In a matter of weeks, the Republican Party will control the presidency and both houses of Congress (not to mention the Supreme Court). Arguably, the last time the party of the right felt this confident about its grip on government was in 2004, when George W. Bush was reelected following his alleged military triumph in Iraq, and the GOP held on to leadership on Capitol Hill.

Incoming Senate majority leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is saying publicly that if the United States is to reduce its ballooning national debt, Congress will have to look at “solutions” that make “these programs sustainable:” GOP code for cutting benefits under Social Security and Medicare. Early this month, Elon Musk, one of Trump’s closest advisors, raised alarms when he amplified a thread on Twitter in which Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) branded Social Security as “a classic bait-and-switch,” “an outdated, mismanaged system,” and lamented that the payroll taxes that fund it hadn’t simply gone into private investment accounts. ­Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s fellow billionaire and his co-chair of the Department of Government ­Efficiency (DOGE), the grandly named think-tank the two set up to find ways to slash the federal government, has also mused about breaking up Social Security and turning it into private investments. 

Trump himself, in a book he wrote in 2000, slammed Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and enthused “privatization would be good for all of us.” Since then he’s been cagier, and he defeated his Republican primary challengers in 2016 in part by telling them they were crazy for wanting to mess with such a popular program. The only concrete proposal he made on the campaign trail this year regarding Social Security was to eliminate the taxes that retirees pay on their benefits, a change that would mostly help more affluent households and that would weaken the program’s finances.

But as with so many other matters, he left himself some wiggle room. 

“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” he said in a campaign video that was still posted to his website this month. But then he continued, “to pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree.”

Lifeline

That leaves tens of millions of workers and their survivors, retirees, and the disabled sitting on a knife edge, waiting to see what the mercurial incoming president and his grab bag of right-wing advisors opt to do with the most successful social-equity and poverty-reduction program in U.S. history.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate how vital Social Security is to working people in the United States. As of last year, some 183 million active workers were paying payroll taxes into the system, according to the ­Social Security trustees. The combined Social Security and Disability Insurance programs paid benefits to 53 million retired workers and their dependents, six million survivors of deceased workers, and nine million disabled workers and their dependents.

Social Security used to be part of what retirement experts called the “three-legged stool” of old-age provision in the United States, along with personal savings and employer-sponsored pensions. Not so much today. Pensions, except in the public sector, are disappearing, replaced — if they are replaced — by 401(k) savings plans that are invested in stocks and other securities, rising and falling with the markets. 

As the costs of housing, healthcare and education have continued to swell, personal savings are disappearing too. Almost 40 million ­working-age households — 45% of the total — have no dedicated retirement account, and 62% of working households aged 55–64 have saved less than the equivalent of one year’s income: not even remotely what they would need to maintain their living standard after they retire. 

According to some estimates, Social Security replaces much less of people’s working income today than it did in 1983, which was the last time the program was significantly revamped. Nevertheless, retirees today are more dependent on it than they were then because of the shifts in the economy that have made it harder for them to save or earn pension benefits on their own.

None of this is very persuasive to the right, which has branded ­Social Security as socialism and a misuse of money from the time it became law during the New Deal. But assaulting it frontally has never been very popular. Republican politicians have been more successful when they attack it obliquely, professing they support it and only want to make sure it remains fiscally solid. 

Social Security has built up a large trust fund over the years, but by 2035, the trustees forecast the trust fund will be tapped out; the only funds available will be the payroll taxes coming in each year, which will cover just 83% of projected benefits. By law, benefits will have to be cut back unless Congress devises a way to make up the shortfall. Given the economic realities U.S. workers face — and the popularity of the program — that wouldn’t be acceptable. But this also creates possibilities for ­Social Security’s enemies.

Raising payroll taxes to reduce the funding deficit is out. Republicans don’t raise taxes. Instead, for decades, they have argued for tweaking the formula used to determine benefit payments to make them less generous, particularly for upper-income workers, while leaving them intact for current retirees and those nearing retirement age. That, theore­tically, will give younger workers time to catch up by saving more. This is essentially what the House Republican Study Committee is calling for in its 2025 budget proposal.

