IRS taps familiar face as new CEO: SSA’s Frank Bisignano

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, still moonlighting as acting IRS commissioner following Billy Long’s ouster in August, is adding another Trump official to the tax agency’s leadership chart: Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano.

Bessent said in a press release Monday that Bisignano will serve as chief executive officer of the IRS, a newly created role that tasks the SSA leader with overseeing all day-to-day operations at the tax agency. 

“Frank is a businessman with an exceptional track record of driving growth and efficiency in the private and now public sector,” Bessent said in a statement. “Under his leadership at the SSA, he has already made important and substantial progress, and we are pleased that he will bring this expertise to the IRS as we sharpen our focus on collections, privacy, and customer service in order to deliver better outcomes for hardworking Americans.”

The press release made the case that Bisignano is “a natural choice” for the position given the shared “technological and customer service goals” of the IRS and SSA. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Bisignano touted his experience as chairman and CEO of the payments and fintech company Fiserv, saying that work made him an ideal choice to guide SSA through its myriad technology challenges.

Mike Kaercher, deputy director of the Tax Law Center at New York University, said in a statement that “managing the IRS is a full-time job” and having one person fill both roles “makes it even harder for the IRS to prepare for the next filing season and implement recent changes in tax law.”

“Putting the same person in charge of both the IRS and SSA creates a conflict of interest when SSA wants access to legally protected taxpayer data,” he added.

The Social Security Administration under Bisignano has since taken victory laps on a variety of tech and customer service-related initiatives — though there has been pushback on some of those supposed wins. Leading up to Bisignano’s confirmation, Democratic lawmakers expressed concerns that he may consider privatizing Social Security — a charge he denied.

“I’ve never thought about privatizing,” Bisignano testified. “It’s not a word that anybody has ever talked to me about, and I don’t see this institution as anything other than a government agency that gets run for the benefit of the American public.”

It remains to be seen whether similar concerns will be levied as Bisignano steps into the CEO position at the IRS, which has cycled through six commissioners during the second Trump term before settling — for the time being — on Bessent. Long, who lasted two months as IRS commissioner, had told lawmakers during his confirmation hearings that he intended to take “clues from [the] private sector” on IT modernization. 

It’s been a tumultuous stretch for the tax agency, which was targeted early and often by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. At least a quarter of the IRS’s IT staff has been cut, and an August watchdog report found that nearly half of the probationary staffers swept up in reduction-in-force orders had “fully successful” or better reviews.

This story was updated Oct. 7, 2025, with comments from Mike Kaercher.