Social Security commissioner Martin O’Malley has been touring the nation to speak with city and state leaders about the program’s future along with what he and the agency can do to best serve its 70 million-plus recipients.
Though he was first introduced as commissioner less than a year ago, he has big plans and hopes for the agency like increasing staffing, improving customer support and eliminating people’s doubts about the health of the program’s future.
His nationwide tour has led him to Dallas and Texas. The state is a key region for the agency as 4.6 million Texans, including nearly 3.3 million retired workers, are the recipients of benefit checks. In total, the state received $83.2 billion in 2022 through the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program, according to its 2023 annual report.
Despite rising life expectancy and cost of living along with balancing the agency’s predicted 2035 shortfall, which could leave recipients with a smaller portion of benefits they’re supposed to receive, O’Malley is optimistic about Social Security’s future.
But he needs Congress’ help to get Social Security back on track, he said.
“Social Security is not about to go bankrupt,” he said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “Social Security will, if Congress doesn’t act, face a 17% benefit shortfall for all of our beneficiaries currently in payment status. The good news is this is a solvable problem.”
O’Malley’s plan to restore confidence in Social Security
Though O’Malley is still relatively new as Social Security commissioner, he continues to hear one theme from the public: Concern that Social Security will run out by 2035.
That, however, is a common misconception. According to the annual trustees’ report released in May, the trust funds which Social Security uses to support benefits are projected to deplete by 2035. If that comes to fruition, the agency will only be able to pay out 83% of benefits to recipients.
To O’Malley, what Social Security faces now is similar to a problem the agency resolved in 1983. At the time, Social Security was approaching the possibility of not being able to fully pay out benefits to recipients with insolvency merely months away.
That same year, a slew of changes came to the program like allowing up to 50 percent of Social Security benefits to become taxable for select beneficiaries. That and a six-month delay in the cost-of-living adjustment to benefits and payroll tax increases helped cover the agency’s trust fund.
O’Malley doesn’t expect to see the retirement age go up or a slash in benefits, but he’s pushing Congress to help him by adding more jobs to the agency. Currently, Social Security is at the lowest level of staffing in nearly 30 years with about 55,000 employees while serving more customers than ever before, according to O’Malley.
“My first seven months here, we were in a hiring freeze. We have fewer staff because of reductions imposed on us by Congress,” he said. “Our fixed costs are going to go up and we’re no different than a police department or school in that respect. It’s like having more students but less teachers. So we really need Congress to act to restore staffing, otherwise they’re going to end up with more angry constituents upset about wait times and Social Security.”
O’Malley’s optimism comes from seeing President Joe Biden’s proposed 2025 budget, which he said calls for a $1 billion budget increase for the agency, freeing it to hire more employees and shorten wait times, another portion of O’Malley’s plan to fix the program.
“We have two crises. One is upon us already, and that is a crisis of customer service, which can have deadly implications,” O’Malley said. “But if we can improve customer service, that will not only save lives, it’ll create more trust at the table of our democracy to address the longer term strength and health of Social Security, potentially for generations to come.”
One of his other ideas to fix Social Security and set it up for its future is to look toward the top 6% of earners in the United States. Getting them to pay more over time would mean the agency could sleep a little easier at night, he said.
When changes were made to Social Security in 1983, the agency didn’t anticipate how tax laws would change to benefit America’s top earners and it’s something O’Malley wants to address soon, he said.
“Today, while you and I may pay into Social Security all through the year, someone like Warren Buffett is done paying into Social Security approximately 21 seconds into the new year,” he said. “Most of the proposals in Congress are some mix of asking higher-end earners to continue to pay into Social Security after a certain point in their earnings. But it likely won’t happen until after the next election.”
Ultimately, he thinks it’s the easiest solution, he said.
“We need to readjust this again so Social Security can be sustained for another 75 years,” O’Malley said. “The simplest, most straightforward way to do it is to ask wealthier people to start paying more to Social Security again, just like the vast majority of us do on all of our income.”
Social Security’s future
Beyond fighting an uphill battle against the upcoming shortfall, Social Security faces other addressable problems. Among those issues are the rise in misinformation and artificial intelligence.
In June, several websites were falsely claiming that Social Security recipients were set to gain an extra $600 in the form of a new stimulus check. Soon enough, aggregators picked it up and O’Malley’s office received an influx of calls.
“I think we’ll all have to combat those things. But this agency, because it touches every soul in our country, from the moment they are born until after they pass, gets a lot of eyeballs, especially if it says free money, right?” he said. “So we had to do a really rapid response. We now have those protocols in place for when it happens. But we’ll probably see more of that rather than less, especially now that we’re in this hotly contested election season.”
The agency is also looking into using artificial intelligence on more procedural and tedious jobs like sifting through 1000 page documents. But he cautioned against leaning toward it too much as customer service is one of his top priorities, he said.
“We are open, within legal parameters and the President’s guidelines to look at advances in automation, what many would call artificial intelligence, but not to the point that we ever take the human being out of making an individual, thoughtful determination of their benefits,” O’Malley said.
O’Malley hears concerns from everyone, whether it’s young or old, that Social Security is failing. But since his arrival, wait times on the agency’s 800 number have decreased by over 20 minutes and have reduced the overpayment rate to 10%.
Still, the job is far from finished and he knows it, he said.
“I’m so glad I get to play a role in this,” O’Malley said. “It’s really about serving people and restoring the trust that we need to have in our republic and in our democracy to something that’s as essential to the life of our country as oxygen is to the life on our planet.”
