Statement by Max Richtmann
President and CEO
National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
House Committee on the Budget
Field Hearing on America’s Fiscal Future: Examining the Need for a Fiscal Commission
Monday September 21, 2026
On behalf of the millions of members and supporters of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, I submit the following for the record of the House Budget Committee’s field hearing on America’s Fiscal Future: Examining the Need for a Fiscal Commission. The National Committee is a grassroots advocacy and educational organization, and our members 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.
With the depletion date for Social Security’s and Medicare Part A Hospital Insurance Trust Funds rapidly approaching, it is imperative that Congress begin a methodical and public exploration of Social Security and Medicare’s finances, with particular attention to preserving and strengthening these landmark programs that are so important to our Nation. Developing and enacting legislation on issues important to the American people is the job of Congress. Voters placed their trust in you and elected you to do your job. Fast-track Commissions are nothing more than tools that allow Congress to outsource your responsibilities to unelected individuals who are not accountable to your constituents. Let me make our position clear: Voting for a commission to tackle Social Security and Medicare’s finances is a vote to cut benefits, pure and simple. Hiding behind a Commission to ‘suggest’ these cuts will not go unnoticed by the American public.
For the reasons we have publicly stated over many years, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare strongly believes the only appropriate course of action is for this critical legislation to be considered by Congress through regular order: introduction of legislation, a series of hearings by the committees of jurisdiction, and public opportunities to offer and vote on amendments, with ample time for the American people to consider and comment on the proposed legislation. Anything less is a disservice to the public, and represents a smoke-screen behind which opponents of Social Security and Medicare could enact cuts to workers’ earned benefits that are overwhelmingly opposed by the American people, while limiting political accountability.
Every single commission bill introduced into this Congress shares features that clearly undermine the trust Americans have placed in their representatives to preserve and strengthen Social Security and Medicare. The Fiscal Commission Act (S. 4012), for example, not only establishes a commission, but the legislation would place Social Security and Medicare inside a fiscal commission aimed at reducing deficits and the entire national debt. Social Security is a self-financed system that does not contribute a penny to the national debt, and Congress should not put it in the crosshairs of unrelated budget debates. Under this bill, any approved package of recommendations would be fast-tracked in Congress, with only five days for committee consideration and sharply limited floor debate. Most troubling, no amendments would be permitted at any point. Members would be asked to cast an up-or-down vote on the entire debt-reduction package as a whole, even if that package included cuts to Social Security or Medicare. This process would significantly limit Members’ ability to scrutinize, debate, amend, or improve legislation affecting the foundation of retirement security in the country, and virtually no opportunity for the public to make their views on the legislation known.
The Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026 (H.R. 9187) is focused only on Social Security rather than the entire national debt, but it also includes all of the objectionable fast-track procedures that allow Congress to outsource its responsibility to develop Social Security legislation to a special commission whose package would then receive privileged consideration. As with the previous bill, this commission’s recommendations would be fast-tracked in Congress, in this case with only three days for committee consideration and sharply limited floor debate. This bill also prohibits any amendments at any point.
Finally, the Protecting Retirement Opportunities and Maintaining Income Security for Everyone (PROMISE) Act, (S. 4979), currently only introduced in the Senate, would require an unelected, four-member Advisory Board to put together a 50- year solvency plan in just over a month, with little time for deliberation and limited public input. Any bipartisan pair of members of Congress could force votes on plans of their own in just a few weeks. And while we appreciate the fact that the legislation allows input by the committees of jurisdiction, and permits alternatives to be proposed, the extremely abbreviated timeline within which these actions could occur makes these options effectively meaningless. As a final insult, the bill sets up fast-tracked floor debates and votes in the lame-duck session of Congress, just after the November elections, when many departing Members who are completely unaccountable to voters will be casting votes.
Commissions as mechanisms for reaching consensus between divergent policy views and fast-tracking their recommendations through Congress have a long history of failure. Two prime examples of failed commissions include the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, or the so-called Bowles-Simpson Commission, and the so-called Supercommittee. Neither produced recommendations that received the supermajority of votes needed for the proposals to be fast-tracked through Congress, and appropriately so, as they included deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare which were extremely unpopular with the public. Attempting to “fix” the structure of potential future commissions by circumventing the public through establishing lower thresholds for the number of votes needed or other mechanisms is not only a disservice to the people you represent, but only will serve to undermine the acceptability of any recommendations such a commission might advance.
One successful fast-track Commission, the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission, has been identified by some proponents as a model by which Social Security changes should be considered. The BRAC Commission was designed for an entirely different purpose, however. Over the years, pork-barrel politics had led to numerous outdated or no longer necessary military installations scattered throughout the country. Because these bases provided economic benefits to the surrounding areas, they had become virtually impossible to close, even if they no longer benefited the nation as a whole. A special process was adopted to facilitate the closure of these bases as a way to better utilize federal funds and improve military readiness.
