Martin O’Malley, commissioner of the Social Security Administration, will resign from his position at the end of the month.

O’Malley announced his resignation Monday while sharing his plans to seek a nomination for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

“We must connect our party with the most important place in America — the kitchen table of every family’s home,” O’Malley wrote in a post on X announcing his resignation.

The New York Times first reported O’Malley’s planned resignation, which will take effect Nov. 29.

O’Malley held the top position at SSA for just under a year. President Joe Biden nominated O’Malley as SSA commissioner in July 2023, and the Senate confirmed him to the role in December 2023. Prior to leading SSA, O’Malley served as the governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore. He also unsuccessfully ran as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016.

During O’Malley’s tenure at SSA, he focused largely on making improvements to wait times on the 1-800 number and for initial disability determinations, as well as rooting out underpayments and overpayments in Social Security.

Earlier this year, SSA launched a “Security Stat” initiative, focusing on addressing customer experience challenges for the agency using data-driven decision making. Over the past several months, O’Malley has held regular “Security Stat” meetings to review performance metrics and identify actions for progressing toward better customer service.

O’Malley, however, has also warned that without more resources and support, the SSA workforce will struggle with rising employee workloads as the agency faces a record high number of beneficiaries and historically low agency staffing.

“We have now reduced the wait times on the 800 number by 50%,” O’Malley told Senate lawmakers in September. “For the first time in recent memory, we have cleared more cases every week for 12 weeks in a row in the initial disability determinations than have been filed on the front end of that process. And we have reduced the appellate level hearing backlog to a 30-year low. But make no mistake about it, these recent gains will be short lived without your immediate attention and support.”

O’Malley is scheduled to testify before the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday about the state of SSA’s budget. During that hearing — which he said is the first one before the appropriations committee in a decade — O’Malley is expected to tell lawmakers that the agency’s lowest staffing levels in 50 years have caused “severe damage” to how SSA serves citizens.

“The result of the growing gap between record high numbers of customers and 50-year lows in staffing is this: the customer service that Americans have already paid for has been allowed to decline to crisis-level lows,” he stated in his written testimony. “We can restore the excellent customer service that you and your constituents expect and demand from Social Security — but only if you in Congress do your part. The fiscal 2025 president’s budget funding level would be a huge step in the right direction towards providing the American people with a level of customer service for which they’ve already paid, but have in recent years consistently been denied.”

In his first few months at the Social Security Administration, O’Malley also traveled to various SSA offices across the country to meet with agency employees on what he described as a “listening tour.”

And in 2024, for the first time in years, SSA employees’ results on engagement, satisfaction and agency leadership all trended positively in the results of the 2024 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.

The agency received a 70% response rate on the 2024 FEVS, in part due to an agency-wide marketing campaign. O’Malley led the campaign to encourage more employees to fill out the survey.

In another recent update, SSA announced on Nov. 13 that the agency is moving away from walk-in customers at field offices and toward mainly scheduled appointments. Starting in January 2025, SSA will require most customers to make appointments before visiting a field office.

The agency said it will make some exceptions for walk-ins for those who are either unable or unwilling to make an appointment, or who otherwise require special attention. That includes, for instance, members of vulnerable populations such as military members and people with terminal illnesses.

Already, close to 400 Social Security field offices moved to appointment-based services during 2024.

“These offices have seen significant improvements in wait times due to more efficient and helpful visitor experiences and increases in the number of customers able to complete their business online,” SSA wrote in a Nov. 13 announcement. “As a reminder, many of our services can be provided via phone with an appointment and do not require a customer to walk into an office for service.”

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