Trump’s Social Security Administration Downsizing Demolishes Customer Service

Interview with Martin O'Malley, Social Security Administration former commissioner under the Biden administration, conducted by Scott Harris

social security customer service

Soon after moving back into the White House for his second term in January last year, Donald Trump recruited tech billionaire Elon Musk to lead an unofficial government initiative called DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, to hunt down federal agency waste, fraud and abuse.  Musk and his team of young engineers failed to find any significant waste, but set in motion mass terminations of federal employees, the closure of entire agencies, deep cuts to agency budgets and cancellation of critical domestic and foreign aid health programs, which led to dozens of lawsuits and claims of unlawful, chaotic cuts.

The Social Security Administration was on the DOGE hit list, where Musk and his team disrupted the agency’s operations by firing 11 percent of its employees and closing 26 field offices, leading to widespread customer service problems and long wait times.  These initiatives aimed at reducing agency costs and modernizing technology have instead caused critical failures in services for many of the 75 million people who depend on Social Security to receive their earned monthly benefits.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Martin O’Malley, commissioner of the Social Security Administration under President Biden’s administration, who previously served as Maryland’s two-term governor and mayor of Baltimore. Here he talks about how the Trump-Musk downsizing of the Social Security workforce has impacted critical customer service and how to fairly address the projected 2033 shortfall of the Social Security Trust Fund.

MARTIN O’MALLEY: When President Biden asked me to go there, it was understanding that for 10 years their staffing had been reduced down to a point where it was a 50-year low and those hard-working men and women by the end of the Biden administration had managed to turn eight of the nine service delivery metrics—the speed with which to answer the phone; getting a beneficiary into pay status initial disability determinations. They had gotten it headed in a much better direction. Some of them at a 20-year best, notwithstanding the fact that baby boomers like me were starting to swell their ranks to a new all-time high every day. But then DOGE and Elon Musk and Donald Trump with his bullhorn of lies started just taking a wrecking ball to the agency. They reduced its staffing now to about a 63-year low. They shoved 7,000 people out of the agency.

The largest loss of staff in the shortest period of time in the history of that 90-year agency, Scott, that’s never, ever once missed a monthly payment. So the result of all of that is that the customer service that people work for their whole lives, just like they earn their benefits by working their whole lives has been taken away from them. And as President Biden said in some of his first remarks as a fully promoted full-fledged citizen, they’re trying to wreck Social Security so that then they can rob it because it’s the only agency that maintains a $2.6 trillion surplus. So that’s the sad story.

The good news is Americans are appalled by this. Eighty-seven percent of us, regardless of party, actually want Social Security to be strengthened, made better and able to pay 100 percent of the benefits we’ve earned for the far future, not just for us, but for our kids and grandkids.

SCOTT HARRIS: Commissioner O’Malley, I did want to ask you if you would talk a bit about predictions—and I guess this is based on the numbers that without adjustment—Social Security and the Social Security Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2033 or 2034 and that without doing anything, their benefits may shrink by 17 percent, but there’s plenty that can be done and has been done in the past to readjust where the shortfalls lie. Commissioner O’Malley, tell our listeners about the shortfall and where policymakers and folks like yourself want to Social Security go to fix this problem.

MARTIN O’MALLEY: Sure. Because so many people, Scott, depend on Social Security, there are very few scary headlines that get as many eyeballs and as many clicks as a headline that says Social Security to go totally dry, run dry by 2033. Oftentimes they put “to go totally insolvent.” Let me define that for just one second. Social Security is a pay as you go program. In other words, the dollars that go out of Social Security to beneficiaries who work their whole lives and are in pay status are the same dollars that are paid in by all of us who are still working in the economy. But it is true that the surplus that Congress built up back in the last adjustment, which was 1982, that that surplus is not lasting as long as they had intended and as they had forecasted in 1982.
When I was confirmed or rather going through the confirmation process, I asked the actuary, the public actuary at Social Security, “What did you all get wrong? Are we living longer? Were birth rates off? What did you get wrong?” And you know what he said? He said, “Income inequality.” I said, “Excuse me, come again.” He said, “We were asked to set the tax bracket on Social Security so that it would apply to 90 percent of increased earnings over the next 40 years. But then so many things happened under Ronald Reagan after 1982 that in essence flatlined any increases in earnings for about 94 percent of us and increased earnings in ways haven’t seen since the roaring ’20s for the top 5, 6, 7 percent of Americans.”
So because of that, Social Security only captured 80 percent of future earnings, not 90 percent. And that is why, my friend, that surplus is running out in 2033 rather than 2050 when most of us baby boomers will move on to our eternal reward. So the cause of Social Aecurity’s upcoming, the forecasted 17 percent cliff, and I do believe, I mean, not to scare the bejeebers out of your listeners, I do believe that there is will in Congress to act on this and the solution is pretty forthright. And (House Rep.) John Larson has put in a bill every year with growing numbers of co-sponsors that would essentially “scrap the cap” for those higher earning people so that they continue to pay the same rate into Social Security that all of the rest of us pay into it for the first $182,000 of our earnings.

For more information, visit Social Security Works at socialsecurityworks.org and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare at ncpssm.org.

Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Martin O’Malley (23:46) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Trump authoritarian playbook Substack or social media, subscribe here.

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