Unlike superfluous military facilities, Social Security and Medicare are not parochial problems that can be fixed by rolling over objections by those nearby who benefit from the economic activity for the greater good of the country. Social Security is a national earned benefit program that affects every single American citizen throughout their entire lives, and every American has a major stake in its future. Medicare gives older adults and people with disabilities reliable health coverage because, before it existed, many private insurance companies wouldn’t cover them. The United States effectively acts as Trustee for the contributions American workers make with each and every paycheck. Changes to these critical programs must not be fast-tracked through Congress through mechanisms designed to allow benefit cuts to be enacted before the public can react, while allowing politicians to avoid political accountability for their actions. The importance of Social Security and Medicare in the lives of the American people demands that they be given full opportunity to understand the implications of any proposed changes and given ample time to weigh in with their preferences.
Many have pointed to the Greenspan Commission as a model for additional Social Security reforms. It is important to note that the Greenspan Commission was not a fast-track commission in any sense of the word. It was only authorized to make recommendations to the President and Congress. No consensus recommendations it produced would have the force of law, nor would they receive any special procedural fast-tracking through Congress. The Commission itself was broadly representative, with its fifteen members including sitting members of Congress, major leaders of business, labor and the general public. The membership represented the broadest diversity of views possible. Finally, while the proposals that emerged from the negotiations were supported by all but three of the Commission members, the recommendations proceeded through Congress under regular order and were fully amendable. In fact, one of the most controversial changes to Social Security, the slow raising of the full retirement age from 65 to 67, was not part of the Commissions’ recommendations at all. It was added through an amendment by Representative J. J. “Jake” Pickle (D-TX) during consideration of the bill on the floor of the House of Representatives.
A key architect of the Greenspan Commission recommendations, Robert M. Ball, the longest-serving Commissioner of Social Security and a leading expert on the program, strongly opposed using the Commission’s success as justification for future commissions. He also made it clear that the combination of circumstances that helped justify the benefit cuts included in the 1983 Social Security amendments simply were not appropriate rationales for additional cuts in the future. These concerns have only become larger and more important over the ensuing decades. This is especially true considering the stagnant middle-class wages and growing income and wealth inequality during the intervening years, which have made it so difficult for generations of hard-working Americans to keep up with the cost of living, let alone build wealth or save for a decent retirement.
From the program’s beginning, Social Security was intended to be a base of protection, supplemented by private pensions and savings, not an individual’s sole source of retirement income. Over the decades, it has become the cornerstone of retirement as nine out of ten people over age 65 receive Social Security benefits. Financial advisers generally recommend aiming to replace between 70 percent and 85 percent of what you were earning at the time you stopped working to maintain your lifestyle as a retiree. In a recent report, Social Security’s actuaries calculated the replacement rate for hypothetical retirees across a wide range of incomes, incorporating the same data used to determine benefit levels at retirement. That is, the actuaries used the average of the highest 35 years of earnings of their hypothetical workers, wage-indexed to the year before retirement. For workers born in 1960, who attain full retirement age at 67, they found that the replacement rate would range between 75.5 percent for someone with “very low” career earnings, to 26.9 percent for someone with “maximum” average earnings. The replacement rate for those with “medium” average earnings ($72,026 per year) was estimated at only 41 percent.
Considering that 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, further eroding the replacement rate by cutting benefits, no matter how this is accomplished, would severely affect the financial security of millions of Americans and their families.
Some conservative groups argue that Social Security provides a more generous retirement income than most comparable industrialized nations. These groups’ myopic view is clearly designed to provide a distorted picture of seniors’ living situations. Every one of the countries highlighted in these ‘research studies’ provide a significantly more generous umbrella of social insurance programs than does the United States. For example, countries comparable to the United States provide free or significantly reduced-cost health benefits to their older citizens, with many providing comparable benefits to their workers, which enhances their ability to set money aside for retirement. Some nations also provide significantly subsidized housing, transportation and other services to seniors, and many help new entrants to the workforce by providing free or reduced college tuition, allowing young people to begin building wealth free from the heavy burden of student loan repayments.
In this country, by contrast, the Medicare Trustees estimate a full 41 percent of the average senior’s Social Security benefit will be consumed by Medicare out-of-pocket costs alone in 2100, compared with 27 percent in 2026. This is in addition to out-of-pocket health care costs not covered by Medicare. The virtual disappearance of traditional pension plans is well-known, and their replacement – ‘do-it-yourself’ retirement savings plans such as 401(k) plans and IRAs (Individual Retirement Accounts) have failed to provide sufficient retirement savings for most American workers, despite the billions of tax dollars that have been spent to boost savings.
