The former commissioner of the Social Security Administration on Tuesday ripped into “co-presidents” Donald Trump and Elon Musk, along with DOGE’s band of “19-year-old nitwits,” and called them the “biggest threat” to the continued existence of the 90-year-old program so critical to millions of Americans.
Martin O’Malley, a former governor of Maryland who ran the agency during the last year of the Biden administration, mocked Musk’s claims that millions of “zombies” from the age of 100 to 159 are collecting Social Security benefits.
“He has no idea what he’s talking about,” O’Malley told CNN anchor Boris Sanchez.
“There is not like a zombie apocalypse of people, cadavers running around with Social Security checks coming out of their pockets,” O’Malley scoffed.
He acknowledged there is some abuse in the massive system that involves 72.5 million people, but it’s minor.
“Sometimes really desperate people will try to hide the fact that grandma died so they get a couple more checks,” O’Malley said. But he insisted it’s more common that people’s benefits are mistakenly cut off.
Musk and Trump “keep throwing stuff out on Twitter that they can never back up,” O’Malley added.
“These 19-year-old nitwits from DOGE that are violating the law and plucking people’s ... personal identifying information, they don’t know what they’re looking at,” he added.
O’Malley was referring to Musk’s identified cadre of barely-out-of-college (one only a high school grad), young techies with little work experience, and no indication they have any familiarity with accounts and bookkeeping. Yet Musk claimed Monday they uncovered some $4 trillion dollars in untraceable payments in the Treasury Department in an astounding matter of weeks.
The “biggest threat ... to Social Security,” O’Malley argued, “is that the co-presidents are going to drive out another 10,000 people from an agency that’s already buckling under a 50-year low in staffing [and] an all-time high in customers” as the massive generation of Baby Boomers age.
O’Malley also blasted Musk and DOGE’S efforts to access highly personal information about millions of Americans. If any unauthorized Social Security employee tried to do the same it would be a “fireable offense” and often also subject to criminal prosecution, he noted.
“We can’t do that [now] because the co-presidents whacked all of the inspector generals whose job it is to police against waste, fraud, and abuse,” he said.
“So there is abuse going on and it’s all being committed by the 19-year-old nitwits ... empowered by Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”
