Whether or not Elon Musk does step down as chainsawer-in-chief in the weeks ahead, the Social Security Administration (SSA) may be on the way to spoiling a perfect record of having sent out benefit checks every month since the very first one on Aug. 14, 1935.
“The Trump co-presidency is gutting this agency,” former SSA Administrator Martin O’Malley told the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on Tuesday. “It is breaking it from within, and it ultimately will lead to cascading failures, interruptions and system shutdowns that will eventually and I think within the next couple of months lead to benefit interruptions for the first time in 90 years.”
O’Malley, also a former Maryland governor and Baltimore mayor, happened to be addressing the committee the same day as a Wisconsin state Supreme Court election that was the most expensive judicial race in state history. Musk was seeking to buy it with record campaign cash while peddling some of the very falsehoods that O’Malley feels are aimed at wrecking the agency he headed until four months ago.
O’Malley noted that at a pre-election rally in Green Bay on Sunday night, Musk and a crony had strutted on stage with a huge American flag in the background, a scene right out of the eponymous movie about the World War II general George Patton. Musk also had a series of outsized charts to show a surge in immigration in recent years.
Elon Musk’s speech in Wisconsin (left) bore a striking similarity to a scene from the 1970 film
O’Malley had watched video of the event and he reported to the committee that the crowd had audibly gasped when told that the millions of immigrants had received Social Security numbers. Musk failed to tell them that the first Trump administration had instituted a system by which newly arrived immigrants eligible to work were automatically mailed a Social Security card to their home. Musk also neglected to say that only citizens and people officially authorized to work can receive Social Security benefits. But everybody pays taxes into the SSA fund.
“The big lie … that illegal immigrants steal your Social Security benefits and are going to bankrupt the system, when the truth is people working here outside of legal status, illegal immigrants, so called, are prohibited by law from receiving any Social Security benefits, although they pay in $22 billion for the rest of us,” O’Malley told the committee on Tuesday.
And Musk and his minion had made the big lie even bigger.
“They said this was all part of a blue state plan to give illegal immigrants the right to vote so that we [will be in] a blue state in perpetuity, from which none of us will ever be able to escape.” O’Malley added.
In what was either a deliberate falsehood or just a misunderstanding, Musk also said that 40 percent of calls to SSA are fraudsters seeking to steal direct deposit checks. Musk may have been confused; 40 percent of fraud attempts are by phone, but that is only a small fraction of the total calls.
O’Malley later said, “Truth: 8 million people a month call SSA’s 1-800 number. Only 1 out of every 3,100 is a successful attempt at direct deposit fraud. We thwart 4 for every on that gets through. In other words, 0.000322581% percent are a successful over the phone direct deposit fraud attempt. The total amount last year was $133 million, represents 0.000095 percent of the 1.4 trillion paid out in benefits.”
O’Malley added, “The crime of impersonating a beneficiary to hijack/redirect their direct deposit is typically discovered by the beneficiary the first month they bounce their own automatic withdrawal to a nursing home or their rent check bounces. Additionally, we mail paper notices within two weeks to beneficiaries telling them their direct deposit was changed and if it wasn’t them, go to a field office with their ID.”
He further noted, “We were about to implement electronic notification to anyone that had a myssa account. But I’m guessing they didn’t move forward once the election happened.”
O’Malley could have also told the committee that Musk had gone so far as to claim that the reason people are burning Teslas is the Democrats fear that DOGE is going to cut off social security payments to illegals.
But for all Musk’s bucks and balderdash, the candidate bankrolled by this would-be-Patton was vanquished at the polls. A muted Musk claimed on X that he had won what he said was the really important issue: a measure incorporating a voter ID requirement into the state constitution. Never mind that Wisconsin voters had been required to show ID since 2011.
But the bigger-than-big lies, and the damage to the SSA will persist, even after Musk is expected to leave Washington and self-DOGE in the weeks ahead.
O’Malley cannot help but fear that an agency he came to love has been deliberately damaged beyond repair.
When he was appointed by President Joe Biden in late 2023, O’Malley discovered that the SSA operated with heroic dedication in extremely difficult circumstances.
“They were sprinting up a downward-moving escalator,” O’Malley said. “And what was moving it downward at such an increased velocity was the greater numbers of people every single day that they were serving … due to Baby Boomers. Every single day was a new record high, and after 10 years of staffing reductions imposed by House Republicans, their staffing was at a 5- year low.”
O’Malley instituted SecurityStat, a variation on Compstat, the data-driven performance management system developed by the late, great NYPD Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple. Compstat has been rightly credited with reducing crime from record highs to a record low in the 1990s. Compstat is largely why crime remains low in New York.
In SecurityStat, the various departments of SSA would rotate to bi-monthly meetings aimed at improving their performance. The session would be live-streamed to leadership in the nine national divisions. Democrats and Republicans on the congressional oversight committee were invited to attend virtually.
Elon Musk listens to President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting. / The Washington Post / The Washington Post via Getty Images
“So they could see what we were wrestling with,” O’Malley told the Daily Beast on Tuesday. “It was a degree of openness, transparency and performance management that’s never been created before in the history of our federal government.”
At the time O’Malley had to depart the SSA and DOGE arrived, the agency had a payment accuracy rate of over 99 percent. Less than 1 percent of social security payments were fraudulent, considerably less than experienced by credit card companies. And SSA had an overhead of just 1.2 percent—markedly lower than any private insurance company—while maintaining customer service that long made it the most popular government agency.
DOGE began by demanding unrestricted access to the databases, which include the new identities of mob informants and spies and others in the witness protection program.
The supposed computer geniuses then either misinterpreted or embellished what they saw. They falsely claimed that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old were receiving benefits. The truth is that only 0.1 percent of SAA recipients are over 100 years old. Payments are automatically stopped by age 115.
At the same time, Musk talked of “massive waste.” DOGE spoke of closing dozens of branch offices and reducing the workforce from 57,000 to 50,000, either through retirements or buyouts.
“If you want to find wasted Social Security today, look at the cash payments of our money and beneficiaries money in earning their benefits, look at the cash that they are burning by paying experienced, if overworked men and women to leave the agency; some of them they’re paying for the entire year,” O’Malley said.
Elderly recipients who would have otherwise been able to straighten out problems with SSA by phone will be forced to make their way to whatever offices remain open, which will be staffed by fewer people.
“It seems that what they’re trying to do, even as they threaten to close offices, is to jam them up and give people the worst possible experience they can have,” O’Malley told the committee. “So then, after wrecking it, they can rob it.”
And there is a $2.7 trillion surplus.
“This agency should be able to function for another 90 years, because it is a pay-as-you-go system,” “O’Malley said. “Americans who worked last year paid in $1.3 billion, and we paid out to the people in beneficiary status $1.4 billion… The difference was taken from that $2.7 trillion surplus intentionally built up… to cover the lifespan of the baby boomers. So the long term viability of this agency should not be in question. It’s only in question now because of the chainsaw that is gutting this agency and destroying its ability to function as designed.”
And what do the SSA haters want to do with a surplus that dwarfs even what the richest man in the world has amassed?
“I cannot tell you,” O’Malley continued. “But I can see that they’re trying to wreck this agency, and the people of the United States who are in this benefit need to stand up right now. I truly believe only an aroused democracy can stop them from doing what they’re already 90 percent of the way to doing.”
