The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced a new executive leadership team and organizational changes last week, including splitting the chief information officer (CIO) role among two individuals.
SSA tapped Aram Moghaddassi to fill the CIO role back in June, making him the fourth person to hold the CIO position at the agency since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20.
However, last week, SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano announced that in his role as CIO, Moghaddassi will focus on technology and customer products. A separate CIO, Michael Russo, will focus on SSA’s core business solutions and IT operations.
“The co-CIO (Core Business Functions) is responsible for oversight and management of information systems that support the agency’s benefit programs. The co-CIO (Technology and Customer Products) is responsible for oversight and integration of information technology and data governance across the agency,” an SSA spokesperson told MeriTalk.
SSA previously tapped Russo to serve as CIO back in February. However, in March, Russo transitioned to serve as a senior advisor at the agency, and he was replaced by Scott Coulter in the CIO role.
Coulter’s appointment came a week after a federal court order prevented Russo from granting the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to “any SSA system of record containing personally identifiable information.”
Both Russo and Moghaddassi are named in a recent whistleblower account that alleges they risked the security of over 300 million Americans’ Social Security data in “serious data security lapses.”
The two CIOs do not have prior government experience, but they have both held roles at companies with ties to Elon Musk, the former DOGE head.
Moghaddassi was a senior engineer at X, formerly Twitter, and a senior engineer at Neuralink. Russo served as the chief technology officer at Shift4, a company that processes payments for Musk’s Starlink.
Aside from the two CIOs, Bisignano also announced that Stephen Evangelista will serve as SSA’s chief of digital services. Evangelista has over 25 years of experience in executive leadership roles at SSA, most recently as the deputy commissioner for the Office of Operations.
“With a goal of driving innovation in service delivery to enhance operation efficiency, reduce wait times, and increase first-contact resolution rates, the Chief of Digital Services provides strategic national leadership and oversight for the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of a unified customer experience across all digital and phone service platforms,” an SSA spokesperson told MeriTalk.
“I am proud of the leadership team we have at SSA. By combining the knowledge and experience of long-term career employees with new perspectives and talent of recent appointees, we are aligning our organization with today’s priorities and tomorrow’s opportunities,” Bisignano said in a Sept. 3 press release.