Social security, the sacred cow of the US welfare system dating back to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal, faces significant threat as it reels under the stress of Elon Musk’s aggressive incursions, its former head has said.
Martin O’Malley, former commissioner of the social security administration (SSA) under Joe Biden, said such a breakdown could result in disruption to benefit payments on which more than 70 million Americans depend, sending shock waves across the economic and social landscape and posing a political challenge to Donald Trump, who has repeatedly vowed that social security will be left untouched in his radical remake of US government.
The warnings come amid a welter of reports of website outages, regional office closures and recipients being wrongly declared dead following the activities of Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, also known as Doge, which has been missioned to make drastic cutbacks and root out supposed waste, fraud and abuse.
About 7,000 of the SSA’s 57,000-strong workforce have been culled in recent weeks as Musk, the tech billionaire and world’s richest person, has sought to live up to his vow to slash non-essential federal workers. More job cuts are feared to be on the way.
Insiders and unions warn that the cuts already made threaten to render the system inoperable.
“I truly believe there’s going to be some interruption of benefits for some period of time, and I believe that will probably happen in the very near future,” the Long Island Press quoted O’Malley as telling a town hall meeting this week hosted by two Democratic representatives from New York, Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi.
“I’ve never hoped I was wrong so much.”
It was not the first time O’Malley – a former Maryland governor and Baltimore mayor who headed the SSA from 2023 until last year – had warned that the system faced catastrophic failure.
“Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits,” he told CNBC in March. “I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.”
Already, some recipients – mainly immigrants who were deemed eligible for benefits under the Biden administration – have seen payments cut off after being declared dead under the SSA’s “death master file” (DMF) in a scheme designed to pressure them into leaving the US, or “self-deport”.
The New York Times reported that the names of more than 6,300 people had been added to the file after having their “financial lives … terminated”, in the words of the SSA’s acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, who used the term in an email to staff.
Underpinning Democrat warnings are suspicions that Doge’s efforts and the resulting cuts are intended to ultimately destroy social security, whose functions include providing taxpayer funded benefits to retirees, the disabled and families of deceased workers, as well as enrolling people in Medicare, the healthcare system for the elderly.
Such fears have been stoked by Musk’s notorious description of the system as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”, and the spread of rumors of benefits being paid out to 150-year-old fraudulent claimants.
Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary and also a billionaire, added further fuel by suggesting only fraudsters would complain if there was an interruption to social security payments – the very scenario O’Malley has warned of.
“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month, my mother-in-law – who’s 94 – she wouldn’t call and complain,” Lutnick told a business podcast last month. “She’d just think something I messed up and she’d get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.”
Suozzi told Monday’s town hall meeting that the loss of 7,000 staff members would save just 0.06% of the SSA’s budget.
The cuts have resulted in the closure of some social security field offices. Recipients have been told to register claims online amid reductions to telephone and in-person services
Yet that task has become harder as claimants have been faced with frequent website crashes – sometimes lasting up to a day – as they attempted to log on to their online social security accounts.
Many of the outages appear to have been caused by an expanded fraud check imposed by Musk’s Doge team, the Washington Post reported.
Doge’s technology team failed to test new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could take the strain, the newspaper quoted SSA insiders as saying.
The technical glitches resulted in many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving anti-poverty support under the supplemental security income support program (SSI) being greeted with a message saying that they were “currently not receiving payments”.
Alex Breen, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee, told Newsweek that the job cuts were putting remaining staff under pressure.
“With other aspects of the administration falling behind, it’s easy to see why there are concerns future payments could be delayed,” he said. “Few Americans will tolerate missed payments or slower customer service for a program they paid into for decades.”
