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, says in Iowa’s U-S Senate race, there’s no bigger difference between Democrat Josh Turek and Republican Ashley Hinson than on Social Security.
Turek supports raising the limit on how much income is subject to Social Security taxes, to stabilize the system beyond 2032.
Turek and O’Malley are criticizing a vote Hinson took in 2024 to cut Social Security’s budget by 452 million dollars. Hinson’s campaign has said the four percent reduction was to cut excessive administrative costs and overhead in the agency. O’Malley and Turek spoke at a Des Moines retirement community this (Wednesday) morning. O’Malley told the crowd 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.
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.
O’Malley is campaigning in Cedar Rapids this (Wednesday) afternoon with Lindsay James, the Democrat running for Iowa’s second congressional district seat. O’Malley says Iowa Democrats have nominated candidates for the General Election that represent a new generation of leaders.
O’Malley 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.
