For Social Security, Martin O’Malley says, “it has been a miserable year.” And he puts the blame squarely on Donald Trump.
In a Fox News opinion piece, the former Social Security commissioner writes that after President Trump “unleashed Elon Musk and DOGE on the Social Security Administration, the agency lost more staff in a shorter period of time than ever before in its 90-year history.”
According to O’Malley, what happened next came dangerously close to a historic breakdown. Trump’s team pushed a drastic downsizing of the agency’s workforce, a move he says would have slashed staffing in half and closed offices across the country. “Fortunately, public outcry and pushback from congressional Democrats saved Social Security from a 50% cut to staffing and the closure of scores of field offices as Trump and his administration had announced back in March,” he writes.
O’Malley describes an agency hollowed out but still standing, held together by the staff who stayed. “So, somehow, those dedicated workers remaining at the Social Security Administration have still managed to keep the agency running, without missing a single monthly benefit payment,” he notes, adding that “there are not many public or private insurers in the world who can claim to never have missed a monthly benefit payment in 90 years.”
That record matters for the millions of people who rely on it. “This is good news for 71 million Americans, many of whom depend on their earned benefit every month as a lifeline,” O’Malley writes. But, he continues, “we are not out of the woods yet. The agency has been gutted. Enormous damage has been done to customer service and to the agency’s ability to process claims.”
Donald Trump is plotting to cut Social Security benefits for older Americans — after he promised during the campaign that he wouldn’t touch Social Security.
We must call it out and stop these cuts. pic.twitter.com/IID7MYus4G
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 5, 2025
Wait times at local offices and on the national 1 800 line have grown, and backlogs for disability decisions have worsened. O’Malley warns that staffing at the Social Security Administration is now at a “60-year low” while the number of beneficiaries sits at an all time high, a gap he says is leaving Americans “paying the price” every time they try to get help.
He also ties Trump’s Social Security moves directly to health care. “Just as many are demanding that Trump’s deep cuts to healthcare be restored, so too must Trump’s deep cuts to Social Security be restored, as the two are inextricably linked,” he argues.
On Medicare, O’Malley lays out a looming hit next year: “Sixty-four million Medicare recipients will see a reduction in their Social Security benefits in 2026 due to Trump’s Medicare price hikes that will cut into their Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), making life more expensive for seniors,” he writes. He calls it “the greatest erosion of the Social Security COLA in nearly a decade, and the first time that Medicare premiums exceeded 200 dollars per month.”
In the piece, O’Malley reminds readers that Trump campaigned on protecting Social Security. As he sees it, the reality has been the opposite. Trump “vowed all through the campaign that he would protect Social Security,” O’Malley writes, but instead “wrecked the program’s customer service, took a chainsaw to its functions and maligned its reputation with false claims of waste, fraud and abuse.”
Social Security, he notes, has never missed a monthly payment in nine decades, and remains one of the most widely supported programs in American life. But after the cuts and chaos of the past year, he says the system will only survive if Congress moves to repair the damage and restore the staff needed to keep those checks coming.
