bisignano frank SSA
yikes corrupt? lie? fail up
musk?
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2X? AN 2026
The Trump administration is illegally using the Social Security email list to spew political propaganda. That email list likely includes everyone with an online Social Security account—over 100 million people, both current and future Social Security beneficiaries. The purpose of the list is for the government to share important information about Social Security benefits.
On July 2, the Trump administration sent an email from Commissioner Frank Bisignano, ostensibly to mark America’s 250th birthday. The email, like a similar one sent a year ago, is a fully political document.
Bisignano begins by bragging about President Donald Trump’s tax bill without mentioning:
- Trump’s bill cuts over $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which is causing hospitals around the country to close—a disaster for seniors, especially those living in rural areas.
- Trump’s bill gives massive tax cuts to the ultra wealthy, including trillionaire Elon Musk.
- Trump’s bill does not end taxes on Social Security benefits, but does weaken Social Security’s long-term finances.
Bisignano then goes on to tout allegedly improved customer service. Widespread media reports show that customer service has massively deteriorated since Musk’s DOGE pushed out more than 8,000 of Social Security’s most experienced, knowledgeable workers. These reports include first-person stories where even highly educated people with Social Security expertise have faced months-long nightmares to resolve simple errors that cut themselves or their family members off from benefits.
Shortly after Bisignano was confirmed last year, Social Security removed longstanding customer service metrics from its website. Since then, Bisignano has cherry-picked his own metrics and used them to mislead.
Bisignano moved many of the remaining Social Security office workers to answering phones, while other essential work piles up. Then, he brags about shorter waits on the phone. What he doesn’t mention is that if you hang up in frustration, or talk to someone who can’t help you because they aren’t adequately trained, it still counts toward a short wait on the phone. The only metric that really matters is if people are getting the help they need. On that count, Bisignano is failing miserably.
The situation is particularly dire for people who need help in person. The country is dotted with Social Security “ghost offices” that aren’t officially closed (because that’s bad publicity for Trump and Bisignano) but have only a skeleton crew of workers remaining. These offices can’t meaningfully serve the community, and people are losing their hard-earned benefits as a result.
The same week that Bisignano sent out his political propaganda email, the Social Security Administration announced that the Freedom 250 logo will appear on the Social Security Cards of all babies born for the rest of 2026.
Freedom 250 is a semi-private, partisan entity. Trump and his allies are using it to turn the celebration of our nation’s 250th anniversary into profit for themselves. Freedom 250 has a history of harvesting data, and employs former DOGE operatives. Bisignano claims that the Social Security Administration isn’t paying Freedom 250 a licensing fee, or sharing data with it. But we already know that Bisignano lies as easily as he breathes.
Trump’s hijacking of Social Security is just the latest example of his corruption. Like the reflecting pool, the Kennedy Center, and the White House, Social Security is a sacred American institution that Trump is abusing for his own financial and political gain.
Social Security is a nonpartisan program, with overwhelming support from Democrats, Republicans, and independents. By using it for political purposes, Trump and Bisignano are betraying the American people.
Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening organization of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition -- a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans.
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an mojo 7 26
The IRS is falling apart, a new report from Mother Jones said on Tuesday.
Reporter Stephanie Mencimer writes that she received a notice from the Internal Revenue Service claiming she underpaid her 2025 taxes, even though the agency had not credited payments she had already made. After two hours on hold, she gave up. A few days later, a recorded message about “high call volume” disconnected her. Her accountant said even dedicated lines for tax practitioners were not working, leaving serious issues unresolved with “no contact available at all.”
Mencimer said she “realized that the IRS was finally imploding.”
It's what everyone warned would happen when Elon Musk used his DOGE program to reduce the IRS by 25,000 people. It was about one-third of the entire IRS.
“When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership,” former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said when speaking to Mother Jones reporter Michael Mechanic in April 2025. “You really are disabling the IRS.”
Frank Bisignano, a former finance executive whom Trump named to a newly created “IRS CEO” role while also overseeing the Social Security Administration, had boasted in April that the cuts would not hurt operations. But Mencimer writes that her experience, along with IRS data and accounts from other taxpayers and professionals, suggests otherwise.
“You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional,” said Traci DiMartini, a former IRS human capital officer who was laid off last year. “Things are starting to break.”
