Former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley came to Wisconsin this week as he travels the country warning about the danger of cuts to the administration. | Photo courtesy Maryland's Executive Office of the Governor.

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor and Social Security commissioner under President Joe Biden, was rushing around Wisconsin Thursday, conducting a flurry of local media interviews before speaking at an evening town hall in Racine.

“I’ve found myself doing a lot of town halls,” O’Malley said, speaking on his phone from the passenger seat of a car as he hurried to a local TV station.

On Wednesday, he was in Kansas City, Missouri, talking to constituents of Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Before that he traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the invitation of a grassroots group to speak to a big crowd of people worried about threatened cuts to benefits for seniors.

In Racine on Thursday night he joined a town hall hosted by the progressive coalition group Opportunity Wisconsin. U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Republican who represents the 1st District, was invited, but did not attend.

“Having served in the agency so recently, as its last confirmed commissioner, I just feel a responsibility to speak up,” O’Malley said of his detour from private life to travel the country criticizing President Donald Trump and Elon Musk for cutting Social Security staff and closing offices.

“The only thing that’s going to stop the driving of Social Security into system collapse is the American people rising up,” he added.

When he came into the Social Security Administration in 2023, O’Malley said, a decade of staff reductions had reduced the agency’s workforce to a 50-year low, just as the Baby Boom generation was causing a spike in the number of retirees it was serving. As a result, “every line of service was headed in the wrong direction.”

“The agency needed to turn things around, and to their credit they did it,” he said. O’Malley is full of praise for the federal workers he supervised, who reduced call wait times from 42 and a half minutes on average to 12.8 minutes, along with other improvements. “It’s one of the most highly skilled executive services I’ve ever worked with,” he said, including when he served as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland. The “obsessive compulsive” culture of the agency, as O’Malley affectionately terms it, has meant that over the last 90 years, no one missed a check.

Then came Trump and Musk, who “unleashed a reign of terror on those employees” — “the same people who got us through COVID without ever missing a payment.”

Mass firings, a hostile work environment, and the huge waste of taxpayer money as employees were paid to walk out the door appalled O’Malley.

Instead of rooting out “waste fraud and abuse,” Musk’s DOGE cut the IT department in half, undoing the work O’Malley and his colleagues had done to improve service at the agency. 

As Trump and Musk drive out the people who know how the system works, intermittent IT outages have become a problem. The website for Social Security accounts has gone down. Wait times are skyrocketing. And as the problems get worse, O’Malley said, “ultimately, it will interrupt benefits.”

“I don’t know when it will happen,” he said, “but when it breaks, it will break.”

What is the point of this wanton destruction? 

“I don’t know what the end game is,” O’Malley said.  

Members of Congress in both political parties have told him they think Trump and Musk have set their sights on the $2.6 trillion in the Social Security trust fund in order to make tax cuts for the superwealthy permanent.

Then there’s Musk’s nihilistic ideology, captured in his assertion that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” 

“There’s no more empathetic program than Social Security,” says O’Malley. “It guarantees widows and orphans and people who are disabled don’t live in poverty. Maybe Musk thinks those are useless members of society who don’t help build his immense wealth. I don’t know.”

Whatever their motives, O’Malley is certain that Musk and Trump must be stopped from a campaign that will end in enormous damage to Americans. 

O’Malley’s message is the opposite of Musk’s — far from being riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, the Social Security administration is a model. Fraud affects less than one-half of 1% of Social Security funds. And far from being wasteful, the program spends 1.2% of its budget on overhead, meaning it could be seen as the most efficient insurance company in the world. Private health insurance companies have notoriously high administrative costs.

Other “Big Lies” O’Malley is out to bust include the whopper that immigrants without legal status are draining resources from the system. In fact, they pay about $26 billion in Social Security tax withholdings to fund benefits they themselves can never access, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Nor are dead people drawing Social Security benefits. “There is no zombie apocalypse,” says O’Malley. Facts and figures supporting the efficiency of Social Security are laid out in plain language on his website, winbackourcountry.com.

The good news is that people are beginning to push back on the idea that Social Security is riddled with abuse and should be made more “efficient.” 

“Congress people are getting a heck of a lot more calls now than they did two months ago,” O’Malley said, “whether it’s from people experiencing long wait times, or having trouble accessing the benefits they’ve worked their whole lives to earn, or who are just seeing what’s happening on the news.”

That pressure is absolutely necessary if we are going to prevent the raiding and destruction of a New Deal program that has served so many people so well for generations.