After decades of procrastination, Congress is beginning to grapple with a Social Security shortfall set to slash benefit checks in six years unless lawmakers fix it.
But instead of discussing actual fixes, a Senate Finance Committee hearing Wednesday focused on how to kick-start the painful debate to come.
Many in Congress have argued for outsourcing the problem to a bipartisan commission or advisory board. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma) is among several lawmakers who have introduced bipartisan legislation to form such a panel.
But AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond told the Senate committee Wednesday to skip that step and get down to the difficult work of finding more money for a program that provides crucial financial support to more than 70 million Americans.
“The history of special commissions is littered with very good intentions and failed results,” LeaMond said. “They typically lack the clout, the power and the jurisdiction to do this hard work.”
Time is running short. The trust fund that helps pay the program’s benefits is projected to be depleted in 2032, before the end of the next president’s term. If that happens, benefits will be abruptly cut by 22 percent, according to the program’s latest report released this summer.
The stakes are huge not just for retirees and survivors who receive benefits but also for the local economies their Social Security income supports, and in turn for the nation’s financial well-being, analysts say. The partisan gap over what to do was apparent at Wednesday’s hearing.
Most Democrats say they want to tackle the shortfall by lifting the cap on wages subject to the Social Security payroll tax, and therefore collecting more in taxes. Many Republicans say that course would burden small businesses, not just the wealthy; some have suggested raising the retirement age, currently set at 67. President Donald Trump has warned his party against cutting “a single penny” from the program.
On Wednesday, several Republicans denied accusations from Democrats that they want to cut benefits. “Stop lying about people,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) said. “We want to preserve Social Security.”
Most budget experts say a successful fix will almost certainly require both moderating the growth of Social Security benefits and raising taxes — actions likely to provoke political blowback. By fiscal 2033, closing the shortfall for a single year would require $477 billion in cuts or fresh revenue, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center — and that sum would grow to more than $1 trillion per year by 2050, as much as the current budget for the Pentagon.
“There was once a time when the shortfall was of a size that it could realistically be fixed solely with additional revenue, solely by slowing benefit growth, or solely by adjusting eligibility ages,” said Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and former economic adviser to President George W. Bush. “That time is long past.”
Blahous argued for appointing a commission to do the hard work of coming up with a plan, drawing on a piece of history that hovered over Wednesday’s hearing: Social Security’s previous rescue in 1983. That deal emerged from a bipartisan commission chaired by Alan Greenspan, who later would become Federal Reserve chair, and it has become the template for reformers since. Blahous argued that the panel succeeded because it gave key lawmakers and the White House seats at the table while providing cover for politically painful policy decisions.
Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, agreed, telling senators that Congress has a long history of turning to commissions to solve hard fiscal problems.
“These commissions are really important not as a replacement for the committee’s work but to support it,” Goldwein said.
Goldwein was a senior staffer on a 2010 commission formed by President Barack Obama to address a soaring national debt in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The commission’s report, which aimed to reduce borrowing by $4 trillion over a decade, won the support of a majority of the commissioners, but it fell short of the supermajority needed to advance it to Congress.
Although what would come to be called the Simpson-Bowles commission “didn’t ultimately get to the finish line,” Goldwein said, it “sparked a bipartisan conversation.”
But AARP’s LeaMond, who adamantly opposes any cuts to Social Security benefits, argued against a commission, telling senators in written testimony that Greenspan’s commission essentially deadlocked. The real deal in 1983 emerged from private negotiations among party leaders and President Ronald Reagan, she said.
Rebecca Vallas, chief executive of the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI), pressed a related point. “Any process to shape the future of a program as important as Social Security should strengthen, not weaken, the connection between Congress and the will of the people it serves,” Vallas said. “A process that limits public debate or makes it easier for elected officials to distance themselves from the outcome risks doing the opposite.”
Lost in the arguments, Vallas said, is that the public is not nearly as divided as Washington’s stalemate suggests. In a survey of more than 2,200 adults, 85 percent said they would rather raise taxes than cut Social Security benefits, a preference that held across party lines, income levels and generations, according to research conducted in 2024 on behalf of the NASI, AARP, the National Institute on Retirement Security and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The most popular option was lifting the cap on payroll taxes, the threshold after which workers no longer pay into Social Security. This year, earnings above $184,500 are not subject to the tax, which means a huge chunk of income is exempt for highly compensated workers. Benefits are also capped, and part of the political appeal of the program has long been the perception that recipients get from it what they contributed.
Policymakers have previously considered breaking that link, so the well-off provide more to shore up the program without receiving an increase in benefits. Blahous warned senators against severing that connection. He said it’s the reason that “Social Security benefits are so reliable and that Americans do not regard them as welfare.”
“We could have a social security system, but a very different one, with benefit levels disconnected from individual contributions,” Blahous said. But “Social Security’s bipartisan advisory councils for decades have repeatedly warned: Do not let that happen.”
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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