Members of Congress are now echoing those concerns. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement, “The Administration laid off close to a third of the IRS workforce, sabotaging its mission, and making it impossible to get someone on the phone to answer even the simplest of questions, let alone resolve issues. Yet this Administration refuses to acknowledge the predictable consequences of gutting an agency and keeps telling taxpayers not to believe what they are experiencing.”
The decline follows years of Republican efforts to shrink the IRS.
When the Biden administration took office, Democrats directed new funding to the agency to pursue wealthy tax dodgers and improve customer service. By the end of that term, the IRS had collected about $1.3 billion in unpaid taxes from high-income filers and had hired more customer-service staff — the very people Mencimer could not reach.
Under Biden, IRS call performance improved: in 2024, the agency answered more than 1 million additional calls during filing season than the year before and cut the average hold time from 28 minutes to 3 minutes, according to IRS data. Those gains have largely disappeared under Trump.
“It’s infinitely worse in 2026 than it was in 2025,” New Jersey tax attorney Richard Champion told Mother Jones. He represents low-income taxpayers in tax court and says he now has at least four or five cases where he is “just stymied” because he cannot get through by phone.
Experts across the board report the same problem: taxpayers cannot reach a live person, much less get help setting up payment plans. Wait times now average about 45 minutes, and many calls are disconnected.
The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights (CTR) conducted its own testing this year and found that government measurements showed IRS phone wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls on its main 1040 help line than the previous year. CTR testers found that nearly 40 percent of calls to various IRS numbers were disconnected.
Online access has also deteriorated. When Mencimer logged into her IRS account, she repeatedly saw a message: “Account features limited due to partial outage. While you can still access your account, some features are unavailable, including account balance and payment history.” She checked for a month and never could view her details.
Biden’s administration had allocated funds to modernize IRS IT systems, but Trump cut the IT office by 40 percent. The Taxpayer Advocate Service, which helps people navigate the bureaucracy, was also reduced.
Mencimer’s next step was to contact her congresswoman, but as a D.C. resident without a voting member of Congress, she assumed no one would intervene. Her last resort was snail mail. But the IRS mailroom has been hit as hard as IT.
“According to a recent report by the Taxpayer Advocate, the number of unprocessed correspondence and amended returns languishing at the IRS jumped from 3.8 million in 2025 to 7 million this year,” Mencimer wrote. “And that was before all the people like you were sending in letters,” said CTR’s Nina Olson.
Despite the deteriorating service, the Treasury Department said about 8,000 new hires could be added through September — a small fraction of the tens of thousands of positions eliminated.
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an 11 25
The new CEO of the financial services technology company Fiserv said Wednesday that the firm’s financial outlook was grim, sending its stock collapsing by more than 40% and erasing $30 billion in market value—and laid the blame squarely with a Trump administration appointee whom the president has praised as “amazing.”
When nominating former Fiserv CEO Frank Bisignano as Social Security administrator earlier this year, President Donald Trump said the executive frequently “takes troubled entities and turns them around.”With current Fiserv chief Mike Lyons warning on Wednesday that Bisignano had made major missteps as CEO, overinflating its sales projections and relying on short-term cost-cutting before selling his stock for $500 million, the advocacy group Social Security Works said beneficiaries of the government’s anti-poverty program for senior citizens should be alarmed that the former executive is now in charge of their crucial benefits.
“Fiserv lost 40% of its value because the former CEO, Frank Bisignano, is a liar,” said SSW. “But Bisignano is Trump’s buddy, so he can only fail up. He’s now in charge of your Social Security.”
Lyons told analysts and investors that when Bisignano was leading Fiserv from 2020 until earlier this year, the company made sales projections that “would have been objectively difficult to achieve even with the right investment and strong execution.”
He added that Bisignano made “decisions to defer certain investments and cut certain costs [which] improved margins in the short term but are now limiting our ability to serve clients in a world-class way, execute product launches to our standards and grow revenue to our full potential.”
Translating Lyons’ comment, Brett Arends wrote at MarketWatchthat “under Bisignano, the company made forecasts it could not plausibly have achieved” and that the former CEO “was chasing short-term quarterly results, not building the business.”
“Did Bisignano know that Fiserv’s stock was about to tank, and ask his friend Donald Trump for a life raft?”
