The future of America's biggest safety net is in the hands of a career bureaucrat and a hard-charging finance titan

The Social Security Administration faces a delicate moment. Its future teeters between a career bureaucrat and a former Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase executive who may bring order — or further tumult.

The agency maintains the country's largest safety net. It employs nearly 60,000 federal workers and provides benefits to over 73 million Americans. It has long been seen as untouchable in Washington — "the third rail of American politics" — and commissioners rarely leave, even as presidential administrations change.

That changed in February, when Michelle King, a 30-year veteran of the agency, abruptly left her role as acting commissioner. In her place, President Donald Trump installed Leland Dudek, an employee who wasn't in the agency's executive ranks.

The transition, which came as DOGE staffers accessed internal agency data, one worker's affidavit said, was a sharp departure from typical agency protocol. It "was a shock to every single person that works at SSA," Laura Haltzel, a former Social Security associate commissioner, told Business Insider. It was also a harbinger of the chaos to come.

Since then, the White House DOGE office has slashed staff numbers, policy flip-flops have put beneficiaries on edge, Dudek weighed closing the agency based on his understanding of a judge's ruling, and the AARP has said that things may get worse.

Meanwhile, Frank Bisignano, a finance titan and formidable turnaround manager, is waiting in the wings as Trump's nominee to replace Dudek. The transition ahead could set the course for how — and how well — millions of Americans receive their benefits.

The turnaround agent

Bisignano, 65, is the chair and CEO of Fiserv, a global fintech giant. He was the second-highest-paid CEO in the US in 2017, when he earned more than $100 million.

Some in the industry told BI they see him as a turnaround artist, which could serve him well should he take over the agency.

Bisignano's confirmation is awaiting a full Senate vote, which is expected after the chamber votes on nominees for multiple diplomatic positions. He has already appeared before the Senate Finance Committee, where he addressed concerns about privatization. "I've never thought about privatizing. It's not a word that anybody's ever talked to me about," he told lawmakers.

An official on the transition team shepherding Trump's nominees through the confirmation process declined to comment for this story or make Bisignano available for an interview.

Some who spoke with BI expressed surprise that he would join the Trump administration. An archived biography from First Data, where he served as chair and CEO, said he's "a strong supporter of diversity" and helped create affinity groups for women and LGBTQ+ employees at the company. He's donated to candidates on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, records show. In May 2019, Bisignano gave $125,000 to the Trump Victory PAC and another $83,900 to the Republican National Committee.

Born in Brooklyn, with a father who was an orphan and a grandfather who emigrated from Italy, Bisignano first landed on Wall Street in the 1970s. He started out at smaller firms before joining the legendary bankers Sandy Weill and Jamie Dimon as they built what would become Citigroup. There, he managed the company's global transaction services business, helping steer trillions of dollars in payments worldwide.

"He knew enough about the guts of the operations he was involved in to be able to be a very good manager," Weill, a former chair and CEO of Citigroup, told BI.

Later, he joined JPMorgan Chase, where he reversed multibillion-dollar losses in the firm's mortgage banking unit and rose to become its co-chief operating officer.

"Frank did a very good job in operations for JPMorgan, but I think that he was looking for something where he would be able to test his leadership skills beyond operations," Weill said.

In 2013, he took over First Data. Its owner at the time, the private equity giant KKR, was seeking a CEO with knowledge of payments and back-office systems. He steered the company through its $2.6 billion initial public offering and its $22 billion sale to Fiserv in 2019; he became Fiserv's CEO the following year. Under his tenure, the company's stock price has roughly doubled.

A post on the official White House website in late April touted the "Trump effect," crediting the president for spurring a series of private sector investments in American industry. Among those the administration pointed to: Fiserv's $175 million commitment to develop a 427,000-square-foot fintech campus in Kansas, which is expected to drive the creation of 2,000 jobs.

Leland Dudek's turbulent tenure

Currently leading the agency — and seen by some SSA insiders as responsible for much of the recent turmoil — is Dudek, the acting commissioner Trump installed in February.

One former senior Social Security official who was familiar with the senior-level employees usually tapped for the role remembered thinking: "Who is this guy?" A director-level employee who's on administrative leave told BI that Dudek, 48, was "a nobody until a month ago." (Most of the SSA sources who spoke with BI left within the past few months.)

Most recently, Dudek had been serving as a senior advisor in the agency's Office of Program Integrity.

