From The Hill:
Former Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Martin O’Malley violated the Hatch Act during an interview with a local news outlet in North Carolina last year, a U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) investigation found Friday. …
The complaint pointed to O’Malley’s seven-minute interview with WPTF Morning News based in Raleigh, N.C. …
The former Maryland governor then claimed he “certainly can’t tell anybody who to vote for, but I can tell you that the proposals that are coming from Donald Trump would quickly deplete Social Security, and we wouldn’t be able to pass it on to our kids as our grandparents passed it on to us.” …
The Office of Special Counsel wrote that the “only plausible conclusion to draw from Mr. O’Malley’s comments is that, while speaking in his capacity as SSA Commissioner, he explicitly told listeners that they must vote against President Trump to satisfy their responsibility to preserve Social Security.” …
This seems almost quaint considering what’s happened since but he wasn’t supposed to do it.
18 comments:
Witch Hunt!
But people can wear M*g* hats to work??
O’Malley is lucky DOGE doesn’t have any brains. If they counted how much time, effort and money was spent on his self-promotional videos published daily and staffers basically forced by SSA to watch, he’d be toast if not worse. But DOGE is spending all its resources combatting two calls out of two million that might be fraudulent.
Just waiting for the indictment…
Cabinet level secretaries were literally selling Teslas last month.
The Hatch Act is a dead letter.
I’d be far more interested in getting a report on Leland’s misconduct since he’s the one still actively employed at the agency.
Yet Leland Dudek is hailed as a hero? Talk about selective memory.
But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”
Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know.”
But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”
When is Leland Dudek being investigated?
“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)
At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”
O'Malley was the commissioner. He was supposed to be instructing employees on being careful not to break the Hatch Act. Instead he was breaking it himself. There should be punishment for this egregious breach of protocol.
I didn't think rules mattered anymore?
No one is above the law.
Maybe he should have just accepted a 400 million plane from the backers of Hama or sold Teslas out of Woodlawn or had a commercially sponsored Easter Egg hunt or used federal funds to bend State governments to his will or ... well you get it.
At it's heart, the Hatch Act is based on the ethical principle that we should not use our position as a government employee to influence political outcomes. So, as much as I respect O'Malley, it appears he violated the spirit of the law. But aren't there much more egregious ethical violations going on in the federal government right now? I'm more worried about what it means that Trump is openly accepting bribes from foreign countries, selling Teslas for Elon, and appointing incompetents to run Cabinet-level agencies. And don't get me started on Dudek. I was an OHO worker way down in the trenches, but when we were told we must send an email directly to OPM with our five weekly accomplishments, he shared his, and one of the things on the list was that he personally fired people. What kind of person puts that down as an "accomplishment"?
Is the public really worried about the Hatch Act, given the wildly inappropriate ethics issues and private profiteering underway by DOGE employees, Musk, Trump, and this entire administration? Hoping someone's keeping track and following the real story -- the money. This is a joke, and no one cares at this point.
Yes. O’Malley can’t be given a pass just because others break the law. If you were the president you’d just let everybody off because one other guy broke the law once.
Why is this a story?
“The only plausible conclusion to draw from Mr. O’Malley’s comments is that, while speaking in his capacity as SSA Commissioner, he explicitly told listeners that they must vote against President Trump to satisfy their responsibility to preserve Social Security,” according to OSC’s report.
Because O’Malley is NO longer in government, the agency said that it would not take any disciplinary action.
A little bothered by how little SSA employees seem to know about the Hatch Act (based on their comments above)
So you are saying if they were smart DOGE would have put a stop to O’Malley’s videos. Ha ha ha ha ha.
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