Republicans should reform Social Security. Do they have the stomach for it? | Opinion
Cuts to Social Security are unavoidable. Republicans have a chance to do it the right way.
Elon Musk has been dominating headlines as a result of his efforts to reduce government spending. However, little attention has been paid to how little is actually being saved against the budget deficit through his proposed slashes.
To this point, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency claims to have saved $65 billion by canceling contracts and firing employees, though outside sources have alerted math problems with how much DOGE has actually saved.
The true number is likely to be somewhere in between, but regardless of where it shakes out to be, actions have hardly made a dent in our budget deficit. If Musk and Trump really want to help the problem, they should urge Congress to reform Social Security for any lasting fix.
DOGE savings are nothing compared with entitlement spending
Our federal government has produced a budget surplus just four times in the past 50 years, and not once since 2001. In each of the last five budgets, deficits have totaled more than $1 trillion.
What DOGE is doing is better than nothing when it comes to the deficit, but Musk’s actions amount to scoring culture war points over meaningful and lasting budget cuts. That only comes through legislation.
The surefire way to get the budget back into a surplus would be to slash entitlement programs, but Trump has promised to leave them untouched.
Social Security and Medicare are the two largest individual spending categories for our federal government, and combine to make up 36% of federal spending. While Republicans' budget proposal does include much-needed cuts to Medicaid, and potentially Medicare, nobody is seriously considering reforms to retirement benefits.
Social Security is on track to become insolvent in 2035, meaning that without reforms, the fund will be unable to pay out full benefits beyond that point. Without action, reaching 2035 would result in an immediate 17% drop in benefits.
I don’t blame Congress. It's a losing action. Taking away retirement benefits that people have already paid into would mean certain electoral defeat in the coming election cycles for the party that did so. However, it's a necessary evil, and doing so is the simplest way to reach a budget surplus.
Ironically, Trump is the perfect president to actually address the deficit. He’s a disruptor who is ineligible for reelection in 2028. He has no reason to not lead the effort to slash entitlements personally, even if it would likely harm GOP prospects for the next election cycle.
Republicans have the chance to seriously work on reforms, but instead they are obsessing over culture war budget cuts that make little progress against the deficit. The House GOP surprisingly has made swift progress on budget proposals, but these cuts are in the interest of extending Trump's first term tax cuts, set to expire this year, rather than actually make progress against the deficit.
Social Security is outdated as it is, reform is needed soon
The average American collects far more in benefits than they ever contributed in payroll taxes. Social Security is essentially a program in which current workers subsidize the retirement benefits for those already retired.
Young people like myself are paying to subsidize the retirements of America's wealthiest generation, knowing full well our benefits are likely to be slashed significantly or disappear by the time we retire. America's youth ought to take an interest in Social Security being reformed for our own sake.
Social Security has been running a deficit since 2010. Since then, the program has been operating by eating into its own trust fund, built from funding surpluses until that point.
The generosity of Social Security worked when birth rates were high, but declining birth rates have led to an older population, meaning more collecting benefits and less paying into them.
Social Security is expected to run $4.1 trillion in deficits by the time it becomes insolvent in 2035, stressing the need for reform now rather than later.
Congress has a number of options in front of it, including cutting benefits, raising payroll taxes to pay for the solution or raising the age of retirement. None is politically convenient, but they are all necessary for the program to even continue functioning.
Per usual, however, Congress is not incentivized to act to solve the issue, meaning that the likely outcome will be time running out and benefits being reduced. If lawmakers do nothing, benefits will be cut automatically by nearly a fifth in 2035.
Congressional inaction on Social Security means that the federal budget will likely continue to run deficits, and the program will still have to slash benefits by 2035. Neither party wants to take the blame for cutting benefits, even for the benefit of a flawed system. But Republicans have an opportunity to fix things.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for Paste BN and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.