Four people could soon be handed the job of redesigning your Social Security. You didn’t vote for any of them. Odds are you can’t name one.
That’s the setup behind a bill introduced in the Senate on July 14 called the PROMISE Act. On July 21, AARP came out swinging against it.
I’ve been writing about money since 1991, and I’ve watched Congress dodge this problem for most of those years. So I’m sympathetic to anyone trying to force the issue.
But how Congress fixes something matters as much as whether it fixes it. Here’s what’s actually in this bill.
1. The board has four members, and nobody elected any of them
The bill hands the drafting job to the Social Security Advisory Board, a panel Congress created in 1994.
It can seat up to seven members. Right now it has four, all congressional appointees, according to AARP. The presidential appointments are vacant.
So four people, appointed rather than elected, would write the first draft of a plan meant to keep Social Security solvent for the next 50 years.
2. Two of the four have spent their careers arguing opposite things
Look at who’s actually on this board.
Nancy Altman runs Social Security Works and has written books arguing the program isn’t going broke and should be expanded.
Jagadeesh Gokhale works at the Penn Wharton Budget Model and previously spent years as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He wrote a book proposing a different method for measuring the program’s solvency.
These two aren’t going to agree on lunch, let alone a 50-year overhaul. AARP says the bill gives the board just over a month to produce one.
Here’s a wrinkle I love, though. Altman was Alan Greenspan’s assistant on the 1983 commission — the last time Washington actually pulled this off. I was a brand-new CPA back then, watching it happen. She’s the only person in the room who’s done this before.
3. This board has never written a bill in its life
The advisory board’s job, as Congress defined it, is making recommendations to the president and lawmakers. Drafting legislation isn’t on the list.
AARP’s senior vice president for government affairs says the board has never done anything remotely like this.
That’s no insult to the four members. It’s a problem with handing a research panel a job it was never built for, on a stopwatch.
4. Committee votes become optional
Normally, a bill has to survive committee. Members vote it out, or it dies there.
Under this proposal, lawmakers could still hold hearings and offer amendments. But if committees don’t report the bill by Nov. 9, it moves straight to the House and Senate floors anyway.
That’s the part that should get your attention. Committee is where most bad ideas go to die.
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5. The whole debate gets a 100-hour clock
The bill limits which amendments lawmakers can offer and caps total consideration — debate plus votes on amendments — at 100 hours.
That’s about four days to rewrite a program that pays more than 70 million people.
In her July 21 letter, AARP’s Nancy LeaMond wrote that the group “strongly objects to fast-tracking Social Security changes through Congress.” Hard to argue with the math on that one.
6. It could land in a lame-duck session, pushed by lame ducks
If the bill hits the floor after Nov. 9, that’s a post-election lame-duck session. LeaMond’s letter argues departing members are unaccountable to voters at that point.
There’s a second layer here. Forbes’ Howard Gleckman pointed out that four of the Senate sponsors — Cassidy, Tillis, Cornyn and Durbin — are lame ducks themselves.
That’s “not exactly a leading indicator of future legislative strength,” as he put it. Ambitious legislation from people heading for the exit rarely goes anywhere.
7. The scary number depends on which fund you mean
You’ve probably seen both 2032 and 2034 in the headlines. Both are correct. They’re different funds.
The retirement trust fund, formally called Old-Age and Survivors Insurance, is projected to run dry in the fourth quarter of 2032, according to the 2026 trustees report. At that point, 78% of scheduled benefits would still be payable.
Combine it with the disability fund and depletion moves to the third quarter of 2034, with 83% payable.
Either way, insolvent doesn’t mean empty. Payroll taxes keep rolling in. Anyone telling you the checks stop entirely is selling something. If you want the dollar figures, we broke down what a cut would actually cost each type of beneficiary.
The case on the other side
I’m not going to pretend this bill has no argument behind it.
Sen. Dick Durbin’s point is that the longer Congress waits, the more brutal the eventual fix becomes. He’s right. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the Bipartisan Policy Center both back the bill.
And here’s the irony. Gleckman’s complaint about the PROMISE Act isn’t that it’s too fast. It’s that it’s too weak, since Congress can still water down whatever the board produces.
So AARP thinks it moves too fast, and a veteran budget analyst thinks it won’t move much at all. That should tell you how hard this problem is.
Worth remembering: The 1983 Greenspan Commission everyone holds up as the success story initially failed too. Its members deadlocked. A small group hammered out a deal only when the deadline got close enough to hurt.
What this means for your money
Nothing here is law. The PROMISE Act sits in the Senate Finance Committee, which is where the vast majority of bills go to expire without a sound.
So don’t reorganize your retirement around a bill that hasn’t passed. But don’t ignore the process either, because process is how the outcome gets decided.
Three things I’d actually do.
Don’t panic-claim. Grabbing benefits early to “get yours before they change it” is the single most expensive reaction to this news. I laid out reasons that thinking is wrong, and it’s worth separating fact from the myths that cost retirees real money.
Run the numbers on a reduced benefit. If your plan collapses under a 22% cut, it was never much of a plan. Here’s how to stress-test your retirement for exactly that.
Build what Congress can’t touch. Every dollar in your own accounts is a dollar no advisory board gets to vote on. Even the experts blow this, as I found out when I retired and hit five costly blunders myself.
I’ve watched Washington kick this can since Reagan was in office. It’ll get fixed eventually, because the political cost of not fixing it is unthinkable.
Just keep an eye on who’s holding the pen.
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