Martin J. O’Malley takes the helm at the Social Security Administration

In a ceremony held on Wednesday, December 20, 2023, Martin J. O’Malley was sworn in as the new Commissioner of Social Security by Senator Ben Cardin. O’Malley, a seasoned public servant and former Governor of Maryland, will helm the Social Security Administration for a term expiring on January 19, 2025.

Expressing his gratitude for the appointment, Commissioner O’Malley emphasized the significance of the Social Security Administration’s mission.

“I am honored for the opportunity of a lifetime to lead Social Security’s outstanding public servants forward, together, in such an important mission to help the agency deliver critical services to the American people,” said O’Malley. “Social Security is the most far-reaching and important act of social and economic justice that the people of the United States have ever enacted.”

O’Malley, a lifelong public servant, brings a wealth of experience to his new role. Serving as the Governor of Maryland from 2007 to 2015 and prior to that as the Mayor of the City of Baltimore, he has a deep understanding of public administration and governance.

His dedication to performance management and customer service technologies in government has set him apart as a pioneer in the field.

A strong advocate for governing for better results in the Information Age, O’Malley has lectured on public administration since 2016 at prestigious institutions such as the University of Maryland, Harvard University, Georgetown University, and Boston College School of Law.

In his capacity as Commissioner, O’Malley will oversee the administration of the Social Security retirement, disability, and survivors insurance programs, disbursing over $1.4 trillion annually in benefits to more than 66 million beneficiaries.

Additionally, he will be responsible for the Supplemental Security Income program, providing cash assistance to approximately 7.5 million individuals with limited income and resources.

The Social Security Administration, with a workforce of approximately 61,000 employees and 1,500 facilities across the United States and globally, plays a crucial role in the lives of millions of Americans.

O’Malley, a graduate of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., in 1985, and the University of Maryland School of Law in 1988, is married to Judge Katie Curran O’Malley. The couple, celebrating over 30 years of marriage, has four children: Grace, Tara, William, and Jack.

O’Malley served as the chair of the Democratic Governors Association from 2011 to 2013. After leaving office in 2015, he was appointed to The Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School as a visiting professor focusing on government, business and urban issues.

O’Malley was one of six major candidates for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, but he struggled to gain support, and suspended his campaign on February 1, 2016, after finishing third in the Iowa caucuses, and endorsed Hillary Clinton four months later.

Since his presidential campaign, he has lectured at Georgetown University and Boston College Law School, and written two books about the use of technology in government.

As Commissioner, O’Malley looks forward to steering the Social Security Administration toward success in its mission to provide essential services and support to the American people.

Eight years before he was tapped to manage Social Security, O’Malley was running for president and claiming to be the only candidate with a plan to fix it.

The vision, the former Maryland governor said, was not just to address the long-term outlook for a program expected to be incapable of paying full benefits by the mid-2030s, but to expand the benefits while raising wages and inspiring more private investment in retirement.

Republicans Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana supported O’Malley when the Senate Finance Committee approved his nomination in a 17-10 vote, but he was confirmed by the full Senate with a vote of 50-11, with many abstentions.

President Joe Biden nominated O’Malley to fill the term expiring on January 19, 2025 of Andrew Saul, whom the president fired more than two years ago and replaced with current Acting Commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi.

O’Malley comes into the position during a tenuous time as the agency faces severe issues including the retirement system’s solvency, concerns over benefits, a staffing shortage, and a $23 billion overpayment problem.

“Governor O’Malley will expand Social Security benefits — not reduce them or undermine Social Security in any other way,” read a four-page plan his campaign released in the summer of 2015.

Reforms he ushered into law in 2011 included increasing state employee contributions and reducing cost-of-living raises to ensure the state’s pension system, chaired by the state treasurer and comptroller, would eliminate its unfunded liability over time. The system at the time of O’Malley’s reforms had $37.6 billion in assets and about 367,000 active or retired participants, according to its 2011 annual report.

The move was widely unpopular among employees and retirees, who protested by the thousands in Annapolis as officials debated the changes. Union representatives, the treasurer and comptroller also all spoke out three years later when O’Malley diverted some of the money saved by those reforms to fill other budget holes.

His presidential campaign platform for Social Security focused on making the entitlement program pay out more to its beneficiaries, mainly through adjustments to laws dealing with taxes and wages.

Those are steps he wouldn’t have authority to take as head of the Social Security Administration. Still, the campaign-era proposal indicates O’Malley would bring a broad and progressive view to his advocacy for the program as its leader, experts say.

“To have an energetic advocate at the helm of Social Security would be lovely,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “Something has to be done and it sounds like it would be good to have him in the room.”

Munnell, who reviewed O’Malley’s campaign plan, said she was pleased to see O’Malley had rejected the idea of privatizing Social Security or raising the retirement age, ideas that some policymakers have proposed to extend the program’s lifespan. She also highlighted his ideas — like raising the federal minimum wage to $15 and requiring employers with at least 10 employees to automatically enroll workers in an IRA — that would help retirement savings, although they are not under the purview of Social Security.

“It’s not necessarily a blueprint in how to restore financial balance to the system, which is going to be crucial, but fortunately his actuaries have a book that has probably a hundred policy options to solve the problem, so he will have access to a superb staff and be able to be a major contributor when the negotiations start,” Munnell said.

The top selling point of O’Malley’s plan was to make income above $250,000 subject to the payroll tax. Current law subjects only a certain amount of wages to the tax. In 2015, when O’Malley made his proposal, it was the first $118,500 earned; in 2023, it is $160,200.

His initiatives also included increasing a special minimum benefit for what the SSA calls “long-term low-wage-earners,” using a different measure of inflation to adjust benefits for retirees, and providing credits to caregivers who take extended time off work, like people who stay home with children or an aging parent.

“As a nation, we must do far more to ensure the retirement security of American families,” O’Malley wrote in an op-ed that ran in an Iowa newspaper in August 2015. “And we should start by expanding Social Security benefits — not cutting them or merely ‘enhancing them’ — to provide a foundation for a more secure retirement to all those who have worked hard to achieve it.”

The plan largely mirrored that of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who became the preferred progressive alternate to the eventual Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While Clinton held off on presenting a detailed Social Security plan in 2015, O’Malley’s campaign argued he was “the only candidate who set a goal to invest in retirement security for seniors.”