Lyons broke the news to investors weeks after a police pension fund sued Fiserv and Bisignano, as well as the new CEO, for “artificially inflating [Fiserv’s] growth numbers.”
But along with causing his former company’s value to plummet, emphasized SSW president Nancy Altman on Thursday, Bisignano personally benefited from overestimating his firm’s performance—selling more than three million shares after he was appointed Social Security administrator for at least $500 million.
“That sale saved him $300 million (and counting) in stock value,” said Altman. “Did Bisignano know that Fiserv’s stock was about to tank, and ask his friend Donald Trump for a life raft?”
Altman demanded that Bisignano “resign immediately” from his roles at the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, where he was also named the first-ever CEO earlier this month.
“Bisignano is in charge of the American people’s hard-earned Social Security benefits, as well as the collection of our taxes—despite his total lack of expertise, or even basic knowledge, of either,” said Altman. “He infamously admitted that he had to Google ‘Social Security’ when Trump offered him the job. If he engaged in wrongdoing, the people need to know.”
Altman called on the US Department of Justice and Congress to launch “immediate” investigations into Bisignano’s conduct as CEO of Fiserv, but noted that with Republican allies of Trump running the government, the former executive is unlikely to be held accountable.“
“The only recourse,” said Altman, “is for Democrats to win control of Congress and make investigating Bisignano a top priority.”
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an 7 25 sn
Retired professor Larry White says the email message he got on July 4 from the Social Security Administration was unlike any he’s ever seen from the agency.
“The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill,” the email message began — using the official name of the massive legislation signed by President Donald Trump that cuts taxes and also slashes spending on Medicaid and SNAP, along with making numerous other policy changes.
White, 71, who lives in Middleton, Wisconsin, has been getting Social Security Administration email since he retired from the Beloit College psychology faculty in 2019. But until the July 4 message, he said, every single one has been straightforward, factual — and nonpolitical.
The message included a misleading description of one provision in the new law. The Social Security Administration later published a correction.
That alone angered White. But that the message was sent at all was just as irritating, he told the Wisconsin Examiner.
The email, including a quote from Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, “appeared to value currying favor with the president over telling Americans the truth,” White said. “I want our federal agencies to be independent, nonpartisan offices that act with integrity and serve the public, not the president.”
The Social Security message claims that the legislation “ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits…”
“This is a historic step forward for America’s seniors,” Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano stated.
A screenshot of the Social Security Administration message sent to the agency’s email list early July 4, 2025.
As was soon widely reported, however, the message itself was off the mark.
“I was surprised to see SSA send this out as an email to such a large list since this seems more about politics than anything specific to the program,” said J. Michael Collins, a household economics expert at the University of Wisconsin. Collins directed a Social Security research center at the UW until the Trump administration shut it down earlier this year.
The actual change that the message refers to is to income taxes paid by all people 65 or older with incomes $75,000 a year or less for single filers and $150,000 a year or less for couples — regardless of whether they’re collecting Social Security or not, Collins explained.
While the message appears to single out Social Security income, “there is no new exemption of SSA income from federal income taxes, just a new deduction for all people 65+ regardless of income source,” Collins told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message.
For people who are 64 or younger and who get income from Social Security, there’s no comparable tax cut, he added.
To be sure, the reduction does give some help to taxpayers 65 or older who collect Social Security.
A 2022 IRS tax tip explains that half of Social Security income is taxable for a single person whose income is $25,000 to $34,000 and for a married couple filing jointly whose income is $32,000 to $44,000.
For a single person with income over $34,000 or a married couple with income over $44,000, 85% of their Social Security income is taxable.
Social Security beneficiaries with incomes below the $75,000 or $150,000 ceiling will get relief from those tax bills — along with everyone else 65 or older whose income also falls below those limits.
The tax break also lasts just a few years, ending in 2028 — stretching the claim that qualifying beneficiaries “will no longer” pay income taxes.
The email message produced a sharp blowback.
“I was appalled — it was really unprecedented,” Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, told the Wisconsin Examiner in a phone interview. “They’ve taken an agency that’s supposed to be above politics and made it an arm of propaganda.”
