Former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley is in Iowa, campaigning with Democrats running for the U.S. Senate and in Iowa’s second congressional district.
O’Malley, who led the agency during the Biden Administration, said in Iowa’s U.S. Senate race, there’s no bigger difference between Democrat Josh Turek and Republican Ashley Hinson than on Social Security. “I believe that the contrast, the differences between the two are going to become more and more clear to more and more Iowans,” O’Malley told reporters after an event in Des Moines.
Turek supports raising the limit on how much income is subject to Social Security taxes, to stabilize the system beyond 2032. “I want to make sure that Social Security’s protected,” Turek told reporters. “I want to take the cap off to make sure that billionaires are paying their fair share.”
Turek and O’Malley are criticizing a vote Hinson took in 2024 to cut Social Security’s budget by $452 million. Hinson’s campaign has said the 4% reduction was to cut excessive administrative costs and overhead in the agency. O’Malley and Turek spoke at a Des Moines retirement community this morning. O’Malley told the crowd of about 100 that while he was Social Security’s commissioner, he focused on bolstering staff to reduce wait times, but since 2025 about 12 percent of the Social Security Administration’s staff has been forced to retire early or leave. “When you call the 1-800 number, I mean you’d better dig in for a long wait, right?” O’Malley asked.
Turek began his remarks by promising the crowd he’d vote to get rid of the cap that applies Social Security taxes to the first 184-thousand dollars a person earns in a year. “It is absolutely ridiculous that individuals like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos pay Social Security tax for the first few minutes of the year,” Turek said, “but we have teachers and police officers and nurses paying year round.”
O’Malley is campaigning in Cedar Rapids this afternoon with Lindsay James, the Democrat running for Iowa’s second congressional district seat. O’Malley told reporters Iowa Democrats have nominated candidates for the General Election that represent a new generation of leaders, “which so many of us — young, old, middle aged, have been yearning for, so I think this is the most excited I can recall Iowans being about the Democratic ticket in a long, long time.”
O’Malley, who served two terms as governor of Maryland, ran for president in 2016 and held 173 public campaign events in the state before the Iowa Democratic Party’s Caucuses. He finished a distant third behind Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.