On the 2024 campaign trail, President Donald Trump said, “I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare. We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.”
A year and a half later, the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary, Karen Glenn, put a number on the law that Trump signed. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut taxes across the board and handed people 65 and older a temporary deduction on top.
Over the decade through 2034, Glenn estimated, those cuts would cost Social Security $168.6 billion in lost revenue and move the retirement fund’s projected depletion date up one quarter, to late 2032.
How a tax cut reaches Social Security
Social Security does not run only on payroll taxes. A slice of its revenue comes from the income tax many retirees pay on their benefits, and that money goes straight back into the trust funds.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, made the 2017 income tax rates permanent and gave people 65 and older a temporary $6,000 deduction through 2028. Together, those changes shrink beneficiaries’ tax bills, so less revenue from taxing benefits flows back into the funds.
Glenn spelled this out in an August 2025 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. The retirement fund alone, formally the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund, is now projected to run dry in late 2032 rather than the first quarter of 2033.
Insolvent is not the same as empty
Once the fund’s reserves run out, Social Security can still pay whatever payroll taxes bring in that year. The 2026 trustees report puts that at 78% of scheduled retirement benefits, a shortfall of about 22%.
That gap is the problem, and estimates of its size differ.
A Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget analysis, published days before the June 2026 trustees report, modeled a 24% across-the-board cut. The Congressional Budget Office projects an average annual reduction of 28% from 2033 through 2036. Under the across-the-board scenarios that the CRFB and CBO use, current and future beneficiaries take the cut alike.
A 90-year-old collecting today would face the same percentage reduction as someone claiming next year.
Congress has stepped in before, most recently in 1983, when the fund was close to the edge. Fixing it again would mean changing taxes, benefits or financing, and lawmakers have not settled on how.
What it means for your check
A 24% cut would trim the average retiree’s monthly check by about $500, ranging from roughly $459 to $556 depending on the state. That is more than the typical retired household spends on groceries in a month, across a program that covers about 63 million people.
The instinct is to claim early and lock in a check before any cut arrives. It does not solve the problem. Claiming at 62 permanently reduces your monthly benefit by up to about 30% against a full retirement age of 67, and an across-the-board cut would still apply on top of that smaller amount.
The reduction is expected to hit as a percentage of whatever you have earned, so claiming early does not exempt you. It only lowers the base the percentage is taken from.
Consider diversifying your savings
One of the best ways to protect your savings is having money in different types of investments outside of Social Security benefits: ideally, ones that can go up when others are going down. For example, stocks tend to do poorly when inflation and interest rates are rising and there’s political turmoil brewing.
One investment that thrives in this scenario is gold. If this is something you are considering, it is important you deal with a trusted gold dealer with a long and proven track record of assisting clients.
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A forecast, not a verdict
The depletion date is a projection, and it has already moved more than once as new laws and fresh cost figures reshaped it. Avoiding it would require Congress to act before the projected 2032 depletion.
That does not make the number safe to ignore. The useful response is not to claim early, but instead to build a plan that can absorb a benefit Congress may trim, delay or shore up.
Understand the risk, and if you are not sure how much of your retirement should rest on it, you may want to consult a professional. If you have over $100,000 in savings, SmartAsset offers a free service that matches you to a vetted, fiduciary advisor bound to act in your best interests in under five minutes.
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