Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano has a simple message about protecting the retirement program: start by cleaning house. In an appearance Tuesday on Fox Business' "Big Money in the Morning," Bisignano said "eliminating fraud, waste and abuse" is the "first solution" to safeguarding benefits, as worries about the program's long-term finances keep piling up.

He framed the effort as the kind of blocking and tackling any well-run business would do. Referring to President Donald Trump, Bisignano said, "The president has been very, very clear. Protect and preserve. The first steps of protecting was to get the operations to work right. Any good business fixes its technology, fixes its operations, fixes its books and records, and that's what's been going on."

Part of that fixing involves artificial intelligence, which Bisignano described as a tool for improving service, processing and recordkeeping. He also stressed the need for coordination among government agencies, because records that live in silos tend to stay wrong.

Clearing Up That 15% Number

Bisignano took a moment to clarify a roughly 15% figure that came up in the interview, explaining that the cleanup touches the agency's entire database. "15% is the amount of records that were corrected. We've gone through 100%," he said.

A week earlier, the agency said it had corrected nearly 15% of all active Social Security Numbers. That included adding 17 million missing dates of death and updating about 25 million records with missing citizenship information. It also said it was correcting 8.5 million more records with inaccurate citizenship status. Bisignano put it plainly at the time: "The Social Security Number database is our country's books and records."

The Money Question

Cleaning up records is the easy part to agree on. The funding math is where things get uncomfortable. The program's main trust fund is projected to deplete its reserves in 2032, at which point continuing income would cover 78% of scheduled benefits. That works out to a potential 22% reduction if lawmakers do not act.

Earlier this month on CNBC's "Squawk Box," Bisignano was asked about raising the retirement age and other possible reforms. He did not endorse a specific change, saying instead that decisions would ultimately involve the White House, Congress and the program's trustees. In other words, the commissioner is happy to fix the books, but the big policy calls belong to the people who write the laws.

Separately, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said in an X post that Social Security "faces a 28.5% benefit cut in just six years if Congress doesn't act." In an interview with host Janet Alvarez on The Business Briefing, Cassidy proposed a "pension investment fund," separate from the Social Security Trust Fund, with $1.5 trillion put in over five years.

So the debate has two tracks running in parallel: one about making the agency's records and operations work right, and one about how to keep the trust fund from running dry. Bisignano is focused on the first. The second, as he keeps noting, is above his pay grade.