Martin O’Malley talks about the impact of the Trump administration’s downsizing of the Social Security workforce on customer service; how to fairly address the projected shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund by 2032 and the current Trump regime attack on democratic institutions and the rule of law.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right now, I’m very happy to welcome to our program Martin O’Malley, commissioner of the Social Security Administration under the Biden administration. Martin’s former governor of Maryland, as well as mayor of Baltimore. And we’re very happy Commissioner O’Malley, you could be with us this evening to talk about the important issues surrounding changes at the Social Security Administration. Thanks for being here.
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Yeah, absolutely. It’s my honor. Thank you.
SCOTT HARRIS: Initially, I’d like maybe from the perspective of someone who ran the Social Security Administration to tell our listeners about what the Trump administration has done to Social Security through the massive cuts in personnel at the agency through Elon Musk’s actions during the early days of Trump’s second term during his DOGE days.
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Well, it’s a sad story. 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, you know, 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: Thanks for that, Commissioner O’Malley. Can you give us some examples of how customer service for that vital lifeline of Social Security for those recipients out there, how it’s deteriorated since these major staffing cuts under DOGE and Musk and Trump?
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Sure. For starters, in the agency, there’s 1,211 field offices all across the United States of America, Scott. These are, think of them like your local post office except it’s for the benefits that many Americans, especially those living alone over 65, entirely depend upon. So those offices were there so that people could reach them. But very soon after Elon Musk and DOGE and Donald Trump started whacking and hacking away the staff, the agency announced through their new regime up there and their public commissioner, that they were no longer going to allow people to walk into field offices. Instead, you must go online or call ahead and get through on the long wait times in order to schedule an appointment. And those appointments, as you would probably figure, the fewer and fewer staff they have to serve the public and to process the claim. So this is not like a McDonald’s drive-through here.
These folks that interview Americans that walk into their Social Security offices are the same ones that process the claims. So in the crush of the work and fewer staff people, it takes longer and longer for anyone to get into the office to get an appointment and the gibberish that people now run into when they call the 1-800 number is a hodgepodge of messy chatbots and repeated messages that ask you, “Do you want to hang up? Do you want to hang up? Do you want to hang up?” There was an article in the New Yorker just within the last few days that chronicled all of this because sadly, the numbers that are now put out under the label of Social Security bear no relationship to the true customer experience that people are having, which is very poor and deteriorating.
SCOTT HARRIS: With the public backlash of individual horror stories that come out of these cutbacks, have the folks in charge for Trump at the Social Security Administration made any noises like they’re going to reverse course because forever Social Security has been the third rail of politics. I mean, you get a critical mass of senior citizens who depend on Social Security, get them angry. It’s not going to be good for your political party.
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Yeah. The good news is yes. When congressional leaders like John Larson, who has been doing an outstanding job roaring back at these guys, when congressional leaders like John Larson and Rosa DeLauro turned the bright light on the bad things that they’re attempting to do, oftentimes in fact, they do back off. I’ll give you one example. They had said that they were going to reduce staffing by 50 percent across the board and then they walked that back slightly at the roar from the public and John Larson and Rosa DeLauro and they said, “All right, well, we’re only going to cut 50 percent of the IT and the system staff.” Well, these are the very people that make sure that every week if you’re in pay cycle, that those payments go out. So many people at the time, myself and George Bush’s former commissioner of Social Security, Mike Asher, said, “They are putting benefits at risk.” In fact, I said, “If they cut the IT staff by 50 percent, we’re going to see the first interruption of benefits in the 90-year history of this agency, not through … It didn’t happen in a pandemic, it didn’t happen in other upheavals, but that was what they were messing with.
Then they backed off of that, fortunately. In fact, they had offered early buyouts to a lot of IT staff and then they withdrew. They rescinded those offers, the generous offers they make with your money and mine, by the way.
