Outside an office at Social Security Administration headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, a placard already carries his name. Matt Zames begins Monday.
CNBC has learned that the former JPMorgan Chase executive is coming aboard the Trump administration as an advisor to the Social Security agency. He will not be paid for the role.
According to people familiar with the move, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about it, Zames is on hand to assist Frank Bisignano, a former JPMorgan colleague, with modernizing the agency. Bisignano took over as Social Security commissioner last year.
A special government employee, with a clock on it
His title carries weight here. One of the people familiar with the arrangement said that, as a special government employee, Zames may hold the post for 130 days. Since he won’t be working full-time, however, those days could stretch across a longer stretch of the calendar.
In other words, this is no permanent appointment. It’s a capped engagement with an elastic calendar.
Why this particular banker
A former hedge-fund trader, Zames made his name at JPMorgan in part by helping the bank clean up its $6 billion “London Whale” debacle. He served roughly five years as its chief operating officer.
Within the bank, he drove technology initiatives and cost-cutting efforts, and was widely regarded as a leading candidate to replace CEO Jamie Dimon right up until he left in 2017.
It’s that mix — technology work at a massive institution, cost-cutting, and disaster cleanup — that explains the hire far better than the JPMorgan brand on his resume does.
What he did after the bank
A year later, he took the president’s job at private equity firm Cerberus, where his remit covered tech investments and included helping engineer a turnaround of the firm’s Deutsche Bank stake.
Zames departed Cerberus in 2021 and launched his own advisory and restructuring firm. He has additionally served on important Treasury and Federal Reserve advisory panels connected to the debt markets.
The agency he’s walking into
The agency Zames is entering runs on technology systems that date back decades. That, on paper, is the issue he’s been brought in to address.
It is not the largest one. Projections show the SSA depleting its retirement trust fund in under ten years, an outcome that could force benefit cuts affecting millions of Americans.
Modernizing systems does nothing to change that arithmetic. A part-time, unpaid advisor with 130 days to spend on legacy technology and a trust fund headed toward empty are two separate problems housed under one roof — and only one of them has a name on the door in Baltimore.