Social Security nominee vows to protect personal information amid DOGE data dives
As judges across the country litigate whether DOGE staffers have compromised Americans’ personally identifiable information during their forays into government systems, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Social Security Administration said Tuesday that protecting that data would be “job one” if he’s confirmed.
Frank Bisignano, a Wall Street veteran and CEO of the payments and fintech company Fiserv, faced sustained questioning during his confirmation hearing from Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee about the Elon Musk-led group’s meddling in SSA systems.
A federal judge last week temporarily blocked DOGE access to those systems, but senators peppered Bisignano with questions about whether he’d make the protection of individuals’ PII a priority.
“In this job, it’s job one,” he said. PII “needs the highest level of scrutiny and protection, and we need to understand who can access what information and ensure that that information is anonymized, so they’re not getting data they could use in a bad way.”
Though Bisignano referred to himself in a February interview with CNBC as “fundamentally a DOGE person,” he asserted to Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., on Tuesday that he hasn’t “talked to anybody in DOGE about” the accessing of Americans’ PII outside of SSA protocols.
Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced a whistleblower complaint that alleged that Bisignano intervened to get key DOGE officials installed at SSA, but Trump’s nominee testified that he was “not involved in onboarding anybody in the middle of the night.” Bisignano also said he’s never spoken with acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek and suggested that current problems at the agency detailed in a Washington Post story were more of a “leadership issue” than a DOGE issue.
When pressed by Wyden about whether he’d lock DOGE representatives out of Social Security databases, Bisignano declined to give a yes or no answer but said he would “do whatever is required to protect the information that is private information.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse expressed concerns about damage that may already be done due to “the Musk infiltration of Social Security databases.” When asked by the Rhode Island Democrat what he’d do to make sure those databases weren’t damaged and there were no backdoors left open for threat actors to enter, Bisignano promised “a total review.”
Musk has repeatedly claimed that burrowing into SSA systems is necessary to root out fraud, though DOGE has reportedly found very little of it. Bisignano, who has held several executive positions at global financial institutions including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, told Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., that there is no “need to expose any PII to minimize fraud.”
If confirmed, Bisignano said he’d look at SSA’s anti-fraud unit to “understand how well we’re doing there” and to ensure they “have the right tools to do their job.” Artificial intelligence, he said, will certainly be a part of that.
“Many times you keep what [tools] you have, but you peel away parts of it,” he told Blackburn. “Technically, you build a middle layer, and then you put in modern technology in front of it. … I think we have a strategic advantage with AI. I think we can make all of the work simpler, easier within the department. I think we could drive the accuracy level [by] multiple decimals.”
Though the agency has used AI for decades and reported nearly two dozen use cases last year, SSA’s workforce cuts have led some to believe that the technology will be used to replace customer service-facing functions. Bisignano said AI would likely be used in many forms, noting that the technology “doesn’t only have to be client facing.”
“One of the greatest efficiency opportunities we have is using artificial intelligence,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we use it for answering the phone. It means we use it to learn how to do our work better.”