Another instance where John Larson roared back in particular by getting about 200 people to sign Congress members to sign a letter, they were going to push through this sleight of hand what was called the “mega reg,” which would have shoved—a part of Social Security as people with disabilities—that’s what we ensure ourselves through our work and our lifetimes and with a strong government, with our back in the past, not only against poverty and old age, but poverty and our kids being impoverished if we should get a work disability. So they were going to shove with a slight change of a sleight of hand, they were going to no longer give sort of extra points, if you will, for people that catch a disability when they are over 50—because think about it, the policy behind that for a long time is harder to work, harder to get a job, your body doesn’t do what it used to do. And so they were going to show 40 percent of those folks in that age bracket over 50 off of the disability roles and they backed off of that one.
And then a third one, they said right after the current commissioner skipped over the winning two bidders and gave the debit card for people that are unbankable or don’t have a bank near them to his former company, he announced that he was no longer going to send out paper checks to the half a million people who have elected to receive their benefits by way of paper checks. And again, they burned their hand on the burner, John Larson and others roared back and they backed off it.
So that’s the good news. It is such a popular program that they do sometimes back off, but don’t think for a second, Scott, that it’s a third rail anymore because while I was there, the House Appropriations Committee in a totally partisan vote and Rosa DeLauro made them cast a roll call vote, they voted to cut Social Security by $452 million without so much as a hearing. And every single one of the Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee voted to do that. And now we’re here in chatter about privatization again. But that’s not universal on their side. I mean, there are some Republican senators who know we have to strengthen it, who know we have to avoid the cliff in 2033 when the surplus—because of income inequality actually—runs out earlier than they thought in the last congressional adjustment in 1982. Man, that was a lot to throw at you.
SCOTT HARRIS: No, I want to get to the shortfall and scrap the cap and all that in a moment. But let me reintroduce you. We’re speaking this evening with Martin O’Malley, commissioner of the Social Security Administration under the Biden administration, former governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore. And we’re talking about Social Security under the Trump regime. And yeah, let’s talk about the shortfall. For many years, there’s been 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. But 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. So 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. 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 capture 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. And 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 Security’s upcoming, the forecast is 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 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.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, that’s a good explanation. And so scrap the cap is the short abbreviation for that action and …
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Yes. And I’m surprised how many people are getting it. Most Americans think it’s really unfair that a family of four in Connecticut making $182,000 will pay about $11,000 of that into Social Security. But somebody making $182 million will also only pay $11,000 into Social Security because they only pay into the first $182,000 of earnings. That’s where the cap is. Goes up a little bit every year with inflation, but most Americans think it’s unfair. It’s unjust. Only six percent of us make more than the cap and most Americans believe that if there’s not a cap on Medicare in terms of what we pay and there shouldn’t be a cap on income for the super wealth. They’re doing fine.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yes, they are. And I think an aggressive public education campaign would go a long way to have people better understand what’s going on with Social Security and what’s at stake if Congress doesn’t act.
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Yes.
SCOTT HARRIS: Commissioner O’Malley, I did want to ask you if you would talk a bit about the so-called Trump accounts for American children and how right-wing Sen. Ted Cruz recently said what they call “the quiet part out loud” about how these accounts were an entry point to begin the privatization of Social Security, which has of course been a long-term goal of the Republican party and their rich friends on Wall Street. And we had Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent say essentially the same thing, that these children’s accounts being set up under the Trump administration was a backdoor to privatize Social Security. I know we could get into a lot of detail here, but what’s the bumper sticker information that we need to know about the threat of privatization
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Well, yes, they have said it out loud. In the Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires, they put in something that Democrats didn’t catch because some Democrats have been advancing the notion of, “Oh, let’s give the parents of every newborn $1,000, $500, whatever it is.” Some people are proposing this locally and in states and that will become a nest egg and the kid can’t touch it ’til they’re 18.” So what Bessent said was, “Yeah, that’s a back doorway of privatizing Social Security.” And what they’re after here is requiring that Americans invest in those dollars that they had anticipated that instead they just, I guess they’re proposing, I guess they would imagine liquidating it at some point or not doing the adjustment and then saying, “Sorry folks, tough luck. You know what we told you all along that billions of dead people receive checks and that it’s waste, fraud and abuse,” none of which by the way is true.