There are three serious problems with this, critics point out. First, immunizing current retirees and older workers from benefit cuts would mean deeper cuts for late retirees (the Baby-Boomer age group now leaving the workforce is the largest in the nation’s history). Second, those later retirees are likely to be more dependent on Social Security, not less. Third, and once again, the public would punish anyone who tried to force through the cuts.

What Happens Next

How to get around these problems? The answer, Republican congressional leaders have known for years, is to peel off some centrist Democrats who accept their arguments, and persuade them to “walk off the cliff together.” With the fingerprints of both parties on a Social Security “rescue” plan, no individual lawmaker would have to pay the price. Congress could pass a law setting up a bipartisan commission that would craft a Social Security “reform” proposal and require in the law that Congress “fast track” a vote on that proposal with minimal discussion and debate. In its budget proposal, this is what the Republican Study Committee signals it would like to see happen.

Nancy Altman, president of Social ­Security Works, a Washington advocacy group, has been studying and working on program issues for decades. “A vote for a fast-track commission is a vote to cut Social Security,” she says.

Slashing benefits for upper-income workers, Altman points out, would undermine the cross-class social solidarity Social Security was meant to foster. It wouldn’t go very far toward improving the funding picture; deeper cuts for less affluent households would still be needed.

Social Security Works and other advocacy groups, many of which are aligned with the labor movement, have made some progress “immunizing” congressional Democrats against the fast-track commission idea, ­Altman says, but some centrists, like Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with the Democrats, have refused to rule it out. 

Altman hopes no such proposal comes up in the second Trump administration’s early weeks or possibly months. Trump himself wants to sign an ­immigration-restriction bill right away, and the Republican leadership is laser-focused on extending and expanding their regressive 2017 tax cuts. The only way to do the latter is through the reconciliation procedure, under which amendments to Social Security would be off the table.

If Thune, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)––or his successor––and their troops can get their priority items passed quickly, however, they may then decide to take up Social ­Security behind closed doors. Whether Democrats would go along is unlikely but not out of the question.

“A lot will depend on the message they took from the election,” Altman observes. If Democrats are feeling they have to show willingness to compromise, they may go along with the fast-track commission and push it through. If not, a more optimistic scenario might be realistic.”

For years progressive Democrats, notably Bernie Sanders and Rep. John Larson (D-CT), have been pushing their own ideas for fixing Social Security’s funding problems while expanding the program to better meet the needs of today’s hard-pressed workers. Larson’s latest version of his bill, Social ­Security 2100: A Sacred Trust, would raise benefits by 2% across the board for all beneficiaries, along with other improvements, such as caregiver tax credits for people taking time out to care for children or other dependents. It would raise payroll taxes slightly overall and for the first time apply the tax to personal income above $400,000 a year. The net result would be to cut the system’s funding gap in half over the next 75 years.

Another bill, introduced in 2022 by Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter DeFazio ­(D-Ore.), would improve benefits while applying payroll tax to all income over $250,000, including capital gains. That would address Social Security’s two great underlying problems. Wage growth has stagnated in the United States since the early 1980s, which is why payroll taxes produce less revenue than they used to. This is partly because of the collapse of good-paying jobs for the working class but also because wealthy Americans get more of their income from investments — capital gains — than previously. Sanders and DeFazio’s bill would correct much of this imbalance.

Both bills have attracted a healthy group of cosponsors. Yet the Democratic leadership has thus far been reluctant to introduce any such proposals. When Nancy Pelosi was speaker, she balked, not wanting to be seen as supporting a tax increase.

The best outcome, Altman argues, would be for the Democrats to hold the line against any Republican initiative this year, with progressives calling out waverers in their ranks. Then, if the Democrats retake the House in 2026, they could move on a version of the Larson bill, daring the Republicans to vote against it. If it passed it would be unlikely to prevail in the Senate, but nevertheless could change the political dynamic. 

“It would put such a squeeze on the ­Republicans. It would be amazing,” Altman says.

What are the chances? Reportedly, ­Larson is close to Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Pelosi’s successor as speaker, and has spoken with him about Social Security 2100. 

A tantalizing prospect. But first the ­Democrats would have to stand firm.

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