Dudek, who holds degrees from the Catholic University of America and the National Defense University, has long been enmeshed in anti-fraud and information technology work. According to an agency biography, he previously served as the chief information security officer for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. He has been with the SSA since 2009, though he does not appear on an organizational chart archived immediately before King's departure.

One former manager at SSA who met Dudek when he arrived at the agency said that he "seemed like a pretty earnest, straightforward kind of computer science IT type who had experience outside the agency." Dudek, this person said, was part of a larger group who felt the agency was slow to adopt technological advances.

"He generally seemed to be interested in things running more effectively," a former SSA employee said. They described him as being frustrated over "trying to make change and do things in a bureaucratic environment" and said other employees at his level felt similarly.

Another former SSA executive said they believed he had good intentions and genuinely cared about curbing fraud and improper payments.

His path at the agency was not straightforward. Elon Musk said on X that Dudek was "fired" for "helping @DOGE find taxpayer savings" before he ascended to SSA's highest perch.

There, he brought his own style.

"I think he felt like he deserved a voice at the table, and then he suddenly got one and didn't quite know what to do with it," the former executive said. The executive added that Dudek appeared to have competing priorities between staff cuts and making sure the agency ran smoothly. "It's been a bit of a yo-yo," they said.

"It's very unusual, very unusual leadership," said Kathleen Romig, who worked at the agency for nine years on and off and now serves as the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Many of his decisions seemed to be "hasty and ill-considered," Romig said. Some, like shuttering the agency or changing in-person identification guidelines, were ultimately reversed.

"I've never seen leadership like this before at SSA, by a long shot," she said.

On a press call in March, Dudek said some contracts in Maine that let parents register their newborn children for an SSA number were "canceled because I screwed up."

"I made the wrong move there. I should always ask my staff for guidance first before I cancel something," Dudek said. "I'm new at this job. It looked fishy." The contracts were ultimately reinstated.

Dudek and the Social Security Administration did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

His appointment pushed at least one SSA worker to leave. When they saw reports that he'd shared information with DOGE and was still elevated, "it just all became a farce," the former worker said.

A person who has spoken with Dudek said they believed some of his bluster might be a smoke screen. They said Dudek, like previous commissioners, said he feared that the system was on the brink of collapse and worried about people not receiving their benefits — a similar sentiment to what Dudek expressed in a recording obtained by ProPublica. They feel that he thinks he's doing damage control and running interference between DOGE and everyone else.

"It felt like a bunch of 6-year-olds with too much sugar had been put in charge of the agency and were just kind of running all over the place, randomly disconnecting and reconnecting things in different ways," the former SSA manager said.

Bisignano's high-stakes challenge

This is what awaits Bisignano, who has developed a reputation as a hard-charging, demanding executive who tends to see Saturdays as just another workday.

"He was always making sure that everybody had their nose to the grindstone," Weill said.

As he's moved from company to company, Bisignano has surrounded himself with a cadre of deputies, some of whom have been with him since his JPMorgan Chase days. Another person who knows Bisignano said some of these loyalists had shown they'd follow his lead without question, no matter how big the ask.

"They're going to pick up any call from Frank any time of day — morning, night, Saturday, Sunday, 7 a.m.," the person said.

Some of the decisions at Fiserv that played out on Bisignano's watch appear to have rankled some of his employees. A former Fiserv client project manager said that return-to-office policies rolled out late last year under Bisignano contributed to his decision to leave. The former manager described the culture as "a bit of a sweatshop."

Around Thanksgiving, Fiserv implemented new return-to-office guidance, calling some personnel managers back to their desks five days a week and instructing other workers to spend about nine hours a day at the office, an internal communication reviewed by BI shows.

The former Fiserv employee credited Bisignano with getting results: "I do think he was part of the reason Fiserv is so profitable."

In a statement, Fiserv pointed to a 122% rise in its stock under Bisignano's leadership, attributing his "vision" to driving innovation across technology and payments. The company also cited his "commitment to investing in people," including veterans and small-business owners.

Whether Bisignano's no-nonsense approach will be as effective in running the government's biggest safety net as it was in vaulting him to the zenith of corporate America is an open question. So is what a dynamic might look like with his peers in the administration, like the former Wall Streeters Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent, or Musk, who has acted as DOGE's public face.

He may soon find himself standing between policy whiplash from Washington and the checks that millions of older Americans depend on.

Bisignano "loves his reputation for fixing things," said one person who worked closely with him, "not for burning things down."

Allie Kelly contributed reporting.