Soon after moving back into the White House for his second term in January last year, Donald Trump recruited tech billionaire Elon Musk to lead an unofficial government initiative called DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, to hunt down federal agency waste, fraud and abuse. Musk and his team of young engineers failed to find any significant waste, but set in motion mass terminations of federal employees, the closure of entire agencies, deep cuts to agency budgets and cancellation of critical domestic and foreign aid health programs, which led to dozens of lawsuits and claims of unlawful, chaotic cuts.
The Social Security Administration was on the DOGE hit list, where Musk and his team disrupted the agency’s operations by firing 11 percent of its employees and closing 26 field offices, leading to widespread customer service problems and long wait times. These initiatives aimed at reducing agency costs and modernizing technology have instead caused critical failures in services for many of the 75 million people who depend on Social Security to receive their earned monthly benefits.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Martin O’Malley, commissioner of the Social Security Administration under President Biden’s administration, who previously served as Maryland’s two-term governor and mayor of Baltimore. Here he talks about how the Trump-Musk downsizing of the Social Security workforce has impacted critical customer service and how to fairly address the projected 2033 shortfall of the Social Security Trust Fund.
For more information, visit Social Security Works at socialsecurityworks.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Martin O’Malley (23:46) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Trump authoritarian playbook Substack or social media, subscribe here.
