My plan to keep Social Security solvent for our senior citizens

During her recent testimony before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted what many of us have known all along. President Biden has no plan to keep Social Security solvent for our seniors. The President and officials in his administration like to parrot the talking point that they will never cut a penny from Social Security and accuse Republicans of targeting Americans’ hard-earned Social Security benefits. While they can repeat this lie over and over again until they’re blue in the face, they cannot change the perilous trajectory of Social Security with empty rhetoric and false promises. We need real action, not political posturing.

Here are the facts. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecasts that the Social Security Trust Fund – more officially known as the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund – will run out of sufficient funds by 2033 to pay Social Security benefits in full. In other words, without doing anything to address this impending crisis, Social Security beneficiaries will face anywhere between a 21% to a 25% cut to their monthly check in less than a decade. A reduction of this magnitude would be catastrophic, preventing vulnerable seniors from putting food on the table, buying lifesaving medications, and purchasing other basic necessities.

In 2023, more than 48 million Americans received Social Security benefits to the tune of $1.4 trillion – roughly 21% of the entire federal budget. As our birth rate fails to keep pace with a growing average lifespan, the federal government will be on the hook for additional Social Security obligations while our workforce – and thus the tax base – shrinks. This combination spells disaster for the long-term vitality of Social Security if we don’t begin to advance real legislative solutions that protect these benefits today and in the future.

While President Biden has no plan to protect Social Security, I do.

I introduced the Save Our Seniors Act to help protect the long-term solvency of Social Security by requiring the CBO to include an honest and accurate projection of Social Security’s financial health in its annual ten-year economic outlook. Under current law, the CBO assumes – when drafting reports and projections – that Social Security will remain solvent forever, which simply isn’t the case. In fact, it is completely misleading and dishonest – and it needs to change.

More specifically, my bill would ensure that a simple and easy-to-understand graph depicting the actual outlook for the OASDI Trust Fund is included in this annual outlook. Similar graphs exist in other Social Security related reports, like the Trustees Reports, but not in a document as widely viewed as the CBO’s outlook, which is used by members of Congress and economists to get a detailed look at the health of our nation’s economy and the federal budget. By directing more eyes and ears to this ticking time bomb, we can ensure that Congress takes action to keep Social Security fully funded while reinforcing the integrity of our fiscal foundation.

In conjunction with reforms to current law and budget reports, we must end reckless government spending that has fueled inflation and sent interest rates skyrocketing. Thanks to profligate spending, our national debt is increasing by $1 trillion about every 100 days and the CBO projects that our annual budget deficit will grow from $1.6 trillion this fiscal year to $2.6 trillion over the next decade. Our interest obligations to service our debt are also dramatically rising. In 2023, our net interest costs topped $659 billion, which is up $184 billion, or 39%, from 2022, and this fiscal year alone, the interest that we pay on our national debt will cost us over $1 trillion, and in less than a decade, our interest is projected to cost us $3 trillion every single year. As we are forced to spend more money to finance our interest payments with hikes in interest rates, we are left with fewer taxpayer dollars to fund important priorities like Social Security and Medicare. For the sake of our financial health and the long-term solvency of Social Security, getting our fiscal house in order and balancing our federal budget are non-negotiable.

Social Security’s imminent insolvency is not only alarming for folks who rely on their Social Security check, but also unacceptable for lawmakers who choose to ignore this looming crisis. Instead of sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that Social Security remains in strong financial health, my bill will make this crisis front-page news for lawmakers and the American people alike. Serving on the House Ways and Means Committee’s Social Security Subcommittee, I will continue to work to ensure that our seniors and workers receive the benefits that they deserve and have earned while strengthening our nation’s fiscal foundation.

This op-ed was originally published in the Northwest Iowa Review on June 17, 2024.