Written by Lee Davidson.
President Trump is wrecking Social Security, but its problems could be solved relatively easily with some new political willpower in Congress, the former head of that program said Saturday while he endorsed and campaigned for former Utah Democratic Rep. Ben McAdams.
“As you probably already know in your gut watching the way Elon Musk and those guys with Trump’s assistance attacked” Social Security, it has been wounded deeply, said Martin O’Malley. “We need people in Congress to fight for it.”
O’Malley — a former Maryland governor and Baltimore mayor — was appointed by former President Biden to head Social Security with a mandate to fix problems that worsened during Trump’s first term.
“I was honored to do it when Social Security was really struggling,” he told an audience at the Sorenson Unity Center. Its “staff had been reduced to a 50-year low” by Trump while the number of people it served skyrocketed as the baby boom generation retired.
So, O’Malley said he inherited an agency where customers often waited hours for calls to be answered, or months for office appointments or decisions or action. “We did get them moving in the right direction, thanks to the heart of the people there and the mission they share,” O’Malley said.
“Sady, in the beginning … of the Trump administration, they unleashed DOGE and Elon Musk for deep, deep cuts,” making service worse than ever, he added.
He noted that Musk once said in justifying such deep cuts that empathy is the greatest weakness in the western mind. “You and I believe differently,” O’Malley said. “The greatness of our country is based on the care and the compassion we demonstrate for each other. There is no program that a free people ever put in place … stronger and more far reaching than Social Security” for such care.
O’Malley said the Trump administration has spread lies about Social Security, including that dead people and illegal immigrants are receiving benefits, that the county cannot afford the program, that it is worsening the deficit, and that it cannot be fixed without raising taxes on everyone.
“Total poppycock. Made-up horse hockey,” O’Malley said. “That doesn’t happen.”
He said Social Security does have some problems that are worsening, but they are fixable. They include improving customer service, helping benefits to keep up with inflation and ensuring that benefits are not cut over the long term.
Much of that could be funded, he said, by scrapping the current cap on income after which Social Security tax is no longer collected. People now pay those taxes until they have earned about $177,000 in income, and then pay nothing on income above that.
O’Malley said that imposing Social Security tax on incomes above $250,000 would adequately fund Social Security for the foreseeable future. But he said in recent years, Republicans have shown little interest in that, and more interest in cutting its workforce.
“There are choices to be made. Eight-seven percent of Americans want their Congress members to choose to strengthen Social Security so that it can pay 100 percent of benefits into the far future,” he said.
O’Malley said that McAdams — whom he has known since O’Malley was mayor of Baltimore and McAdams was mayor of Salt Lake County — would help lead the fight.
“There were only three Congress people who ever came to Social Security headquarters,” when he led the agency, O’Malley said. “You know who one of those three was? Ben.”
McAdams said Social Security “is something that is very important to me. This is not just about honoring a promise that this country made to retirees, but making a promise to future generations.”
He said he worries the Trump administration seems to be trying to break Social Security so that it can argue it is so bad that it is so dysfunctional that it should be dumped and privatized.
“We must make sure it is there,” McAdams said. “It’s not impossible to solve this problem. It’s not even really that hard.”
He added, “I have never worried more about the direction of our country than I am today…. We need people who will stand up to Trump.”