A 2011 photo shows an exhibit at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act in August 2010. (FDR Presidential Library & Museum | via Flickr)

The chairman and CEO of Milwaukee-based FiServ said Thursday that he looks “forward to applying my experience to transform our social security system” as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration under President-elect Donald Trump.

Frank Bisignano made the statement in a press release from FiServ confirming his appointment to the post, which is subject to Senate confirmation. Trump first disclosed the Bisignano’s nomination on his social media platform Wednesday evening, The New York Times reported.

FiServ, founded in 1984 as a financial services data processing company, expanded into electronic billing and payments, providing mobile banking services for financial institutions and related technology based services for the financial industry.

Bisignano, who has spent most of his career in investment banking, has held the top spot at FiServ since 2020 after engineering the 2019 merger of the company he headed at the time, First Data Corp., with FiServ.

The Milwaukee Business Journal listed Bisignano as the highest-paid Wisconsin public company executive in the most recent fiscal year, with compensation totaling more than $27.9 million, 83% of that in stock awards.

At First Data, where he led the company in 2015 in a $2.6 billion initial public offering, he ranked as the second-highest paid U.S. executive in 2017, according to the Times — $102 million, 97% of that in stock awards. His total compensation that year was 2,000 times that of the average First Data employee, the Times reported.

In announcing his nomination, Trump listed Bisignano’s prior investment banking posts at Morgan Stanley, CitiGroup and JPMorgan Chase & Co. “He has a long career leading financial services institutions through great transformation,” the president-elect wrote.

Bisignano has contributed to both Democrats and Republicans over the course of the last two decades, according to Federal Elections Commissions records assembled by OpenSecrets.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that tracks political spending. Those include contributions to Trump.

In the last election cycle, however, his largest individual contributions include $15,000 to a PAC backing former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who mounted an early primary challenge to Trump’s 2024 bid, and $50,000 to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who also ran against the former president for the GOP nomination. 

Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, was skeptical Thursday about Bisignano’s qualifications to operate the program, however.

“I don’t know that he has any background in Social Security or with a large government agency, or a program that sends benefits to 70 million Americans every month,” Altman said.

She suggested that the absence of evidence that he’s proposed drastic changes to Social Security makes it likely he can be confirmed. “But it’s a question who will come in with him who maybe won’t [need to be] confirmed, but will maybe be  calling the shots,” she added.

Social Security is designed so that payroll taxes from the current generation of workers fund the benefits of the previous, now retired, generation. Altman said that it should be viewed not as a kind of savings account but as a form of insurance.

Within the next decade, forecasters have predicted that Social Security’s revenue from payroll taxes will not be enough to fully fund recipients’ benefits, requiring changes to the program.

While that’s led some people — especially younger members of the workforce — to fear the program won’t be around for them when they retire, Altman said those fears have been stoked by opponents hoping to do away with Social Security entirely.

Altman said she’s confident that Congress will reach a solution, but that her organization and other advocates will watch closely and oppose a deal that cuts benefits, raises the retirement age or privatizes the system. Instead, Social Security Works is campaigning for an approach that includes raising the income levels subject to the payroll tax. 

The Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, holds a campaign rally at Gastonia Municipal Airport on Nov. 2, 2024 in Gastonia, North Carolina.  Trump won the election on Nov. 5 and now federal prosecutors are winding down an election interference case against him related to the 2020 election. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Special counsel Jack Smith, the prosecutor in the federal criminal cases against President-elect Donald Trump, asked a D.C. federal judge on Friday to suspend deadlines in the election interference case that centered on Trump’s supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

To allow the government time to mull the “unprecedented circumstance” of a former president under indictment returning to the White House after Tuesday’s election, Smith’s team, writing in an unopposed motion to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, called for upcoming deadlines in the case to be cleared.

Under U.S. Justice Department precedent that dates to the Watergate era, the department may not prosecute a sitting president. 

“As a result of the election held on November 5, 2024, the defendant is expected to be certified as President-elect on January 6, 2025, and inaugurated on January 20, 2025,” the prosecutors wrote.

“The Government respectfully requests that the Court vacate the remaining deadlines in this pretrial schedule to afford the Government time to assess this unprecedented circumstance and determine the best appropriate course going forward consistent with Department of Justice policy.”

A 1973 Justice Department memo concluded that criminally prosecuting a sitting president would diminish the president’s capacity to perform the office’s functions. That conclusion was affirmed in a 2000 memo dealing with the question.

The four-sentence brief filed Friday said prosecutors would let the court know by Dec. 2 what route they planned to take.

Chutkan granted the motion shortly after Smith filed it.

Reversal of Trump’s fortunes

The legal development marks another milestone in Trump’s remarkable comeback.

The former president ended his first term, shortly after the Jan. 6 attack and amid a worldwide pandemic, with fewer than 39% of voters holding a favorable opinion of him and nearly 58% disapproving.

Over the next few years, the U.S. Justice Department and state prosecutors in New York and Georgia launched investigations into allegations that resulted in four felony indictments.

