Former Social Security commissioner Martin O’Malley considered the suggestion that the agency is “rife with fraud” laughable on “CNN News Central” Tuesday.
O’Malley, who served as the Social Security Administration (SSA) commissioner under President Biden from 2023 to 2024, discussed the report that the acting SSA head Michelle King had quit her job after clashing with Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) over access to data.
“Elon Musk has claimed that SSA is rife with fraud, suggesting that benefits are being paid to dead people, that millions and millions of dollars are going to waste,” CNN host Boris Sanchez said.
O’Malley began laughing at the accusation.
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“You‘re laughing, but that is a concern that a lot of Americans have, is it not?” Sanchez asked as O’Malley continued laughing. “Is it a laughing matter?”
“Yeah,” O’Malley answered, still laughing. “He has no idea what he’s talking about. There is not like a zombie apocalypse of people, you know, cadavers running around with Social Security checks coming out of their pockets.”
He then admitted that “it’s a big agency,” so there are “outliers.”
“It‘s 72.5 million people. Sometimes really desperate people will try to hide the fact that grandma died, so they get a couple more checks,” O’Malley said.
He added, “More often, because of the checks we have in place where we interrupt payments of people over a certain age, especially if they stop receiving Medicare benefits… more usual is that we have to restore benefits when we erroneously cut them off, when somebody moves out of the country or something.”
O’Malley criticized Musk for putting out claims that he “can never back up.”
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“Ask Elon Musk, show me the 12 people that are 150 years old. He can’t. Show me the 200 million that are still receiving checks. He can’t. These 19-year-old nitwits from DOGE that are violating the law and plucking people’s personal identifying information, they don’t know what they’re looking at,” O’Malley said.
Musk has claimed that more than 20 million names listed in the Social Security database were over 100 years old, including more than 3.9 million in the 130-139 age range, more than 3.5 million in the 140-149 range and more than 1.3 million in the 150-159 range. He did not say how many were still receiving benefits.
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