MIAMI — On Friday night, former Social Security head Martin O’Malley faced some of the rage that Democratic and Republican members of Congress have been confronted with in recent weeks as the Trump administration ravages the federal government and threatens programs like Social Security. O’Malley was there to detail not just what the Trump administration is going to harm the program, but how Americans can stop it.

The rage came in a gleaming, progressive Methodist church on the ninth floor of a high rise overlooking the Biscayne Bay as O’Malley answered questions from a small audience of seniors who had gathered at one of a handful of events across Florida in recent days. It came from a 61-year-old Cuban-American retiree and Marine veteran named Enrique Tamayo.

“I have to say that sitting here and listening to you speak is frustrating because we are at war,” Tamayo said as O’Malley listened and the room tensed up. “Our country is being taken over. Our programs, our entitlements are being dismantled. What I feel is that we’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

O’Malley, the former Democratic Maryland governor, had been telling attendees to call their congressional representatives to urge them to protect Social Security as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) makes cuts to the agency that, O’Malley says, are already “90 percent of the actions necessary to crater Social Security.” 

Tamayo felt it wasn’t enough — his congressional representatives in South Florida, Republicans like Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar and Sen. Rick Scott, weren’t going to listen to people like him. They are part of the authoritarian takeover Tamayo believes the United States is under. 

“Do you think they’re going to stop with Social Security? This is authoritarian rule that we’re under and it’s going to get worse,” Tamayo said, noting that Trumpworld figure Steve Bannon has been openly talking about a third Trump presidential term. 

Tamayo suggested drastic action — “a month of no consumption,” he said. Shutting down the economy would cripple the Trump regime because “the corporate governance that we have today is at the heart of this mess.”

After a few more comments and questions, O’Malley took in the response to his suggestion that frustrated seniors share their concerns over threats to entitlements like Social Security and Medicaid with their elected representatives. What he heard in response at the Cornerstone United Methodist Church in Miami was that it wouldn’t matter. The people were at their wit’s end.

“That’s how — do I want to use this word? Yes, I do. That’s how fascists win, by making us feel like we can’t do anything about it,” O’Malley said. 

Since mid-March, O’Malley has been bouncing between his native Baltimore and Florida to speak at events held by Save Social Security and Medicare Now, a Super PAC formed last year. On Friday, he started the day in Naples, then drove across Alligator Alley to the event in Miami. The next day, Orlando and Palm Coast, then Pensacola. The event with Tamayo in Miami was the smallest of the events so far with about 30 people — former Miami mayor Manny Diaz noted it’s not easy getting downtown at 4 p.m. on a Friday. In all, O’Malley and organizers say, they’ve had some 3,000 people, mostly seniors, show up at their events. The next day in Fort Lauderdale, hundreds filled every pew of a Methodist church.

“I think this is the beginning of something,” O’Malley told Rolling Stone after the Fort Lauderdale event. There, he told attendees that “this is a moment in our country’s history to not give up on the capacity of our neighbors to be engaged. So many of us are checking out because it can be anxiety-inducing, but now is the time to be at the table of democracy.”

ATTENDEES AT THE EVENTS have vacillated between distraught, bewildered, confused, and occasionally very, very angry. 

“Where’s Jared Moskowitz’ rep?” one man screamed of the Democratic representative as O’Malley thanked local pols who attended an event held Saturday at the Methodist Church of Christ in Fort Lauderdale. 

The people at the events are worried about soaring wait times online and on over the phone, plus the prospect of their local Social Security office closing. Meanwhile, the agency’s website has crashed and waits to speak to representatives have skyrocketed thanks to DOGE’s cuts, according to the Washington Post. DOGE has slated 47 field offices in 24 states for closure and has said it will do away with the agency’s 800 number in favor of online customer service. 

“I’m techie, so I can figure stuff like that out,” one woman, who didn’t want to give her name, tells Rolling Stone. “But I worry about people who aren’t so good with technology or who don’t have Internet access.”

The woman and her husband noted that many of the offices DOGE wants to close are in rural areas with unreliable internet. Attendees worried that Social Security is effectively being shut down under the guise of rooting out the fraud, waste, and abuse that Musk and the Trump administration claim are infecting the system. 

In addition to the wildly unfounded claims that Americans well over the age of 100 are receiving benefits, Musk and Trump have claimed that entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are rife with fraud and improper payments. Musk recently claimed, without evidence, that there’s up to $700 billion in fraud in entitlements each year. The White House has singled out a report from the former inspector general of Social Security showing that the agency made $72 billion in improper payments between 2015 and 2022, amounting to .85 percent of all payments. 

