US President Donald Trump points as he boards the new Air Force One, a plane gifted by the Qatari government, for a trip to San Antonio, Texas, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, US, October 7, 2026.
President Donald Trump repeatedly promised during his three campaigns that he would not touch Social Security. As a conservative commentator pointed out on Wednesday, however, he seems prepared to break that pledge.
"Peculiar line from Trump, who ran explicitly on not touching social security and now invites attacks that he may try to," noted The Bulwark's Sam Stein on Wednesday.
He referred to a moment in Trump's press conference the same day when he said, "I wanted to ride with Social Security being fully invested in the stock market in the first month of my first year, so 2016."
The president added, "I was met with tremendous criticism by the Democrats and some Republicans. I wanted to do it so badly."
Social Security currently faces a funding shortfall, yet even many of Trump's fellow Republicans balk at the idea of modifying a program that is widely popular and on which over 71 million Americans depend (out of roughly 350 million in the total population).
Speaking with AlterNet in August, President Joe Biden's Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley warned that Trump's signature economic legislation — the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill — has accelerated the agency's problems rather than ameliorating them.
"His policies have certainly accelerated the depletion date by a year," O'Malley explained. "At the end of President [Joe] Biden's administration, that date had actually been pushed further into the future by a year. So there you go — a net swing of two years. That's what his policies have done to make the situation more imminent and worse."
He added, "Having said that, the damage he's done to the trust fund and the damage he's done to customer service at the agency and its operations are both solvable problems — but he doesn't appear to be in a mode to solve them. He appears to be in a mode of wanting to privatize Social Security."
O'Malley added that the Trump administration has used its economic programs as a sneaky way of privatizing the Social Security fund.
"Treasury Secretary Bessent said that those Trump accounts — which were ostensibly wedged into that 'big, ugly' or 'beautiful' bill, depending on how you look at it — were set up as their backdoor way of privatizing Social Security," O'Malley said. "He's said this himself, on the record. You can look it up. It's not just Max saying it or imagining some motive — Bessent stated it out loud: this is their backdoor way of privatizing Social Security."
He also expressed deep skepticism about the impact of privatizing the fund.
"And let's keep in mind, in all of this, that Wall Street and cryptocurrency are gambles," O'Malley told AlterNet. "Social Security is a sacred trust backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. Wall Street is a gamble; Social Security is a guarantee — a guarantee that has been there without fail every month for 91 years."
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