There’s already a placard with his name on it outside an office at Social Security Administration headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland. Matt Zames starts Monday.
The former JPMorgan Chase executive is joining the Trump administration as an advisor to the Social Security agency, CNBC has learned. He’s taking the job unpaid.
The people with knowledge of the move, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly, said Zames is there to help his former JPMorgan colleague Frank Bisignano tackle modernization of the agency. Bisignano became Social Security commissioner last year.
A special government employee, with a clock on it
The title matters here. As a special government employee, Zames can hold the position for 130 days, said one of the people familiar with the move. But that could be spread over a longer period of time, because he won’t be working full-time.
So this isn’t a permanent appointment. It’s a capped engagement with an elastic calendar.
Why this particular banker
Zames is a former hedge-fund trader who rose to prominence at JPMorgan after helping clean up the bank’s $6 billion “London Whale” mess. He was its chief operating officer for about five years.
Inside the bank, he spearheaded technology and cost-cutting projects. He was seen as a top contender to succeed CEO Jamie Dimon until his departure in 2017.
That combination, big-institution technology work plus cost-cutting plus cleaning up a disaster, is the resume line that explains the hire better than the JPMorgan name does.
What he did after the bank
The next year, Zames became president of private equity firm Cerberus. There he oversaw tech investments and helped turn around the firm’s Deutsche Bank stake.
He left Cerberus in 2021 and started an advisory and restructuring firm. He has also had positions on key Treasury and Federal Reserve advisory groups tied to the debt markets.
The agency he’s walking into
Zames is joining an agency that relies on decades-old technology systems. That’s the problem he’s nominally there to work on.
It isn’t the biggest one. The SSA is projected to exhaust its retirement trust fund in less than a decade, which could require benefit cuts to millions of Americans.
No amount of systems modernization touches that math. A 130-day unpaid advisor working part-time on legacy technology and a trust fund running dry are two different problems sharing one building, and only one of them has a name on the door in Baltimore.
