(WASHINGTON) — The newly sworn-in head of the Social Security Administration told agency staff this week that when he was first offered the job in the Trump administration, he wasn’t familiar with the position and had to look it up online.
Frank Bisignano, a former Wall Street executive, said during a town hall with Social Security managers from around the country on Wednesday that he wasn’t seeking a position in the Trump administration when he received a call about leading the SSA.
“So, I get a phone call and it’s about Social Security. And I’m really, I’m really not, I swear I’m not looking for a job,” Bisignano said, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by ABC News. “And I’m like, ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ So, I’m Googling Social Security. You know, one of my great skills, I’m one of the great Googlers on the East Coast.”
“I’m like, ‘What the heck’s the commissioner of Social Security?'” said Bisignano, who now oversees one of the largest federal agencies that’s responsible for distributing retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to more than 70 million Americans.
“Put that as the headline for the Post: ‘Great Googler in Chief. Chief in Googler’ or whatever,” said Bisignano, who throughout the meeting repeatedly bemoaned media leaks from within the agency.
While Bisignano, who previously served as chairman and CEO of financial technology company Fiserv Inc., brings experience managing large organizations and overseeing complex payment systems to his new role, he has no prior history working in government or with the Social Security system.
A spokesperson for the Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
In Wednesday’s 90-minute call, Bisignano sought to calm concerns about the future of the agency amid recent leadership turnover and scrutiny from Elon Musk’s government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.
He told the managers in the meeting that Social Security was “not going away,” adding that President Trump also agrees with that.
“This is America’s, you know, safety net — it’s not going away. And hopefully you hear me say this every day,” he said. “You know who wants me to tell people that? Guess. The president.”
“I’ve gotten notes about, ‘Will the turmoil of the last five months end? Are you here to cause more turmoil?'” he said. “I don’t think it’s the turmoil of the past five months, although I will be the fifth since, you know, November, right?” Bisignano said, referring to being the fifth person put in charge of the critical agency since Trump was reelected in November.
“Are we having fun yet? Are we OK?” he asked those on the call.
Bisignano told the managers that they needed to believe that DOGE was “helping to make things better” even if “it may not feel that way.”
“Who’s heard of DOGE? Raise your hand, right? Your bias has to be, because mine is, DOGE is helping make things better. It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.”
He said DOGE would be involved in rebuilding the Social Security website and integrating artificial intelligence into the agency’s phone support systems.
The head of the agency also told managers that the SSA must adopt a “digital-first” mindset to meet the expectations of the American public, comparing the agency to how consumers interact with tech giants like Amazon.
“You’re competing with experiences that people have with Amazon, right? So if I could get something done at Amazon, why can’t I get something done the same way with Social Security? That’s how people think.”
Bisignano’s officially joins the agency following months of upheaval at the SSA, which has seen a revolving door of leadership amid DOGE’s sweeping efforts to overhaul the agency by modernizing its operations and cutting costs. Among the changes DOGE is pushing are staff reassignments, digital infrastructure overhauls, and the controversial outsourcing of certain administrative functions, according to sources.
Bisignano also said he does not intend to implement reductions in force, or RIFs, at the agency, at least for now. “I have no intent to RIF people, OK? Because that’s the big question,” he said.
When the Wall Street veteran was named Trump’s pick to lead the agency, he faced backlash from Democrats and activists who claimed his selection threatened the future of the Social Security program. In early May, lawmakers, union leaders, and activists protested his selection outside the U.S. Capitol ahead of the Senate vote on his nomination.
On Wednesday’s call, Bisignano appeared to revel in the news.
“Did you guys know there was a protest against me? Who knows there was a protest against me?” he said. “I like that protest — I want to prove them so wrong, man, this is going to be most fun I ever had.”
“I mean, think of that — a poor boy from Brooklyn, from a multi-generational household with a dad who worked in the federal government, and senators picketing that I’m going to ruin it,” he said. “No way — make it great, right?”
Bisignano, during the call, returned several times to his concerns about leaks to the press, suggesting that he would sniff them out.
“My father was a DA and I’m a detective at heart, so I can figure stuff out,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — As state and local officials in Texas have come under scrutiny over the lack of sirens to warn people of impending flash flooding on the Guadalupe River that killed more than 100 people, records reviewed by ABC News show authorities of one of the hardest hit counties have had discussions about implementing such an alert system for nearly a decade.
The destructive flooding hit in the early morning hours of the Fourth of July, causing the Guadalupe River in Kerr County to rise by 26 feet in less than an hour, spilling its banks and flooding multiple summer camps and RV parks along the winding river.
On Monday, the death toll from the flooding climbed to more than 100, according to officials. At least 84 of the deaths occurred in Kerr County, including 27 children at Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp near the banks of the Guadalupe, authorities said.
Ten girls and a counselor from Camp Mystic remained unaccounted for on Monday as search-and-rescue efforts stretched into their fourth day.
Since the catastrophe, local officials have faced questions about how warnings were sent out to the community, why evacuations weren’t ordered in low-lying areas and why there were no audible warning systems to alert campers along the Guadalupe.
“There should have been sirens here,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News on Monday, adding that the subject will likely come up in a special session of the state legislature to analyze what occurred during the flooding.
