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Frank Bisignano’s cell phone lit up, and he recognized the caller. The president was on the line. On this morning in early October, the newly confirmed Social Security commissioner was seated in his 40th floor office in Manhattan’s Tribeca that features a sweeping view of the lower East Side and on to Brooklyn, where he grew up in a blue-collar family to a father who spent 44 years as a customs agent, and a mother who ran a stevedoring outfit. “The president and my boss, [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent were together in the Oval Office, and the president told me it was Scott’s recommendation that I also run the IRS as its first ‘CEO,’” recalls Bisignano. “I said, ‘Yes, I’ll do whatever you want,’ and the president said that he’s counting on me to ‘make the IRS great again,’ just as he’d charged me to do with Social Security.”
Those dual jobs make Bisignano probably the back-office administrator wielding the broadest authority in recent U.S. history. He now oversees both the largest retirement system in the world, which pays out $1.5 trillion a year to over 70 million beneficiaries, and a planet-topping revenue machine that collects over $5 trillion in annual taxes that fund over 90% of the federal government’s operations.
Bisignano is a phenomenon neither agency has seen in a long time, if ever; a former super-big-time private-sector CEO who’s running both agencies like they’re the kind of turnaround cases he’s made a career of f...
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