(NewsNation) — Former President Joe Biden returned to the stage Tuesday and warned that the Trump administration has put Americans’ retirement benefits at risk.
“They’ve taken a hatchet to the Social Security Administration,” Biden said.
The former president suggested that the Trump administration wants to “wreck” Social Security so they can “rob it.”
NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo questioned that strategy and pointed out that while Trump has messed with the program wrongly — and spread misinformation about it — the president has no plans to cut benefits.
“Cutting benefits would be politically perilous, and Trump knows it,” Cuomo said Tuesday. “Don’t trot out the ultimate senior citizen to say otherwise.”
Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, doesn’t think it’s hyperbole to say Trump and his team, particularly Elon Musk, have put the program at risk.
“They’ve already sacked 7,000 workers at Social Security, it’s impossible to get through on the phones,” Raskin told Cuomo on Tuesday.
He added: “Your Social Security is not safe with these guys in charge.”
O’Malley: Social Security is being ‘dismantled’ before our eyes
Martin O’Malley, former commissioner of the Social Security Administration under Biden, says the agency is currently being “dismantled, deconstructed and destroyed before our very eyes.”
“I do believe that the DOGE people and co-president Musk have already taken 90% of the actions necessary to crater this agency into a collapse that will interrupt benefits,” O’Malley told NewsNation’s Leland Vittert on Tuesday.
Trump has repeatedly said he won’t touch Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits, but O’Malley thinks Americans have a “right to be concerned.”