While Americans should be greatly concerned about Elon Musk accessing their Social Security data, what could ultimately threaten monthly benefit checks would be efforts to reduce the agency’s staffing, former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley said in a TV interview Tuesday night.
President Donald Trump’s administration has given Musk authority to downsize the workforce across the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. So far, thousands of government workers have been dismissed.
“I don’t know if it’s their plan to crater it, or if they’re just so ignorant of how stressed it is that they don’t realize they could interrupt benefits,” O’Malley, a Democrat and former Baltimore City mayor and Maryland governor, said in an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
The Social Security Administration, based in Woodlawn, is operating with staffing that is at a 50-year low, O’Malley said, adding that the agency is a lifeline for 72.5 million Americans and “half of all seniors living alone depend entirely” on the benefits they receive from it.
“So I do believe this will probably be the first beloved program by Americans that these DOGE boys break, and they’re on their way to doing it by driving people out of the agency,” O’Malley said, referring to Michelle King, who resigned from her position as acting Social Security commissioner Monday after Musk’s team requested access to sensitive information.
O’Malley said protecting personal information is a pillar of the agency, one that its employees and administrators take very seriously.
He said he was not at all surprised by King’s departure.
“[She] is a woman beyond reproach, a career civil servant who loves the agency and believes in the mission that she would not allow herself to be an accomplice to any violation of law or the sacred duty that she’s been taught her whole life to abide by, which is to protect people’s personal identifying information,” O’Malley said.
He said “browsing” or sharing Social Security data was a firing offense at the agency, and that employees could be referred for possible criminal prosecution. King, he said, would have been responsible for doing so.
“This is an agency that collects a lot of data [about] every job we’ve ever had since our very first job,” O’Malley said. “They keep track of those earnings, and there are a lot of laws in place that protect the privacy of that information.”
Musk has pointed to some of the Social Security information DOGE has accessed to question whether payments might be going to dead people.
The president on Tuesday also questioned some of the payments. At a news conference, Trump, a Republican, said “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits. “They’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent,” he said.
O’Malley disputed that notion, calling the allegations “total horse hockey.”
“There are not like cadavers wandering all around the continent of these United States with Social Security benefit checks flowing out of their pockets,” he said.
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