Nomination of Frank Bisignano

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am pleased to supplement the remarks of our distinguished leader with respect to Social Security.

Rhode Island has I believe the largest participation per capita in Social Security in the country. Social Security is what brought American seniors out of poverty and into a distinguished and fair retirement, and it really matters that we defend it and that Social Security remain unbroken.

The threat is pretty clear. The President keeps talking about imaginary fraud. Why would you talk about imagery fraud in a system unless you have some motive?

It wasn't just him. Elon Musk talked relentlessly about fraud in the Social Security system. The Secretary of Commerce went a mile out of his lane to add a shot at Social Security being riddled with fraud. Then the President went to the other end of the building there, stood at the rostrum of the House, and lied to the American people, flat-out lied to the American people about Social Security fraud. He let Elon Musk call it a Ponzi scheme as well.

This is a battering ram of misinformation and disinformation, and it doesn't happen without a motive. The motive here is to degrade public confidence in Social Security.

At the same time, you sent what I call your little ``Muskrats''--you sent your ``Muskrats'' into Social Security to disrupt its operations. So you have the rhetorical attack happening over here, and then you begin to have Social Security fail because you broke it and get what has been referred to as an interruption of benefits--an interruption of benefits.

Then you also have your private equity people and your tech bros over there so that when the interruption of benefits happens, they can come in and swoop to the rescue of the problem that the administration caused, and next thing you know, what have you got? Privatized Social Security, with private equity guys and tech bros running the show because thousands of the employees who know how to run the Social Security Administration have been forced out.

That is the concern, and it is a very real concern.

I want to give Mr. Bisignano good marks for saying that he is not going there. He said that he will not privatize the Agency--will not. He said that under his leadership, the Social Security Administration will remain a government Agency and remain an Agency that is run for the benefit of the American people and benefit recipients.

Now, the problem is, I find nominees' statements hard to believe up against the power of that pressure from the White House and from Musk and from the Secretary of Commerce and from whoever else is trying to accomplish the Republican extremist goal for decades of getting rid of Social Security. So I was a ``no'' vote in committee. I am going to be a ``no'' vote out here.

I hope very much that I am wrong, but I also hoped very much that Secretary Rubio would stand up for Ukraine and that he would be an anchor, as Secretary of State, to defend Ukraine against the predatory, brutal, criminal war crimes of Vladimir Putin. But what we have seen instead has been the ``Putinization'' of our strategy to Ukraine, and the Secretary of State has been entirely complicit in it, from all the signs that I see.

So when you have somebody who says one thing and, in the case of Secretary Rubio, who actually lived it--he was actually an ardent advocate for defending Ukraine. Then you get into Trump zone, and suddenly all your principles disappear, all your commitments disappear, and you just become a tool of the Trump political operation. I have seen that too often, so I am going to vote no.

We need, as a Senate, to send a clear message that Social Security is inviolable; that it is a promise amongst us all, as Americans, to protect our seniors, to protect ourselves when we get to that age; and that no one will be allowed to break it.

And one of the things I am going to ask is to make sure that we go into Social Security's databases and make sure that those ``Muskrats,'' when they went in there, didn't do any permanent damage, didn't set off mines to go off later, and didn't leave backdoors for the information to be exfiltrated out to private sector folks for whom it is as good as gold.

I will say one last thing, and that is Mr. Bisignano said he would work with me on the benefits cliffs, where you are fine with full benefits, and then one little thing happens, you miss one little mark, and there is a complete crash. There is a better way to deal with it. Benefit cliff smoothing is a technical thing. He promised to work with me. I intend to hold him to that promise.

My friend Mr. Cornyn, the Senator from Texas, has been patiently waiting.

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