Musk is dodging questions about Social Security — but we shouldn't let him
Salon interviewed former Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley about Musk's evasiveness.
Martin O’Malley, the former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor, served as President Biden’s Social Security commissioner for the last year of his administration.
For this reason, O’Malley has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of President Trump’s war against the Social Security system. He is leading his charge through a political action committee (PAC) called Win Back Our Country PAC. His new role keeps him busy; as he discussed with Democracy at Work, Trump has told so many lies about Social Security that it is difficult to keep up.
Perhaps the most troubling thing O’Malley discussed, however, is the role played in Trump’s crusade by the world’s richest man. Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent his goons from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to evaluate every American’s Social Security information regardless of safety protocols. Even though Musk has now distanced himself from the Trump administration, O’Malley points out that Musk’s violations of citizens’ privacy are the least of our worries. He also imposed draconian cuts to the agency’s staffing and services, as well as spread misinformation about how its $7.3 trillion is being spent. Now one of his acolytes, the inexperienced 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, has been left to work at the organization despite Musk’s ostensible absence from the government.
Regardless of whether Musk still wishes to be viewed as part of Trump’s team, the American public will live with the legacy of what he did to Social Security for many years. O’Malley is challenging Musk to a debate in no small part for that reason — but Musk refuses to accept.
Below is a transcript of my recent conversation with O’Malley. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What is the truth about Social Security and what are the lies that the Trump administration is now saying?
Gosh, where to begin the count? The biggest lie is on this day that the trustee's report comes out. The biggest lie is that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and is going bankrupt. The truth of the matter is that Social Security has never missed a payment in 90 years, far from being a Ponzi scheme. Most of those collapse in short order.
Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program. The same dollars that come in from people working in the American economy are the dollars that get paid out to the people who are beneficiaries. So in terms of the Big Lie that it's going bankrupt, the truth is that Social Security will never go bankrupt so long as there are people working in the economy.
But it is true that the surplus reserve, with Congress back in the 1980s, had hoped and expected it would last. The retirement life of the Baby Boomers is being depleted sooner than they thought in 1982 due primarily to income inequality. That is to say, dollars that they thought would be paid into Social Security, instead were made only by increases in those among the top 6% of Americans in the ensuing 40 years.
So that was a lot.
Social Security receives the highest sterling financial audits year in and year out from reputable private sector big accounting firms like Grant Thornton and Ernst & Young. The same dollars that get paid out are the dollars that are paid in every year by people working in the economy, and in terms of the big scary headline that it's going bankrupt by 2034 there, that's in reference to the surplus reserve. There is no agency in the federal government that carries the huge surplus reserve that Social Security does, of $2.5 trillion.
That surplus reserve was built up intentionally to cover the current demographic bubble of the Baby Boomer generation. [That refers to] a period of time right after the Second World War when there was a big increase in birth rates, and surplus reserves were built up to cover that demographic bubble that everybody saw coming.
Sometimes people want to say the reason that surplus reserve is being depleted sooner than they had hoped in 1982 is because of changes to our tax code that concentrated increased earnings in the hands of very few, only a small percentage of Americans, namely income inequality was really made to take off by choices we made during the Reagan years.
And it only became exacerbated. And here's why that has that impact on the big surplus reserve not being as big as they had hoped it would be.
We only pay as Americans into Social Security on the first $170,000 that we earn. Most people aren't aware of that because most of us don't make more than $170,000, as individuals or as a family. But the practical effect of that, and the reason why it impacts the dollars that might have gone into Social Security, is this: a family of four making $170,000 paying into social security, roughly $10,000 from their earnings in any given year. But a single millionaire, or rather a single person making $170 million a year, also only pays $10,000 into social security.
Most Americans think that's not fair. And to those who say, well, shouldn't those millionaires get back a bigger benefit, then I'm not going to get into that. You can ask that if you want.
A person at a town hall said, "Yeah, but isn't the rationale that everybody gets back, kind of what they put into it?" I said, "Yeah, the key word there is kind of lower earning people actually, who do generally harder work, actually get back more than they put into it. There are bend points that create a progressive formula, if you will, so that since it's insurance against dying in poverty, if you get a disability or living in poverty, if you suffer disability, the goal is to lift people out of poverty. So in order to do that the actual formula, it gives more. People that are lower earning people actually get more back than they put into it. But the other part of my answer is that what I said, the keyword there is kind of, I said if somebody's making $170 million a year, they've already gotten a lot back from them by being in this country.
Now my next question is about your challenge to debate Elon Musk. And I want to add in my opinion, even though Musk is no longer in the government, his legacy remains, he still has access to all of our private data. He still fired all of those people. So as far as I'm concerned, he's still accountable. What do you think?
