Former agency head on preserving Social Security
Social Security has been getting a lot of attention lately — and not the good kind.
The Social Security Administration was already at its smallest size in 50 years, and, now, Elon Musk's D.O.G.E. team has cut another 14% of its employees — 7,000 people — and eliminated phone service for new retirees. About 80,000 people a week will now have to drive to field offices.
The administration's website has repeatedly crashed, and the agency's own website puts the average phone wait time at about four hours.
"They've already pushed service to people back, nationally, to a pretty horrifying extent. And it's probably going to get worse in the next couple of months," said Michael Astrue, who served as commissioner of the Social Security Administration under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
"I'm getting calls now all the time, from people that can't get through on the telephone, from people that can't get appointments in the field offices. And it will, in some cases, delay benefits," Astrue shared. "This is a very tough thing for millions of Americans."
Referencing arguments by President Trump and Musk that prioritize trimming so-called "waste" at federal agencies like the Social Security Administration, Astrue said the idea of such excess on staff is "just not true" and added, "there is no data to support that claim."
"In fact, what experts worry about is not fraud, which the agency itself estimates is below one one-hundredth of a percent of its payouts," he continued. "It's the Social Security time bomb."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Social Security program in 1935, during the Great Depression, as a safety net to keep Americans out of poverty. Speaking about the initiative around the time of its inception, FDR told Americans that the measure would provide "at least some protection to 50 million of our citizens."
Roosevelt enacted a program where the government takes a piece out of every working American's paycheck and pays it to people reaching retirement age. Today, those checks average about $2,000 a month, and they're the primary source of income for 40% of older Americans.
"If Social Security were not here, you'd have about 22 million Americans who would be considered poor under the federal standards," said Astrue. "Some of them have no other income."
For years, this all worked pretty well. Social Security became America's biggest government program; today, it pays $1.6 trillion to 73 million retired and disabled Americans. But, when World War II ended, the baby boom happened, and all those babies got older. Now, there were a lot more people getting money from the system — and fewer people paying in.
And we started living longer. In FDR's day, the average age of death was 63. Now, it's 77, which is 14 more years of payments per person.
"You will hear a lot of people saying there will be no Social Security for you. And that's, in all likelihood, not true," Astrue said. "If Congress does nothing, which you have to accept is a real possibility these days, they'll get about 80% of what they get now. And that will be a significant hit for a lot of Americans. We're looking at 2033, 2034, when the bottom will drop out."
We've seen this moment coming for years, and all kinds of solutions have been kicked around. We could increase the tax a little. We could shrink the payments a little. We could delay the retirement age, now defined as 62. We could invest the money in the stock market instead of Treasury bills, but that's really risky. A market crash could wipe out the whole thing overnight.
Today, you and your employer each contribute about 6% of your paycheck to Social Security, up to a point. There's no tax on anything you make over $176,000. The income line grows.
So, here's another idea: Tax more of your earnings by raising that limit. Or even eliminate the limit. The taxable area grows.
Astrue expects it'll be some combination of those ideas.
"The likelihood is that Congress will panic right toward the deadline," he said. "There will be some cuts in benefits and there'll be some increase in taxation."
That deadline is eight years away, but Astrue says that the more immediate problem is the indiscriminate cutting.
"The way they're doing it, which is just, meat-axe cuts that are fairly random, is not the way. It's actually going to impair the agency's ability to make productive changes," said Astrue, who clarified that he is a Republican. "I voted for President Trump, so I'm all for change, but I'm all for intelligence change. And the people who are trying to drive this change don't understand the system. I don't think they care."
