Oligarchs and the Trump Admin: Frank Bisignano

Net Worth: $1 billion (ABC News, 12/17/24)

Who is Frank Bisignano?

• Frank Bisignano made his fortune as a banking and fintech executive, amassing his wealth by climbing the corporate ladder at some of America’s most powerful financial institutions. In 2017, he was the second-highest paid executive in the U.S., making $102 million as the CEO of First Data, more than 2000 times the average salary of his employees.
  
• Bisignano worked at Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase before becoming CEO of First Data. Fiserv acquired First Data in 2019, and Bisignano was made CEO a year later. In 2020, First Data agreed to pay the FTC $40 million to settle charges that the company knowingly processed payments and laundered credit card transactions for scams that targeted hundreds of thousands of consumers.
  • First Data was a payment processing company that enabled businesses to accept electronic payments, issue debit and prepaid cards, and facilitate secure transactions. First Data handled 45% of all U.S. credit and debit card transactions, equivalent to $2.2 trillion in card transactions each year.
    
• Bisignano was a member of the Business Roundtable, a trade association for executives of major corporations. The Business Roundtable has supported raising the retirement age to 70, lobbied against a corporate tax increase in Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ that would have been used to fund climate action, and praised the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
  
• Bisignano donated $125,000 to the Trump Victory PAC in 2019. His wife, Tracy Bisignano, donated $924,600 to the Trump 47 Committee in 2024. 
  • The Trump 47 Committee was a joint fundraising committee that split donations among various recipients including the Trump campaign, the Trump-aligned Save America PAC, the Republican National Committee, and nearly every state Republican party.

How has Frank Bisignano been involved in the Trump administration?

• Trump nominated Bisignano to serve as his Social Security Commissioner in December 2024; he was confirmed by the Senate in May 2025. During his confirmation hearing, Bisignano downplayed his connections and communications with DOGE staffers before his confirmation. But a whistleblower claimed that Bisignano had expedited the onboarding of a DOGE staffer and personally approved several key DOGE personnel before he was confirmed to lead the agency. Bisignano also “repeatedly declined to agree to categorically block DOGE operatives from accessing Americans’ private data.”
  
• During his time as commissioner, DOGE allegedly accessed Americans’ sensitive personal data within a SSA database.  SSA whistleblower filed a complaint alleging DOGE staff had copied a SSA database then uploaded it to an unsecure server.
  • In a September 2025 letter to the Senate Finance Committee, Bisignano wrote that “neither the Numident database nor any of its data has been accessed, leaked, hackers, or shared in any unauthorized fashion”. 
  • The Washington Post later reported a DOGE staffer took a thumb drive containing the sensitive information of 500 million living and dead Americans when he left the agency and planned to share it with his new employer. The SSA inspector general opened an investigation into the data breach. 
    
• Bisignano signaled in a TV segment that he was open to raising the retirement age, only to quickly walk it back. The initial comments prompted Senate Democrats to send a letter to Bisignano warning of the “dangerous ramifications if this change were to come to fruition.”
  
• In addition to leading the SSA, Bisignano was appointed to serve as the first CEO of the IRS in October 2025. The newly created position faced backlash, and Democratic Senators questioned the role’s purpose and legality.
  • The Treasury Department announced that Bisignano would be “managing the organization and overseeing all day-to-day IRS operations” as CEO.
  • The Washington Post reported that the CEO position was created to sidestep “a potentially lengthy Senate confirmation process to fill a leadership vacuum at IRS as it prepares for filing season and tries to integrate massive change to tax law from Trump and the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill”.
    
• Bisignano came under fire after he revealed nobody was fired after it was reported that the IRS illegally shared data with ICE nearly 43,000 times. 

For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Oligarchs in Trump World tracker.