Altman recalled thatwhen Social Security checks were mailed in October 1972, President Richard Nixon suggested including an insert in which he could take credit for a benefit increase — even though he had initially opposed it. The commissioner at the time, Robert Ball, threatened to resign if Nixon followed through, and Nixon backed off, Altman said.
As originally worded, the email message appeared to suggest two separate tax cut provisions — one for Social Security recipients 65 and older and one for others:
“The new law includes a provision that eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples. Additionally, it provides an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older, ensuring that retirees can keep more of what they have earned.”
On July 7, the Social Security Administration added a correction and changed the second sentence in that paragraph to, “It does so by providing an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older…”
The correction waspreviously reported by HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney.
The morning that he received the Social Security message, White, the retired Beloit professor, wrote back to Bisignano directly — guessing at a direct email address for the Trump-appointed Social Security Commissioner.
“Commissioner Bisignano, When did the Social Security Administration become so blatantly political? I thought government agencies like the USPS were supposed to just go about their business from one administration to the next, but clearly that’s not the case with the SSA. You have become an unabashed mouthpiece for Trump. Shame on you!”
“I was upset that the head of a major federal agency would act in a way that undermines the public’s trust,” White told the Wisconsin Examiner.
“For years, Trump has expressed contempt for America’s once-revered institutions — courts, universities, the press, medical experts, climate scientists, long-time allies abroad … the list is a long one,” White added. “Trump wants to diminish any group or individual who questions his aims or methods.”
The email message appears to play directly to that characteristic of the president, he said, and White fears that will diminish the agency in the public eye.
“What upsets me is that the commissioner of the SSA foolishly wrote a letter that will prompt millions of Americans to question the integrity of the SSA,” White said. “It takes years for an organization to build up a good reputation, but it can be fatally damaged almost overnight.”
Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.
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an 5 25
An internal Trump administration document reportedly shows that anti-fraud checks recently installed at the Social Security agency have found just two cases of potentially improper benefit claims out of more than 110,000—a rate of 0.0018%.
The documents, first reported Thursday by Nextgov/FCW, further undercut President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's narrative that Social Security is brimming with fraud. Musk falsely
in March that "40% of the calls into Social Security were fraudulent."
The anti-fraud checks for Social Security have been applied only to benefit claims made over the phone. According to the internal document, "No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases." Earlier this year, amid widespread outrage, the Social Security Administration (SSA) walked back a proposal to scrap many of its phone-based benefit claim services.
Nextgov/FCW noted Thursday that the Trump administration's deployment of the anti-fraud tools beginning last month "did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend."
"The lags stem from the three-day hold placed on telephone claims in order to run the anti-fraud [checks], a move that 'delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,'" Nextgov/FCW reported, citing the internal document.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement that "the Trump-Musk Social Security takeover has only meant more chaos and confusion for Americans."
"Every one of DOGE's so-called 'mistakes' is a backdoor cut to people's benefits," said Warren. "There's nothing efficient about making it harder for people to access the checks they’ve earned and are owed."
On social media, Warren called the revelations in the internal administration document "a HUGE scandal."
It's long been clear that Social Security fraud is minuscule, with an inspector general report published last year estimating that just 0.84% of Social Security benefits paid out between 2015 and 2022 were dispensed improperly—and even those improper payments were not necessarily fraudulent.
The new reporting out Thursday bolstered warnings that the Trump administration's hunt for fraud is a mere pretext for slashing Social Security benefits and weakening the program.
"Turns out there ISN'T rampant Social Security fraud, but Elon's witch hunt, driven by his insane conspiracy theories, IS keeping seniors from getting their benefits as quickly as they should be," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wrote on social media. "THIS is Republican governing: hunting for nonexistent fraud while breaking Social Security."
Frank Bisignano, the newly confirmed SSA administrator, has close ties to Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and has defended the president's false claim that tens of millions of "dead" people are receiving Social Security benefits.
CNNreported earlier this week that as SSA combs "through its databases to check whether beneficiaries are alive or dead" at Trump and Musk's behest, agency staffers are "seeing more people coming in to be resurrected" after being falsely deemed deceased.
"I've been saying it all along," former SSA chief Martin O'Malley wrote Thursday. "Elon Musk is the biggest fraud, not Social Security."
NOW READ:The backlash is here — and Republicans have no one to blame but themselves
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