The claims are key to the Trump administration’s argument that it is carrying out a campaign promise to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. So far, DOGE and the White House have yet to report a single actual instance of fraud. Still, Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted at Monday’s Cabinet meeting that those who commit fraud in relation to government services will be prosecuted. 

“We’re coming after you,” Bondi said, in part, claiming the Justice Department now has a “task force” looking at fraud claims in every major federal government agency.

O’Malley is quick to point out that there were already checks against fraud within the Social Security Administration (SSA) — checks that were some of the first cuts made by DOGE when it closed the Office of Analytics, Review and Oversight, the SSA office responsible for investigating fraud and improper payments. 

O’Malley, the former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor who briefly ran for president in 2016 and served as Social Security commissioner for a year under President Joe Biden, has begun his talks at the events by describing how he got the job. Neera Tanden, Biden’s staff secretary and a senior advisor, had called O’Malley and described how wait times had gone up as the SSA’s customer service operations had deteriorated. “Sounds like a problem. Who do you have in mind to fix it?” O’Malley recalls asking Tanden. “Well, we were thinking of you,” she replied.

Thus began O’Malley’s crash course in Social Security, an agency with offices and thousands of employees in his native Baltimore. He remembers asking top staff there if they had pie charts so he could better visualize some of the endless numbers and stats being thrown his way. “Pie charts are for simpletons,” was the response, O’Malley told the crowd in Fort Lauderdale before taking a pause. “OK, do you have any pie charts to help explain all this?” he recalled responding to the staffer as the crowd laughed. 

O’Malley points to a simple graph to explain the challenges his former agency faces. It shows the number of Social Security employees going down over a 50-year period as the number of beneficiaries — Baby Boomers like O’Malley entering retirement — have skyrocketed. At events across Florida, O’Malley has touted his work as Social Security Commissioner, noting that wait times on the agency’s 800 number went down during his tenure, and how he limited “clawback” fees to prevent seniors from going broke if the agency made a mistake and overpaid them. The Trump administration has returned those clawback fees to 100 percent, meaning even an accidental overpayment that is no fault of a beneficiary will result in their entire check being withheld.

From there, O’Malley has gone on to explain everything that has happened in Trump’s first two months in office, with acting commissioner Leland Dudek overseeing a “reign of terror,” as O’Malley puts it. First, DOGE staffers like Musk deputy Steve Davis and a 22-year-old former Meta and Palantir intern named Akash Bobba demanded sweeping access to all of SSA’s data systems, according to a deposition from a 30-year SSA veteran filed in a lawsuit brought against the agency by the AFL-CIO. When former commissioner Michele King — who O’Malley says was a dedicated public servant who began her career decades before as a 22-year-old intern herself at the agency — refused to provide the data, Dudek undercut her, eventually admitting to his subordination in a since-deleted LinkedIn post.

“I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” Dudek wrote.

As punishment, King placed Dudek on administrative leave as Davis and DOGE continued demanding access to the data. Rather than hand it over, King resigned. The Trump administration then chose Dudek for the role of acting commissioner. On Tuesday, the Senate will hear from the administration’s pick to lead the agency — Frank Bisignano, a former Fiserv executive known for cost-saving staff cuts at the company — at his confirmation hearing. 

Dudek and DOGE have been on the warpath, closing the review and oversight office that examined fraud and improper payments, closing the Office of Transformation, which dealt with customer service, and shuttering the Office of Civil Rights, which heard workplace complaints of discrimination. Amid the carnage, Trump fired the agency’s inspector general along with more than a dozen other inspectors general across the government. 

Also removed in the slow-rolling massacre were Eric Powers, the agency’s head of customer service, and Claudia Postell, who oversaw the civil rights office — both dedicated public servants, O’Malley says. Powers was unceremoniously fired for cause, according to O’Malley, who relayed the stories of Powers’ firing and other agency cuts as told to him by insiders

“Trump isn’t pleased with customer service and you haven’t made it any better so you’re fired — go get a cardboard box,” O’Malley says of Powers’ firing.

“It was like the Wizard of Oz tearing apart the scarecrow,” O’Malley told the crowd in Fort Lauderdale as attendees sat in silent disbelief at the description of events. “They made a spectacle of it for everyone to see — people standing in the parking lot with boxes on the hood of their cars crying and hugging each other.” 

