This week’s “You Earned This” podcast features a special VIP guest: former Maryland Governor and Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley. It’s a conversation that everyone who cares about the future of Social Security should hear. O’Malley, who led the Social Security Administration (SSA) during the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency, conveys a clear message: Social Security is under attack, and the consequences for millions of Americans couldn’t be more dire.
O’Malley doesn’t mince words when reflecting on the state of the SSA under what he terms the “co-presidency” of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. “It breaks my heart to see the way that Musk and Trump are just taking a meat cleaver to this agency and kneecapping its ability to serve the public,” he said during our interview. “It’s not fair. It’s not right. People need to wake up to the very real threat that this poses to their earned benefits.”
2024: A Year of Progress
O’Malley described his year at the SSA as one of the most rewarding periods of his life. Tasked with leading an agency that had been chronically underfunded, he sought to rally the workforce that delivers Americans’ retirement and disability benefits. Years of congressional budget neglect had reduced SSA staffing to a 50-year low, while the demand for services was at an all-time high.
O’Malley took pride in working with SSA’s dedicated employees, who, despite these challenges, had a shared mission to serve the public. Together, they focused on addressing severe customer service backlogs, improving fraud prevention, and ensuring benefits were delivered on time. His team implemented critical changes, including improved data sharing with suspect banking institutions to combat fraud. Under O’Malley’s leadership, SSA reduced wait times on the agency’s 1-800 phone line from 40 minutes to twelve minutes, and shrank the delays for Social Security Disability Insurance hearings, among other improvements.
“I hadn’t felt that fully engaged in work since my time as mayor of Baltimore,” O’Malley said. “Watching the agency turn around, even on a very leaky battleship — even as we coped with inadequate resources and decades of neglect — was well worth doing.”
But the gains O’Malley and his team worked so hard to achieve were quickly undone.
The Sabotage of Social Security
According to O’Malley, the reversal began almost immediately after Trump took office. Under the new administration, the SSA announced severe staffing cuts, including mass firings. Entire offices, including those dedicated to improving customer service and promoting equal opportunity, were illegally purged. “Carrots and sticks” were used to incentivize early retirement, creating a hostile work environment that alienated the dedicated public servants O’Malley once led.
“Trump, Musk, and DOGE have really (abused) a group of people that I came to love very quickly. The workers believed in a shared mission, that what they’re doing matters so much to so many. That’s the only reason people hung in there through all of the tough years,” O’Malley lamented.
After the induced early retirements and firings, “people saw their colleagues hugging each other goodbye. There were tears… and cardboard boxes on top of hoods of cars,” O’Malley explained. “SSA leadership essentially said, ‘Hey, joyous news! Everybody who feels compelled to leave the agency: quit now without letting the door hit your backside on the way out.’”
O’Malley estimates that the reductions in staffing will ultimately result in 10,000 SSA jobs disappearing — a 20% cut. The consequence, he says, will be a depleted, overburdened workforce unable to meet the demands of an aging population, at a time when 10,000 Baby Boomers reach retirement age every day. This systematic gutting of the already SSA has exacerbated wait times on phone lines and at field offices, caused website crashes, and increased frustration for the everyday Americans who depend on these vital services.
Musk’s Ideology of Brutal Efficiency
O’Malley doesn’t hold back on what he sees as the Trump administration’s true intentions:
“Elon Musk wants to destroy Social Security. It doesn’t fit with his worldview. He thinks people that are elderly, people who are disabled are, by their very nature, wasteful.”
Musk has publicly derided empathy as a weakness, a philosophy that seems to underpin his approach to governance. O’Malley pointed out that Musk views Social Security beneficiaries as “inefficiencies” or, worse, “dispensable.”
“The ‘waste’ that Musk is talking about are people who are elderly and can’t work, people who are disabled and can’t work, children who lose parents,” O’Malley explained. “That’s why he wants to go after a program that he thinks subsidizes people who supposedly are ‘a drain on the system.’”
Musk’s fake hunt for waste and fraud is hypocritical, O’Malley noted, given the billionaire’s reliance on federal contracts worth $8 million per day. Yet instead of safeguarding Social Security, Musk has partnered with Trump to undermine a program that keeps seniors from falling into poverty.
Trump & Musk’s Falsehoods
O’Malley also called out Trump and Musk for spreading disinformation about Social Security, including absurd claims about rampant fraud:
“Donald Trump stands up in his non-state of the union address and implies there are 360-year-olds collecting Social Security, people who presumably came here for the founding of Jamestown or Plymouth. Totally untrue.”
O’Malley re-iterated a darkly funny, but apt remark he made at a Social Security hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. “The zombie apocalypse is not real. There aren’t millions of people wandering all around the cities of America with checks spewing out of their cadaverous pockets.”
The truth, O’Malley explained, is that fraud within Social Security is extraordinarily rare, despite Trump and Musk’s bogus claims. Musk alleged that 40% of the calls on SSA’s phone line are fraudsters. In truth, says O’Malley, for every 3,100 calls taken by SSA’s call center, only one results in a successful attempt at direct deposit fraud. That’s about .0007%! Of course, ideally there would be zero fraud. In fact, new policies implemented during O’Malley’s tenure targeted improper payments. Unfortunately, those reforms likely are out the window now.
Undermining Public Confidence in Social Security
O’Malley expressed his belief that Trump and Musk aim to erode public confidence in Social Security as a prelude to dismantling it entirely. “I have come to the conclusion that Trump and Musk actually want to sour the public against the SSA. And they do that by destroying its ability to provide customer service for people who work their whole lives for these benefits,” he explained.
By making it harder for Americans to access their benefits and by spreading false narratives of ‘waste, fraud, and abuse,’ they hope to sway public opinion against the program. Once that confidence is eroded, the ultimate goal is clear: cut, privatize, and even raid Social Security for cash.
“I could even imagine a sinister scenario,” O’Malley speculated, “where they say, ‘Hey, Social Security is broken. It was always going to go broke and it doesn’t work. So we’re going to have to liquidate the trust fund.” If that were to happen, the $2.7 trillion in the trust fund could be misdirected for unrelated purposes — including a permanent tax cut for the wealthy and big corporations.
O’Malley speaks at a Save Our Social Security rally in Florida last month
A Call to Action
Social Security isn’t a government handout. It’s an earned benefit that keeps seniors and people with disabilities financially afloat. It’s a contract between generations, ensuring workers who pay into the system today can claim benefits upon retirement, disability, or the death of a family breadwinner.
As O’Malley pointed out, the vast majority of Americans support expanding Social Security, not weakening it. “80% of Americans believe Social Security should be strengthened and made better,” he said. But maintaining that support requires action. “Members of Congress need to hear directly from the people,” O’Malley urged. “Americans see the threat and they want them to ‘stop the steal’ of their Social Security benefits.”
Since leaving his post at SSA, O’Malley has been traveling the country to advocate for Social Security and to speak out against the DOGE squad’s interference in the program. He has already delivered two speeches in Florida, warning seniors of what’s at stake, and is heading to Oklahoma next. While he may no longer be Social Security Commissioner, Martin O’Malley remains fiercely devoted to defending the agency he led — and the 73 million people who depend on it.
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LISTEN TO GOV. O’MALLEY’S PODCAST INTERVIEW here.
READ OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SSA WHISTLEBLOWER LAURA HALTZEL here.