Credit: (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed a former Wall Street executive without government experience to lead the Social Security Administration on a 53-47, party-line vote.

New Jersey’s senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, voted against Frank Bisignano, former chairman and CEO of the payments-processing firm Fiserv, to lead the department.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives do not vote on federal nominees.

Following the Senate vote Tuesday, Bisignano, a longtime political donor from New Jersey will take the helm of an agency that oversees monthly payments to an average of roughly 69 million people in the U.S., including retirees and children whose parents died. His term expires in 2031.

Bisignano, who lists a Somerset County home address, and his wife have been prodigious donors to politicians for national and state offices, giving money to Tammy Murphy, the governor’s wife, during her Senate run and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-5th) for his current campaign to replace Gov. Phil Murphy.

Bisignano’s confirmation comes as the Trump administration is threatening to close regional Social Security Administration offices, cut about 7,000 employees and seize personal data of millions of Americans.

Last week, the administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow a task force President Donald Trump created through an executive order access to Social Security Administration records.

Labor unions and an advocacy group, the Alliance for Retired Americans, filed a lawsuit in Maryland to block that task force — the Department of Government Efficiency, which is known as DOGE and is not an official government department — from accessing personal data SSA maintains on millions of citizens.

The Social Security agency holds sensitive data on nearly everyone in the nation, including medical files, bank information, school records and salary details.

Billionaire industrialist Elon Musk, who spent about $261 million to elect Trump and other Republicans in 2024, leads that task force, which is directly responsible for layoffs that affected about 280,000 federal workers, about 280,000 government jobs, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm.

The Social Security system is the bedrock of the American social safety net and created as part of the New Deal nearly a century ago. It is funded almost entirely through payroll taxes. Musk has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

In April, a federal judge in Maryland issued restrictions on what records the DOGE group could obtain and an appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s request to freeze that ruling.

In a submission to the Supreme Court on Friday, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said DOGE-approved groups have entered agencies to “streamline government, eliminate waste, ferret out fraud, and modernize outdated systems that let malfeasance and inefficiency go undetected.”

“These teams have a business need to access the data at their assigned agency and subject the government’s records to much-needed scrutiny,” wrote Sauer.

Sauer represented Trump in a personal trial last year and argued that a sitting U.S. president could direct U.S. soldiers to kill a political opponent and remain immune from prosecution.

During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Bisignano said he has not considered privatizing Social Security.

“I’ve never thought about privatizing,” Bisignano told senators. “It’s not a word that anybody has ever talked to me about, and I don’t see this institution as anything other than a government agency that gets run for the benefit of the American public.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the committee, accused Bisignano of lying about his “actions and communications with DOGE and the Social Security Administration prior to his hearing.”

An unnamed whistleblower wrote the senator, in a March letter, that Bisignano worked to get DOGE staffers placed at the Social Security Administration, a charge Bisignano denied.

During a floor speech prior to the vote, Wyden said Bisignano “lied multiple times” to the committee. “By confirming Mr. Bisignano, the Senate will be signing a death sentence to Social Security as we know it today,” Wyden said.

Sen. Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho and chairman of the finance committee, and GOP senators dismissed the accusation from the anonymous whistleblower, who said they are a former SSA worker.

“The Social Security Administration needs steady, Senate-confirmed leadership,” Crapo said Tuesday.

Without congressional action, the trust funds that pay for Social Security are on track to be unable to pay out full benefits starting in 2035, according to the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan agency that informs Congress.

Bisignano gave $1,000 to Crapo’s campaign in 2004. Crapo is one of at least nine sitting senators, Democrats and Republicans, who received donations from Bisignano. There are no Senate rules about members voting on nominees who have given them campaign checks.

Before confirmation, Bisignano set a goal of cutting wait times for beneficiaries.

“On the phone, I am committed to reducing wait times and providing our beneficiaries with a better experience. Waiting 20-plus minutes to get an answer will be of yesteryear,” he told the committee.

Bisignano and his wife, Tracy, have given more than $2.6 million to federal political campaigns since the early 2000s, including a $924,600 payment to pro-Trump super PAC. Super PACs are political entities that can spend unlimited sums, including from corporations, unions and outside pressure groups, to influence elections.