The Social Security Board of Trustees said last week that the program’s combined trust funds will run out of money in 2034 — one year earlier than was projected in 2024. Without a fix, the trustees’ report said, the venerable program may have to reduce retirement benefits by almost one-fourth in less than a decade.
Though Social Security counts over 73 million people as beneficiaries, the news went largely unremarked in Washington. And to be fair, there’s been a lot going on. But soon enough, Social Security will face a funding crisis — and President Donald Trump’s approach will only make matters worse.
Trump has plunged ahead with policy proposals that risk moving the depletion date closer.
First, a bit of a background: Social Security is (primarily) a pay-as-you-go system — payroll taxes on today’s workers fund benefits for today’s retirees. From 1983 — the last time the program’s finances were overhauled — until 2021, Social Security took in more than it paid out. Beginning that year, thanks to demographic changes, benefits exceeded revenues, and Social Security began drawing down its two trust funds, one for disability benefits and a much larger one for retiree and survivor benefits. The trust fund for retirement benefits is projected to be depleted in 2033, and drawing on the disability trust fund (which requires congressional approval) buys Social Security only an extra year.
The immediate cause of the depletion date’s moving forward was the Social Security Fairness Act, which eliminated provisions that reduced benefits for teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public workers who receive pensions. That law, which passed Congress with bipartisan majorities in both chambers, brought the depletion date forward by about six months. But the new law is just a fraction of the total shortfall — an average of about $330 billion per year over the next 75 years.
If nothing is done, retirement benefits won’t disappear entirely, but only 77% of those benefits would be payable, according to the trustees’ report. Any interruption or significant reduction in benefits would be catastrophic for millions of people. As of 2015, Social Security provided at least half the income of roughly 40% of retirees (and at least 90% of the income for 1 in 7 retirees).
What has the president done about this? Trump has plunged ahead with policy proposals that, as I wrote last fall, risk moving the depletion date closer. Mass deportations will reduce the workforce paying into Social Security (including undocumented immigrants, who paid billions in Social Security taxes and don’t receive benefits). If, as both the Federal Reserve and many experts fear, Trump’s tariff policies increase inflation, that would push up the program’s cost-of-living adjustments.
When Trump and his allies do talk about Social Security, they say they’re going after “waste, fraud and abuse.” In his address to Congress this year, Trump repeated claims about Social Security going to “millions and millions of dead people” — claims debunked by his own Social Security Administration. The SSA’s acting inspector general reported in February that overpayment of benefits averaged $3.4 billion per year for the last four years. For context, the cost of the entire program in 2024 was nearly $1.5 trillion.
Americans are unusually uniform in their views on Social Security cuts.
Furthermore, as Gopi Shad Goda and Lily Nevo of the Brookings Institution pointed out last week, “Social Security is already a lean operation”; 99.5 cents of every dollar that the program spends goes to beneficiaries. Even before the second Trump White House imposed deep staff cuts, the Social Security Administration had fewer employees and fewer field offices than in 2010. With wait times for claims already increasing, further cuts to the SSA would only worsen beneficiary service.
If “waste, fraud and abuse” can’t make ends meet, what do Republicans have to offer? If you guessed “cuts,” you’re right. Last spring, then-candidate Trump told CNBC “there is a lot you can do” to cut Social Security. A week later, the Republican Study Committee, which represents most of the House GOP caucus, released a budget that would raise the retirement age and reduce benefits for high earners (though, recognizing the politics at play, the RSC also said benefits would not change “for any senior in or near retirement”).
Speaking of politics, Americans are unusually uniform in their views on Social Security cuts, and they do not agree with Republican politicians. In a Pew Research poll taken last year, for instance, 79% of Americans (including 77% of Republicans) opposed any benefit reductions, and other polls find similarly strong opposition.
A “Blueprint for a Bipartisan Solution” from the Brookings Institution, for instance, would cut wealthier beneficiaries’ earnings, but it otherwise would achieve solvency through other methods, including raising the payroll tax cap, slightly increasing the payroll tax itself and (unlike the Trump administration) encouraging legal immigration.
And then there’s the Social Security Expansion Act, introduced by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., which would, in Warren’s words, “make the wealthiest Americans pay a fairer share.” That bill would apply the payroll tax on all income (including capital gains) above $250,000 a year. Not only would this proposal, according to an SSA analysis, keep the trust funds solvent, but Sanders and Warren’s bill would increase benefits by $200 a month.
“How did you go bankrupt?” one character asks another in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” The other replies, “Two ways: gradually and then suddenly.” Social Security won’t go bankrupt, but its funding shortfall is approaching in much the same fashion. And unless Trump acts with uncharacteristic sanity, the next president and the accompanying Congresses will have to clean up the mess he helped make.