“And so here’s your lump sum and you have to put it in the stock market.” So I don’t know that that’s what they’re thinking, but it certainly sounds like that’s what some of them are thinking. On the other hand, a senator named Bernie, not that one, but a senator from Ohio named Bernie Moreno said something else in a committee recently. I nearly fell off my chair reading it. He said, “I just don’t understand why wealthy people don’t pay the same rate into Social Security that everybody else does.” So this will be a scrum …
But clearly there are some within the Trump administration, Ted Cruz and others who are still in this drive to privatize. And you know what else they say, which doesn’t square and isn’t factual. They say, “Oh, we have such big deficits we can’t afford it.” Horse hockey. Social Security doesn’t contribute to the deficit. The dollars we put in every year as working Americans are the same dollars that go out. It is a pay-as-you-go program. It doesn’t contribute anything to the deficit to speak of.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, I wanted to just brush one more topic with you before we say goodnight, commissioner. And that is, I think the whole country’s still trying to absorb and understand what the U.S. Supreme Court did last week dealing a deathblow to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. So I wanted to get your quick reaction to that because it seems that America is going backward towards an era of Jim Crow election segregation or apartheid. It’s really a frightening moment. And I know in response there are many states now considering partisan gerrymandering to just stay even with where the Republicans might be in two, four years from now. And Maryland, as your state where you were governor, has been hesitant to engage in that kind of no holds bar gerrymandering warfare. But whatever you want to say about this, I’d be interested to hear your take.
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Yeah. We could unpack this in a longer show. I was governor of Maryland when we came up on the 2010 redistricting and in that era, which in hindsight seems like a much happier time, we did in fact do everything we could, but within the law, including the Civil Rights Act, to draw districts in such a way as to counter what we saw Republican governors doing in their states. I’m a Democrat and I was pretty clear about it. The voters approved it with, I think 67 percent at a referendum, but this notion of carving the districts in such a way that it draws Americans’ voices into irrelevance before the vote is cast is not good for our democracy. This is an extraordinary time with an authoritarian president who started breaking the Constitution the second he took his hand off the Bible when he was sworn in this time.
And so there are states that are trying to do everything in their power to counteract this so that we hold on to this republic and it’s not a pleasant thing. Nobody likes it, but I understand why Gavin Newsom and the governor of Virginia and others have done it. In Maryland, I’ll leave that call to our governor and the Senate president. We decided not to do it. Seven of our eight are held currently by Democrats.
But my case, I’ll leave you with this last thing—I’m blabbing a little too much, but there was a group that took our case all the way to the Supreme Court along with the North Carolina state, which was a Republican state that went the other way. And in the deposition, I said to the gentlemen, they were all gentlemen that were questioning me. I said, “Understand me very clearly. I did everything within my power under the Constitution and case law to draw these in such a way as to counteract what was happening in other states.” I saw it as my duty in a very imperfect system of checks and balances, but now this Jim Crow 2.0 that the Supreme Court has handed us makes all of this far, far worse.
There were some guardrails, there were prohibitions against diluting or packing people of color into one district or eliminating their voice and all of that’s out the window now. It makes me extremely sad. I still see visions of Lyndon Johnson handing the signing pen to Martin Luther King. It was a great achievement with a lot of people taking a lot of political risk and risks of their lives and the Supreme Court just tossed it in the gutter.
SCOTT HARRIS: Sadly, yes. Well, Commissioner O’Malley, thanks for spending time with us on this important issue of Social Security and we’ll reserve more discussion on the Voting Rights Act and its demise for another time. But much appreciation for all you’ve done for America in your state of Maryland and thanks for being here tonight.
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Hey, thank you. My pleasure. We’ll see you now. Bye-bye.
SCOTT HARRIS: Goodnight. That’s Martin O’Malley, commissioner of the Social Security Administration under the Biden administration, former governor of Maryland and Mayor of Baltimore. This is Counterpoint.
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