Republican Congressman Mark Alford has touted raising the retirement age to help cut federal government costs.
Speaking on Fox News, the Missouri representative said GOP members had recently sat down with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will head up the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] under Donald Trump, beginning in January, to explore ways “to cut our budget.”
“I think there’s a way, when people are living longer, they’re retiring later, then on the front end, we can move that retirement age back a little bit,” Alford said. The current full retirement age is 67 for those born in 1960 or later, and is the earliest age at which workers can begin getting Social Security benefits without any financial penalty for claiming early.
Alford said the “$36 trillion” national debt and its interest payments is “unsustainable,” with a whittling down of government spending required to “right the ship.”
“It’s going to mean cuts to the 24 percent of the discretionary spending that we have, and it’s also going to mean looking long-term at the front end of some programs like Social Security and Medicare,” he continued. Newsweek has contacted Alford’s office for comment via email outside of regular working hours.
However, raising the retirement age is unlikely to be popular and could reduce overall lifetime benefits for recipients, experts have told Newsweek.
Stephen Kates, principal financial analyst for RetireGuide.com, told Newsweek that raising the age at which people can claim benefits “is a backward way of simplifying reducing benefits.”
Kates said: “The earliest age someone can claim benefits is age 62, and this usually results in a [roughly] 30 percent decrease to their monthly benefits when compared to their expected benefits at full retirement age, which is 67 for people born after 1959. Increasing either the earliest or full retirement age would mean benefits would start later and be smaller than they are today for future retirees.”
“I do not believe that there is a constituency among the public for raising the retirement age,” Lisa Whitley, financial coach and planner at MoneyByLisa, told Newsweek. “The reality is that most already take a ‘discounted’ benefit by claiming before their full retirement age.
“Raising the FRA will only exacerbate the wealth gap between lower and higher income households. And even for those content to wait until FRA, the dream of a longer life expectancy is not a dream of working longer,” she continued.
Whitley said “other, less regressive, avenues available to Congress such as increasing or even eliminating the salary cap that is subject to FICA taxes” were better alternatives for federal budget cutting.
While Alford did not specify to what age the retirement threshold should be raised to, earlier this year, Rachel Greszler, senior research fellow at the Roe Institute, wrote in an article for the Heritage Foundation that the normal eligibility age for collecting Social Security retirement benefits should be raised to 70 to help address the funding cliff. The Republican Study Committee also published a budget in March 2024 that touted “modest” changes to the full retirement age.
Georgia Representative Richard McCormick also said last week that some “hard decisions” about mandatory funds for Social Security and Medicare are also on the table for the next Congress.
“We’re going to have some hard decisions,” McCormick said. “We have got to bring the Democrats in to talk about Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. There is hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved and we know how to do it; we just have to have the stomach to actually take those challenges on.”
DOGE cohead Ramaswamy recently said in an interview with Axios that, while the new department would look for opportunities to cut waste and fraud within Social Security and Medicare, large widespread cuts are unlikely as it is “a policy decision that belongs to the voters” and their representatives in Congress.
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