The Social Security Administration delivers one of the most popular and widely relied-upon services in the country, but that doesn't mean it's always received five-star reviews.
The SSA had a reputation for long processing times, overburdened customer support and inefficiency, but appeared to be turning around under the leadership of Administrator Martin O’Malley. The appointee of President Joe Biden oversaw a 68% dip in call wait time and a 24% decrease in disability hearing delays during his year-long stint at the agency.
That progress may be in jeopardy under Donald Trump. The president has teamed up with billionaire Elon Musk to drastically slash government spending, and the pair has the agency in their sights.
In a phone interview with Salon, O’Malley warned that hard-won improvements to the SSA were quickly unraveling amid the biggest assault on the program in its history.
“For over 90 years, Social Security has never missed a monthly payment and remains one of the most trusted and beloved programs in our federal government,” O’Malley told Salon. “We saw what was possible for that one year. By the time that President Biden left office, every service metric was moving in a better direction… and now these guys seem intent on sinking it.”
At a conference on threats to Social Security earlier this week, O'Malley said cuts sought by the Department of Government Efficiency could pose an existential danger to the system.
“There’s always room to increase productivity… but that’s not what the DOGE/Musk/Trump team has been about. They are gutting this agency’s staffing with a chainsaw, and they are driving it into a total system collapse,” O’Malley said. “It’s going to be extremely expensive to put Humpty Dumpty back together again once they wreck it.”
Biden concurred with O’Malley’s assessment in a rare post-presidency speech on Tuesday, sounding the alarm over the “breathtaking” damage his successor’s administration has done to the program in mere weeks.
"Fewer than 100 days into this new administration, they have done so much damage and destruction. It is kind of breathtaking it could happen that soon," Biden said. "They’ve taken a hatchet to the Social Security Administration… already we can see the effects."
O’Malley worries the reputational damage to Social Security might be intentional. Speaking to Salon, he said Trump administration cuts could be a ploy to turn public opinion against the agency and soften the blow of an eventual raid on its coffers.
“I suppose that if they want the $2.7 trillion surplus that this agency has – no other agency generates and runs a surplus like Social Security does – I suppose they can't do that in an agency that's respected... and trusted by the public,” O’Malley told Salon. "They appear to be wrecking it so that they can rob it and get away with it," he said.
Several offices within the SSA have fully shuttered, and the federal government is gearing up to close down more. To O’Malley, it’s a move in the wrong direction after a year of dramatic improvements.
"They've done mass firing of whole offices, like the Office of Customer Service Transformation, which helped us make so much of last year's progress, fired the head of it – an A-plus player – and the other 70 people in his office," O’Malley said. "Totally illegal. There was no cause. They just did it to send a message that even the highest performers aren’t safe."
More than 7,000 of the agency's staffers are on the chopping block, further cutting a headcount that is already dozens of times lower than that of private insurers, O’Malley shared. Pulling employees from crucial offices when the agency is already at a 50-year-low in staff puts benefits in a precarious place, he told Salon.
“You’re going to see intermittent outages of a lot of the IT systems – there’s about 3,000 of them,” O’Malley said. "They've probably already taken 90% of the actions they need to take to crater this agency and drive it into a total system collapse.”
Without the thousands of dedicated experts who keep the massive records system running, O'Malley believes a sequence of “cascading events” could wreck the whole program. To Musk's untrained eye, the staff of SSA represents something different: bureaucratic bloat.
Musk has parroted claims that the SSA’s phone support systems were burdened with widespread fraud attempts, and made a dubious claim that deceased beneficiaries listed as 150 years and older were receiving millions in payouts.
O’Malley disputed claims made by DOGE that millions of dead people were cashing Social Security checks, explaining the Administration’s partnership with state and local authorities to identify deceased beneficiaries had been proven effective.
“Just because somebody’s record is still in Social Security doesn’t mean they’re still in pay status,” he said.
O’Malley said if Trump and Musk were really concerned with waste and fraud, then their firing of the Inspector General overseeing Social Security did more harm than good.
“It’s underneath that big lie of ‘doing away with waste, fraud, and abuse’ that they’ve been actually doing away with the agency and its ability to serve the customers,” he explained.
Regardless of whether or not they're finding actual fraud, the SSA under Trump is already augmenting records and cutting off beneficiaries. O'Malley said the administration's plan to cancel the Social Security numbers of some eligible immigrants is “totally contrary to law.”
“They are disappearing people, marking them as dead in the Social Security database if they are people that DHS has deemed shouldn’t be in the country anymore… they’re digitally murdering these folks.”
At least 6,300 immigrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba who were lawfully assigned Social Security numbers were moved to the agency’s “master death list” last week at the request of immigration authorities. The White House argued in a statement that the move would encourage immigrants to “self-deport.”
“As often happens with fascism, the first group they asked for were the undesirables… Now I understand they’re asking for another 92,000 [Social Security Numbers to be canceled], and I understand there’s another 800,000 they’re going to ask for on top of that,” the former administrator said. “If they can, without any due process, unlawfully do away with Social Security numbers of people who legally entered the country, then they can do the same thing to any of us.”
Threats aside, there may still be hope for the vast agency. O’Malley highlighted the “real bipartisan desire” to strengthen Social Security.
“There are a lot of Republicans who, behind closed doors... want Musk to shut up about Social Security,” he said. “So far, most of them in elected positions are remaining silent as they watch this agency being dismantled, and it’s not like they don’t know.”
To those Republicans defending Social Security in private, O’Malley warned that their window is closing.
“The time is coming,” “Eventuallly, they’re going to drive the agency into a total system collapse that will involve the interruption of benefits for the first time in 90 years.”