But in part thanks to his electoral victory in which he won or led in as of Friday afternoon every battleground state and could win the popular vote for this first time in his three White House runs, Trump appears likely to escape culpability in any of the cases.

Smith, whom Trump railed against and promised to fire — and possibly deport — appears ready to drop the election interference case.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee in South Florida, already dismissed charges related to Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents that prosecutors said he illegally took from the White House and brought to his Mar-a-Lago estate after his 2020 election loss. Prosecutors have appealed that decision.

The Georgia election interference case that charged Trump as part of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in the state has sputtered amid revelations Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is prosecuting the case, had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate in her office.

A New York jury did find Trump guilty earlier this year of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payment promised to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.

But sentencing for that case was postponed following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling granting presidents the presumption of criminal immunity for any acts conducted in their official capacity.

The Nov. 26 sentencing could be further delayed as Trump prepares to return to the White House.

Packages of Mifepristone tablets are displayed at a family planning clinic on April 13, 2023 in Rockville, Maryland. (Photo illustration by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump has several choices to make in the coming months about whether his second administration will keep access to contraception and abortion as it is now or implement changes.

While Trump cannot on his own enact nationwide laws or abortion bans without Congress, he and the people he picks for key posts throughout the federal government will have significant influence on reproductive rights nationwide.

During Trump’s first term in office he barred health care organizations that perform or refer patients for abortions from receiving Title X family planning grants, even though there’s a moratorium on using federal funds for abortions unless it’s the result of rape or incest, or the life of the woman is at risk.

Alina Salganicoff, senior vice president and director for women’s health policy at the nonpartisan health research organization KFF, said on a call with reporters Friday that about a quarter of providers withdrew or were disqualified from receiving federal family planning grants as a result of that policy.

“The Title X program basically funds family planning services for low-income people,” Salganicoff explained. “It’s basically a small program, it’s around under $300 million — but it is a critical program to people who don’t otherwise have insurance.”

Abortions as stabilizing care

Trump will also have to decide whether to leave in place guidance from the Biden administration that says a federal law from the 1980s protects health care providers who perform abortions as stabilizing care during an emergency that would affect a woman’s health or life.

That law, known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, became one point of disagreement between the Biden administration and Republican states that implemented abortion bans or strict restrictions after the Supreme Court ended the nationwide right to an abortion.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra wrote in a letter released in July 2022 that under the federal “law, no matter where you live, women have the right to emergency care — including abortion care.”

EMTALA is at the center of an ongoing lawsuit between the Biden administration and Idaho over that state’s abortion law. Oral arguments in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals are set for early December.

Abortion pill

The future of medication abortion, a two-drug regimen approved for up to 10 weeks gestation that’s used in about 63% of abortions nationwide, will be another area the Trump administration could alter without congressional approval.

Salganicoff said there’s no way to know just yet if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will seek to change prescribing guidelines for medication abortion or revoke the 2000 approval of mifepristone altogether.

“We don’t know whether they’re going to actually review the approval, but I will tell you that it is likely that they will revisit the conditions in which medication abortions, which now account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in this country, can be provided,” Salganicoff said.

The Trump administration, she said, is likely to focus on revisions made during the Biden administration that allow doctors or other qualified health care providers to prescribe the two-drug medication abortion regimen via telehealth and then have mifepristone and misoprostol mailed to the patient.

Salganicoff anticipates anti-abortion organizations will also encourage the Trump administration to address recent findings from the We Count Project, showing 1 in 10 abortions take place after medication abortion is mailed to people in states with bans or significant restrictions from states that have shield laws.

“This FDA protocol is legal to do that, but clearly this is going to be a target,” she said.

Mailing of abortion medication

The Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law from the late 19th century that once banned the mailing of boxing photographs, pornography and contraception, will also be front and center after Trump takes the oath of office on Jan. 20.

The law, which is still on the books despite not being enforced in decades, could potentially allow the U.S. Postal Service to prevent the mailing of abortion medications or any other instrument or tool used in abortions.

“The Biden administration’s Department of Justice did a review and said that they are not going to enforce Comstock,” Salganicoff said. “Project 2025 sees it very differently, and even though President-elect Trump has said that he is not going to enforce Comstock, it’s not clear, and there will likely be a lot of pressure to do that.”

Project 2025 is a policy map for a Trump presidency published by the Heritage Foundation. Trump has disavowed any connection with it, although former members of his first administration helped develop it.

Salganicoff said enforcing the Comstock Act would affect access to medication abortion throughout the country, even in states that have reinforced reproductive rights during the last two years.

“Clearly that’s going to tee up a lot of litigation and challenges,” Salganicoff said.

Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, said during the call that the Trump administration’s possible elevation of people who spread misinformation or disinformation could lead to more confusion about research-based health care.

“I think one thing, particularly with the rise in prominence of RFK Jr., you know, is the potential for misinformation,” Levitt said, referring to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a prominent vaccine opponent who endorsed Trump and campaigned extensively with him.

“We turn to the government for reliable data, public health information and scientific information,” Levitt said. “And there’s the potential now, for the government to be not only not an effective source for health information, but in fact, an accelerant for misinformation.”