The Senate voted Tuesday to confirm Wall Street veteran Frank Bisignano to head the Social Security Administration despite strong opposition from Democrats.
He was confirmed in a 53-47 vote.
The final confirmation vote came a day after the Senate advanced Bisignano on a 50-45 procedural vote.
Bisignano’s nomination drew strong pushback from Democrats after Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency and other senior Trump administration officials called for slimming down the Social Security Administration’s 57,000-person workforce by 7,000 positions and shutting dozens of offices across the country.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) called Bisignano’s confirmation “a disgraceful moment.”
“This is putting a fox in the hen house. Bisignano is slash and burn. And the Republicans don’t want to say directly that they want to kill Social Security, so they strangle it. There is no better strangler of any program than slash-and-burn Bisignano,” he said.
Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said Bisignano made “a very lucrative career out of being the guy that swoops in to failing businesses, guts them from the inside out, and moves on to his next target.”
Wyden said Bisignano has “close ties to DOGE and its ongoing operations at the Social Security administration.”
The nominee denied at his Senate confirmation hearing in March that the Trump administration secretly intended to privatize the agency.
“I don’t see this institution as anything other than run for the benefit of the American public,” Bisignano told senators.
The nominee also denied that he had any direct involvement with DOGE.
Bisignano, the CEO of Fiserv, a financial technology and payments firm, has ranked as one of the most highly paid corporate leaders in the country.
Every Republican senator voted for his nomination and every Democrat voted against it.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee posted a “vote alert” on X, the social media site, after the vote to highlight vulnerable Republican Sens. Susan Collins’s (Maine) and Thom Tillis’s (N.C.) votes for the nominee.
Updated at 4:03 p.m.
