WOODLAWN, Maryland — There is a pattern in the Trump administration that if you are very good at the first job you are appointed to, you are likely to get another one, something more challenging than the first.
It’s been true for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the acting national security adviser and acting archivist of the United States, and for several months, he was the acting director of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
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Frank Bisignano hasn’t hit peak Rubio yet. But the 18th commissioner of the Social Security Administration, who was confirmed by the Senate in May, was named earlier this month the chief executive officer of the IRS, serving directly under Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Bisignano said his path to both positions had a humble beginning. His dedication to keeping Social Security robust and available to all people for generations to come originated from those working-class beginnings and his family’s experiences.
“I grew up in a house with my maternal grandfather, who immigrated to our country and served in World War I and became blind, and a father who was orphaned in 1937. He was one of 15 children. By 1940, orphans got survivor’s benefits, and that played a big role in his life,” said Bisignano, who grew up in the working-class Mill Basin neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Both men, he said, benefited from Social Security in different ways.
“It played a very significant role in their lives,” he said. “My dad never called himself an orphan, but he got shuffled around to different sisters’ homes, and obviously, Social Security was helpful for them to take care of him.”
He said his childhood was loving and resilient and filled with determination. It was also loud and included many traditions brought over from the old country, such as the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve.
“All of us would gather in the basement to do the cooking. It is something we still do today with my family,” he said.
“After the war, my father spent over 40 years as a treasury employee. And honestly, I grew up in a home with two role models who both were war veterans, and they shaped my life,” he said.
Bisignano said most of his life has been spent living in and around New York in finance, a career path that began with a summer internship with Bear Stearns.
“I got hooked on the business,” he said. He was so good at it that he became the youngest senior vice president at American Express in his 20s, going on to manage a third of First Fidelity Bank by the age of 30.
Bisignano then listed an impressive career at the highest level of finance, innovation, and banking. He found a way to have all three intersect with the transformative power of technology. From J.P. Morgan to Fiserv, Bisignano has been at the center of some of the greatest success stories of the past 20 years.
It was while he was the CEO at Fiserv, one of the largest financial software companies in the country, that he received a phone call to come see Donald Trump, then the president-elect, about running Social Security.
Trump posted on social media, “Frank is a business leader with a tremendous track record of transforming large corporations. He will be responsible for delivering the Agency’s commitment to the American people for generations to come!”
Bisignano, who just celebrated the social service’s 90th birthday with employees, said the task was not just to protect the program’s future but also to make it more efficient for people trying to access it, as well as to reduce the call wait time. Efficiency and technology are Bisignano’s sweet spots. Six years ago, he navigated the complicated merger of Fiserv and the payment processing company First Data.
Bisignano, who has lived and worked in New York for most of his life, said it was his multiple treks by car across the country from Brooklyn to Kansas during his college years that gave him a real sense of the expanse of the country and the complexity of needs that were similar to and different from his family’s.
“It was good for me because if you grow up in the Northeast and you just live in New York, you start thinking that is normal. And then you see there’s a whole other world. It helped me run companies, but it also helped me call on people at a very young age and talk about things that I would never have been able to if I had never stepped out of the Northeast,” he said.
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Bisignano smiled when he was asked if he took a pay cut for this job — of course he did — but he said he was so inspired by the president’s commitment to protecting and preserving Social Security that he didn’t think twice about joining the administration.
“My job is to get Social Security to be a great service, that it will be here forever,” he said, adding, “I feel the urgency to get this completely right for everybody, and I will.”