He's so far managed to hide behind Fox News. And there's no privilege to be unaccountable. There is no person in American history that ever did as much alleged damage to our federal government as Elon Musk managed to do in the hundred days that they were taking a chainsaw to Social Security, to education, to veterans benefits, and many other institutions that Americans thought they could always depend on. Now, the effects of all of that have yet to be seen by Americans in their daily lives, but it will be as if they've knocked the supports out of a big Jenga tower.
It's going to topple over where Social Security is concerned.
They took an agency that had never missed a payment in 90 years, an agency that has been forced to operate on a complex web of IT systems in dire need of modernization, and an agency that was struggling with a growing workload from Baby Boomers to meet that demand with staffing already reduced to a 50 year loan — and they push 7,000 people out the door, reduced it, cut it by 7,000, cut out workforce and customer service by 7,000 people, so far.
But they're going to go down. They're going to lose another 3,000 people by the time fall rolls around. And this is why all of the mass firings they did of the Office of Customer Service Transformation, the Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, the 50% cut in IT staff in the IT department, all of that means a much higher workload for all of those people who are still left, who didn't take the cash to leave, who weren't paid for the rest of the year, to go home today and not let the door hit their butt on the way out.
All the people who remain are really miserable because they're doing the jobs of the people that left in addition to their own job, and suffering every day from ever higher workloads. And there is no magic wand that is suddenly going to replace all of those people and the work that they had to do serving individuals, making sure they got the right amount to the right person at the right time. So those who stayed, you're going to see an attrition rate at that agency, you're going to see an attrition rate that may well be the worst in the federal government of people leaving with their feet.
Before I got there, Matt, for three years in a row in the federal employee viewpoint survey, they said that they were the worst place to work in the federal government. So it was, and it was because of the workloads growing. Every year, their staff was reduced by another $600 million because of so-called level funding by House Republicans….
Now they might not publish it, but [Social Security is] shedding employees even beyond the ones they fired and paid to leave, as they find better jobs in other places that don't treat their employees like crap. They have intentionally created a hostile work environment that's across the Social Security Agency. They're doing their level best to wreck its reputation with Big Lies like “Social Security's going bankrupt,” like “Social Security never worked,” like “illegal immigrants are bankrupting Social Security,” like “there's a zombie apocalypse with 12 million people, a population the size of Illinois, running the planet with checks spewing out of their cadavers' pockets.”
None of it's true, but even as they wreck its reputation by wrecking its staffing and its ability to serve the public, they're now cramming people that work their whole lives to pay for their benefits — and, oh, by the way, all hose same dollars pay for their customer service — they are forcing those people into crowded field offices, oftentimes for services that they used to be allowed to do online or over the phone, they're making people wait again for hours on that, to try to get through on the 800-number. And they are reversing things that were done in the recent past to automate some of these functions, and forcing people instead to show up in Social Security offices and add to the ever longer lines with fewer and fewer people behind the windows.
And if you doubt that that's what's going on, walk into any Social Security office. In any office you'll probably see six empty windows for everyone that has a staff person at it. And that's because of the huge reductions in staffing.
Before I close this interview, is there anything else you'd like to say that I haven't broached so far?
I'm in the middle of a five town hall swing through Arizona and California with my leadership pack called Win Back Our Country. Part of when people come out to these town halls, what they hope to walk away with is the plain language truth and rebuttals to the Big Lies that are told about Social Security. “They can't really rob that big trust fund.”
Well, remember the story about the bank robber who was asked, “Why rob banks?"
“Well that's 'cause that's where the money is.”
That's why the DOGE people in Trump have been so focused on Social Security. It's that big trust fund, and they can't really go after it until they turn enough of the public against the agency and convince them that it doesn't work and it's ultimately going bankrupt anyway. And so there is this time worn story that talks about that surplus reserve in the trust fund, as if it were the entire program. It's not. Last year the dollars paid into Social security were $1.3 trillion. The dollars that went to beneficiaries were $1.4 trillion. And the only difference was taken out of the trust fund. So if Congress for the first time in a hundred years of the Social Security program by then in 2034, if Congress doesn't act and make another adjustment like they did back in 1983, yes every beneficiary would receive a 17% reduction in benefits, but they would continue to receive 83% of their benefits.
I don't make light of that cliff, of that dip, of that shortfall but it is a totally solvable problem. Matt, if you were told in your family owned business by your sister, who is your accountant, that you were going to have a 17% revenue shortfall in nine years, you would not automatically plaster a bankruptcy sign on the front of your store and wrap up your business. Instead, you make the adjustment so that you don't have that shortfall of 17%, nine years off on the horizon. Congress has plenty of time to address this, and the biggest part of addressing it is to repeal that windfall [tax break] that millionaires currently enjoy when they don't pay anything into Social Security after the first $170,000 that they make.
Back Seat Socialism
Column by Matthew Rozsa who is a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, "Neurosocialism," which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.