Patrick added, “Had we had sirens around this area, up and down — the same type of sirens they have in Israel when there’s an attack coming, that would have blown very loudly — it’s possible that would have saved some of these lives.”
‘I’ve spent hours in those helicopters pulling kids out of trees’
Records reviewed by ABC News show that many of the same questions have been under discussion, specifically in Kerr County, for nearly a decade.
The minutes from a March 28, 2016, meeting of the Kerr County Commissioners’ Court, show that former Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer pushed the commission to upgrade the county’s flood-warning system. At the time, Hierholzer told the commission that he was in favor of placing high-decibel outdoor sirens along the river that could go off and be heard from a distance of 3 miles when water gauges indicated flooding, according to the online minutes of the meeting.
According to the meeting minutes, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, then-Commissioner Tom Moser said there are state-of-the-art warning systems, including those with sirens, in other parts of the state, “even though this [Kerr County] is probably one of the highest flood-prone regions in the entire state.”
Hierholzer told the commission that the sirens, in addition to the county’s CodeRED emergency notification system, would work to quickly spread the word of imminent danger, according to the meeting minutes.
In that meeting, according to the minutes, Hierholzer raised what he called the “most important” issue — that of warning the summer camps along the Guadalupe, recalling a 1987 flash flood in which 10 children from the Pot O’ Gold Ranch Christian camp in Comfort, Texas, were killed attempting to evacuate the camp in a bus.
“I’ve spent hours in those helicopters pulling kids out of trees,” Hierholzer told the commission, according to the meeting minutes.
At the time, Hierholzer added that a lot of people in the county were not signed up for CodeRED alerts and that it was difficult to get people to sign up for the phone alerts.
“So yes, you need both. You need the sirens, and you need CodeRED to try to make sure we’ll notify everybody we can when it’s coming up,” Hierholzer said, according to the meeting minutes.
Moser, according to the meeting minutes, told his fellow commissioners that upgrading the warning system to include sirens was “not hugely expensive,” adding that the units would cost around $40,000 each.
The Kerr County Commissioners’ Court applied for a nearly $1 million FEMA grant, according to the meeting minutes. The county’s application was not selected, but it was not immediately clear why.
Moser could not be reached for comment by ABC News on Monday. He told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday that the county considered paying for the upgrade of its flood warning system, but eventually decided not to include it in its annual budget.
“It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes,” Moser told the newspaper.
Reached by ABC News by phone on Monday, Hierholzer declined to comment on the statements he made to the commissioners more than nine years ago.
“This is probably one of the worst disasters Kerr County has ever seen. So right now, I don’t want to get into all this kind of political stuff — what we could’ve, would’ve, should’ve done,” Hierholzer told ABC News.
Officials concede they were caught off guard
Kerr County officials said during a news conference on Saturday that they were caught off guard by the torrential rains that caused the Guadalupe River to rise to near-historic levels in a matter of minutes.
“We didn’t know this flood was coming,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said. “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States, and we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here, none whatsoever.”
But during a news conference on Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the state began preparing for the storm last Wednesday by pre-positioning assets and resources in flood-prone areas of the state, including Kerr County.
Chief W. Nim Kidd of the Texas Division of Emergency Management said alerts were also sent out.
“From a technical perspective, there were multiple warning systems that are out there, and all of us can choose to sign up for warning systems in certain areas depending on the local government that they’re in and the way their system works,” Kidd said during the governor’s press conference. But he added that some places have spotty cell phone reception.
Kidd added, “There can be all kinds of alert systems that are sent, and we know that some general messaging was sent early, some urgent warnings were sent at various times. But just sending the message is not the same as receiving the message, having a plan to do something when you receive the message and then the ability to implement that plan.”
During a news conference on Monday, Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said staff at some of the summer camps on the Guadalupe were monitoring the rising river at 3:30 a.m. on the day of the flood and managed to move campers to higher ground.
Asked by reporters why mandatory evacuations were not issued by the city or county, Rice said, “Evacuations are a delicate balance because if you evacuate too late, you then risk putting buses, or cars, or vehicles, or campers on roads … trying to get them out, which can make it more challenging because these flash floods happen very quickly.”
When pressed on why evacuations were not announced far in advance of the storm, Rice added, “It’s like disasters in Texas everywhere — it’s very tough to make those calls because what we also don’t want to do is cry wolf.”
(ASBURY PARK, N.J.) — A lifeguard is in the hospital after she was impaled by an umbrella at a New Jersey beach on Wednesday morning, officials said.
The woman was found on the ground near the lifeguard stand with an umbrella stake that had pierced the front of her left shoulder and was sticking out the back of her arm by about 1 foot, Asbury Park Fire Chief Kevin Keddy told ABC News.
She was being treated by her fellow lifeguards, Keddy said, and when the fire department officials arrived they took over and stabilized her. The fire department responders also cut the umbrella stake in the front and in the back to make the wound more manageable, he said.
Paramedics then responded and took the lifeguard to a hospital, Keddy said, adding she was conscious and alert the whole time.
“She’s a tough young woman,” the chief said.
The circumstances surrounding the impalement were not immediately clear, but Keddy said his advice to beachgoers is to always make sure umbrellas are placed securely in the sand and are carried with the point down.
