Eight years before Martin O’Malley was tapped to manage Social Security, he 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.
“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.
Now, nearly a decade after a distant third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses ended his presidential hopes, Social Security is even closer to crisis — and O’Malley has been nominated by President Joe Biden to lead the agency that runs it.
Social Security pays benefits to roughly 70 million people and is financed by payroll taxes. But expenses have exceeded revenues, and the trust fund that’s used to fill the gap will be unable to pay full benefits in about 10 years, according to an annual report released in March.
As governor from 2007 to 2015 and Baltimore mayor before that, O’Malley has experience reducing benefits to preserve the long-term viability of a retirement system.
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 would eliminate its unfunded liability over time.
As a candidate on a bigger stage a few years later, O’Malley’s pitch went in a different direction.
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 that he would not have authority to change as head of the Social Security Administration, a post that will require confirmation by the U.S. Senate.
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 life span. 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 but are not under the purview of Social Security.
The top selling-point of O’Malley’s plan was to make income above $250,000 subject to the payroll tax. Current law allows wages only to a certain amount subject to the tax — in 2015, when O’Malley proposed it, that was $118,500; in 2023 it is $160,200.
His initiatives also included increasing a special minimum benefit for low-wage-earners and using a different measure of inflation to adjust benefits for the elderly.