The Honorable Ron Wyden
221 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Adelita Grijalva
1203 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Senator Wyden and Representative Grijalva,
On behalf of the millions of members and supporters of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, I am writing to endorse your bill, the “Protection of Social Security Benefits Restoration Act of 2026”. Members of the National Committee come from all walks of life and every political persuasion. What unites them is their passion for protecting and strengthening Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the other programs that are so vitally important to older Americans.
As you know, since the inception of the Social Security program in 1935, the Social Security Act provided strong protections against loss of retirement income through the garnishment or attachment of Social Security benefits for the purpose of recovering debts owed by retirees. For decades, the law provided near iron-clad protection against impoverishment in old age due to debt collection. Unfortunately, in 1996 Congress enacted the Debt Collection Improvement Act, which authorized the garnishment of Social Security and other earned benefits for the purpose of collecting debts owed by seniors to the federal government. This Offset Program with Treasury was suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic but later restored by the Trump Administration.
Your legislation would repeal this legislation and restore the historic protections that once were provided by Social Security against the spectacle of impoverishment in old age. Social Security benefits are already modest, averaging just over $2,000 per month for a retired worker. More than half of seniors receive over half of their income from Social Security, and it provides at least 90 percent of income for more than one-in-five seniors, leaving millions of older Americans struggling to afford the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs, food, housing and transportation.
According to two Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reports at https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/201701_cfpb_OA-Student-Loan-Snapshot.pdf and https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/issue-spotlight-social-security-offsets-and-defaulted-student-loans/ consumers age 60 and older are the fastest growing age-segment of the student loan market, and the number of Social Security beneficiaries experiencing forced collection after default on these loans grew by more than 3,000 percent in fewer than 20 years. The count is likely to grow as the age of student loan borrowers trends older. Three out of four borrowers report their student debt is owed for a child’s and/or grandchild’s education. The total amount of Social Security benefits the Department of Education collected between 2001 and 2019 through the offset program increased from $16.2 million to $429.7 million. Despite the exponential increase in collections from Social Security, the majority of money the Department of Education has collected has been applied to interest and fees and has not affected borrowers’ principal amount owed.
Older borrowers tend to owe larger student loan balances, have more late and missed payments than a decade ago, and nearly 40 percent of student loan borrowers over age 65 are in default. More than 1 in 3 Social Security recipients with student loans are reliant on their Social Security payments to get by, resulting in a serious risk of falling into poverty as a result of forced collections, while existing minimum income protections fail to protect student loan borrowers with Social Security against financial hardship. Older consumers with outstanding student loans are more likely than those without outstanding student loans to report that they have skipped necessary health care needs such as prescription medicines, doctors’ visits, and dental care because they could not afford it. In 2014, for example, 39 percent of consumers age 60 and older with a student loan said that they skipped such care.
As many as eight in ten Social Security beneficiaries with loans in default may be eligible to suspend or reduce forced collections due to financial hardship. Yet these individuals are not accessing such relief because the Department of Education’s data matching process insufficiently identifies those who may be eligible. Most unfair of all, it is estimated that 1 in 5 Social Security beneficiaries may be eligible for loan forgiveness due to a disability, yet they have been unable to access the forgiveness they are entitled to. As a result, hundreds of thousands of older Americans are needlessly plunged into default on student loans that should already be forgiven.
By repealing the legislation that authorized garnishment of Social Security benefits to pay federal loans, your legislation would protect older borrowers from facing destitution due to debt collection on of federal loans. We endorse your initiative to prevent the garnishment of modest earned Social Security benefits that can inflict a real hardship on older Americans who have few, if any, other resources to fall back on.
We thank you again for your long history of working on behalf of America’s seniors and look forward to working with you on this important legislation.
Sincerely,
Max Richtman
President and CEO