With the agency being gutted from the inside out, DOGE offered buyouts to thousands of employees at or near retirement age. More than 2,000 have taken the offer. “These guys are paying people — with your money — to leave,” O’Malley told the crowd. “That’s the biggest waste of efficiency in the history of the Social Security Administration.”  

Then came the lies, O’Malley says. Looking at data that was, in part, organized by an antiquated coding system, DOGE staff thought they had discovered people well over the age of 100 receiving benefits. What they were actually looking at was a quirk in the system: For people whose date of birth wasn’t known, the system — known as COBOL — defaulted to an internationally recognized date for statistical language. The date was in the year 1875, making it appear that Americans who were well over 100 years old were still receiving benefits. 

Musk and Trump took this mistake and ran with it, talking about people who were 100, 150, and even 300 years old who were allegedly receiving Social Security benefits. None of it was true. 

“The DOGE kids were elated — they thought they’d found this high scandal,” O’Malley told the crowd in Fort Lauderdale. “But didn’t really know what they were looking at.”

O’Malley says he believed Musk would correct the record and admit DOGE’s mistake, but when Trump mentioned the phenomenon of people at impossibly high ages receiving benefits, he knew it was part of a campaign to discredit Social Security amid efforts to cut services. 

“I thought, ‘Woah, what a huge gaffe, Musk probably didn’t tell him it wasn’t true.’ Now, I think they must have done their polling and know that enough people in their base will choose to believe that we’re sending money out to cadavers with checks falling out of their pockets.” 

ALL OF THIS HAS LEFT seniors and other Americans who rely on Social Security asking two questions: How bad will it get, and what can be done about it? The answer to the first question, according to O’Malley, is “total system collapse” if nothing is done to stop DOGE’s work inside the SSA. Part of that work was halted last week when a federal judge issued an order prohibiting DOGE from accessing the personal data of hundreds of millions of Americans. 

To answer the second question, O’Malley believes that his barnstorming tour and the message it sends to congressional Republicans might strike enough fear of losing in the midterms into the hearts of congressional Republicans to make them think twice about letting DOGE’s work inside the SSA and other agencies continue unfettered. 

“I can see the look in your eyes — we’ll never get Rick Scott to do anything,” O’Malley told Tamayo in Miami. “But don’t give up on him; don’t give up on your legislators.”

After the event, O’Malley and Diaz found a nearby bar to grab drinks and unpack the event. Over a Corona and a shot of well tequila, O’Malley told Diaz he has embraced the role of “Social Security Commissioner-in-exile,” something the former Miami mayor suggested is in line with what prominent Democrats should be doing in Washington: holding “shadow cabinet” meetings and regular press conferences explaining the threats posed by DOGE and the Trump administration’s gutting of government.  

That may help from a messaging perspective, but much more may be required. Tamayo wasn’t alone in suggesting that true progress on defending Social Security and stopping the Trump administration’s authoritarian dismantling of government might take something more forceful than calling members of Congress. A woman at the Fort Lauderdale event told O’Malley that Americans should prepare for widespread protests and boycotts. 

“To stop them — France is where I think we need to be looking towards,” she said. “They do general strikes all the time whenever the government comes for their benefits.”

O’Malley didn’t oppose the idea even as he insisted that pressure on Congress could bring an end to the DOGE madness. That, plus something as simple as talking to one’s neighbors, friends, and family — even if they’re Trump supporters — to inform them about the threats to Social Security. O’Malley told the crowd in Fort Lauderdale he had achieved a greater understanding of what drives Musk when the world’s richest man recently said that “the fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.” 

He said Musk believes that the men and women attending the events in Florida, like all retirees, are an “inefficiency” to be eliminated — a position that O’Malley argued is out of step with fundamental American values.  

“The greatness of our country is not measured by the power of our armies or by the vastness of our wealth, it is measured by the care and compassion we demonstrate for each other,” O’Malley said in Fort Lauderdale. 

After the event, O’Malley spent 30 minutes speaking with attendees before his bodyman gave him the three-minute warning. Then, it was into a rented Kia sedan and off to Palm Coast, three hours and 45 minutes away. With growing anger at Democratic Party leadership and progressive Americans looking for party leaders to push back against the Trump administration, it’s only natural to wonder whether O’Malley’s tour of Florida to save Social Security is the beginning of a long road that ends at the White House in 2029. 

“We’re primed to think of things in terms of electoral self-preservation,” he tells Rolling Stone. “But I’d rather not be having to do this. I’d rather be running Social Security.”

Even under Trump?

“Hell no — for an administration that isn’t trying to destroy it.”