Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley has been warning for weeks that social security checks are at risk due to actions by the Trump administration.

As the president’s 100th day in office approaches on Tuesday, O’Malley still sees disruptions on the horizon.

O’Malley, who led the Social Security Administration during the final year of President Biden’s term, said we are already seeing dings to customer service.

“You’ve seen now all of the timeliness indicators, you know the time to get an appointment, the time to answer the phone, the time to process a claim, all of those that had been going in a much much better direction last year, you’ve seen all of them reverse,” O’Malley said. “They’re all starting to spike in the wrong direction.”

The SSA has plans to lay off about 12 percent of its workforce, or 7,000 jobs.

Appearing on WYPR’s Midday on Monday, O’Malley worried that soon there won’t be many people left at Social Security who know how to run its 60 year old computer system.

“We’re seeing an exodus of more staffers in a shorter period of time than you ever have before, including for the first time ever cutting in half the people that maintain those old systems,” O’Malley said.

DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, reportedly plans to upgrade the computer system within months. Experts say it will take a massive effort to shift more than 65 million social security recipients to a new system.

O’Malley said while he hopes that is a success and the system doesn’t crash, so far what he’s seeing from DOGE is bumbling incompetence.

“We know that their backgrounds are inclined to believe that you just have to let legacy systems crash so that then people have no choice but to go to a new system,” O’Malley said.