes generated problems that impaired the agency. He told advocates during the meeting that if they disrupted citizens to the point of being untenable, the agency would roll them back.
In another instance, the Social Security Administration briefly ended a contract that had allowed parents of newborn babies in Maine to sign their children up for a Social Security number at the hospital, instead requiring them to do so in person at an office. Mr. Dudek said he had ordered the move after watching Janet Mills, Maine’s Democratic governor, clash with Mr. Trump at the White House. He quickly reversed that decision, as well as another to end electronic death reporting in the state.
“I was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president,” Mr. Dudek said in the interview. “I screwed up. I’ll admit I screwed up.”
Because of Mr. Dudek’s self-admitted bumpy tenure, he said he did not expect to last much longer.
“I can’t imagine the nominee would want to keep me after the way I’ve been doing things here,” Mr. Dudek said, adding that he had had no contact with Mr. Bisignano.
In the meantime, he is continuing to push through the administration’s demand for cost reductions, cutting the staff and preparing to reorganize regional offices.
While the Trump administration has taken a similarly aggressive approach to bureaucracies across the government, the incursion into Social Security comes with singular political risks.
The program is the primary source of retirement income for many older Americans, a critical voting bloc. Mr. Trump has spent his entire career in politics promising to protect Social Security, even proposing to eliminate taxes on benefits during the campaign. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have moved to protect local field offices from closure, while Democrats try to take advantage of their opposition’s decision to grab ahold of what has long been the third rail of American politics.
‘Needle in the Haystack’
The worries are so acute that routine hiccups — like changing the date of payments or website problems — now seem to many beneficiaries to be signs of more profound problems.
Michelle Ouellette, a 67-year-old former lawyer in California, applied for benefits online in January without success. After more than a month, she then tried several different phone lines, finally getting through to someone.
“If it was so hard for me to get help before Trump cuts to Social Security, what will it be like after?” she said. “I assume that Trump wants to make it so burdensome that you won’t bother to sign up.”
At Social Security offices across the country, workers say they are seeing a noticeable increase in concerns like Ms. Ouellette’s — and in more visitors overall worried about changes to come. In recent weeks, employees said they had heard beneficiaries repeat claims about fraud or express fear about the Musk team seeing their personal data.
That is adding to the stress and workload for a staff that the Trump administration plans to shrink by 12 percent.
Field office workers are already spread thin. Claims specialists must often wear many hats — working the front window and answering phones, all while completing their own assigned caseloads. It can take years to get up to speed on complex systems and policies, a key reason attrition is especially problematic at the agency, workers say.
Chris Delaney, an official for a federal workers’ union who also works as a claims specialist in Hudson, N.Y., said there was an “eerie cloud” looming over his office.
“It seems like the people calling the shots have no clue what the field office is actually like, or they just want us all slaughtered,” he said.
Undergirding the suite of changes is Mr. Musk’s fixation on the idea that dead people and undocumented immigrants are fraudulently claiming benefits from Social Security. Experts say the relatively small amount of improper Social Security payments — estimated at less than 1 percent of paid benefits — has little to do with dead people or undocumented immigrants, who in fact often pay taxes into the system without ever claiming benefits, improving its fiscal health.
Nevertheless, Mr. Musk’s team has prioritized as one of its first projects marking people as dead in a crucial database if they are listed as being 120 years or older, along with other criteria. The team’s engineers are working with career civil servants on that effort, which is aimed at ridding the database of faulty records and is not expected to affect anyone receiving payments, according to people familiar with the work, who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.
Separately, Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who is a close friend of Mr. Musk, and DOGE aides have also requested information about whether undocumented immigrants are receiving benefits, according to these people.
A federal judge castigated the Musk team’s fraud work in an order barring it from having access to sensitive personal information. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack,” wrote the judge, Ellen Lipton Hollander.
The order at one point last week prompted Mr. Dudek to threaten to shut down the system that undergirds the agency, though he later backed off. Members of Mr. Musk’s team no longer have access to sensitive agency data, he said.
Other initiatives by Mr. Dudek and DOGE are still proceeding. During the Biden administration, the agency said it would no longer withhold a full monthly benefit to recollect overpayments — which are often caused by agency errors — but instead hold back a maximum of 10 percent until the balance is repaid. The goal was to leave Americans with access to what is often a critical source of cash. Mr. Dudek reversed the policy and has resumed pulling back the entire check until the excess is paid back.
Mr. Dudek said he had in mind the best interest of the Social Security system, which his family was a beneficiary of when he was a child.
“Unless you use a brute force in government, you get stalled out,” Mr. Dudek said.
Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac and Eli Murray contributed reporting.