Fewer than one-half of the civilian workforce participate in employer-sponsored retirement plans (largely due to a lack of disposable income), and according to the most recent data from major plan providers such as Fidelity and Vanguard, median account balances for those closest to retirement (age 55-65) are estimated at under $100,000. According to Empower, median IRA balances are higher, estimated at $140,000 for savers in their 50’s and $262,000 for those in their 60’s. These balances are an improvement from 401(k) plan estimates, but still hardly enough to finance a retirement that could stretch an additional 20-30 years.
Finally, in addition to direct out-of-pocket health care costs, the exploding costs of long-term care are well known to anyone with aging parents. Millions of seniors and near-seniors are counting on the equity they have built up in their homes through a lifetime of work and savings to help finance long-term services and supports, whether one is aging in the community or in an institution. Reducing the Social Security benefits of those who are considered too old to work in our agist society, or who simply are unable to work due to health reasons, can inspire panic as Americans watch their hard-earned savings dwindle with each passing year – with little or no hope of replenishing their resources.
In addition to the financial harm that could be devastating to generations of seniors and their families if Social Security benefits are cut, either today or for future beneficiaries, it is important to consider how we have ended up in this situation. The 1984 Trustees Report projected that the 1983 amendments had restored Social Security to actuarial balance for the full seventy-five-year valuation period, through 2057. The 2026 report now projects the combined Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds would be depleted in 2034, for a loss of almost a quarter of a century of solvency. The most significant change in the American economy that was not anticipated in 1983 was the enormous income and wealth inequality that the nation has experienced in the intervening four decades.
Stagnant wages have made it harder for average families to live the American dream, while millionaires, billionaires, and a rising class of new trillionaires have absorbed most of the income and wealth hard-working Americans have generated in the economy. According to Federal Reserve data, the top one percent of American households controls almost 32 percent of the nation’s net worth, and the top ten percent owns just over 68 percent. In contrast, the bottom fifty percent of households controls less than three percent of the nation’s wealth. In 1989, the percentage of the nation’s wealth controlled by the top one percent was estimated at 23 percent.
It has been estimated that the ongoing leakage out of Social Security’s revenue resulting from these decades of increasing inequality has led to a Social Security Trust Fund holding 50 percent fewer reserves in 2022 ($1.4 trillion fewer) than it would have if inequality had not increased.
Numerous members of Congress have introduced legislation that would correct this inequity by asking those who benefited the most from the past decades of inequality to pay their fair share. These bills would raise the payroll tax cap, which many Americans are unaware even exists because every dollar of their incomes has always been fully subject to the payroll tax. In addition, many of the bills would begin to address the disturbing shift away from wage income to a wide variety of income sources not subject to FICA, such as investment, interest and dividend income — only available to the wealthiest in the country — by expanding the existing Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT) to apply to Social Security. One example of such shifting is Elon Musk, who earned $158 Billion from Tesla alone last year according to press reports. None of this income was in the form of wages, which means ZERO was paid in FICA taxes on these billions of dollars. It is imperative that Congress find a way to capture this sheltered income to bolster Social Security and Medicare. These changes alone would extend Social Security’s solvency for the foreseeable future, while also funding much needed improvements to the program’s benefits.
The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare has endorsed many of these bills, including the Social Security 2100 Act (H.R. 9519), Social Security Expansion Act (S.770/H.R. 1700), and the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act (S. 1690/H.R. 3271) – all would extend solvency for decades by asking the wealthiest among us, who have benefited the most from the income and wealth inequality of the past half-century, to pay their fair share. Some of these bills also make needed improvements to the program.
Bills showing how fiscal conservatives would cut benefits, on the other hand, are in short supply. While outside organizations have compiled numerous ‘lists’ of benefit cuts they promote to ‘improve’ Social Security, sitting members of Congress have shown they are reluctant to introduce legislation specifically identifying the cuts they would support. The last such legislation was introduced by former Representative Sam Johnson (R-TX) during the waning days of the 114th Congress as he was retiring from the House. Although congressional organizations such as the Republican Study Group have endorsed specific benefit cuts as part of broader budget proposals, even these groups no longer include cuts to Social Security’s earned benefits in their published materials. Commissions provide a handy mechanism to force members of Congress to support benefit cuts they would never support as free-standing proposals because they are so strongly opposed by their constituents. Promoters hope to facilitate these cuts by creating an environment that allows Congress to hide behind a package designed by unaccountable, unelected commission members.
Solvency of Medicare’s Part A Trust Fund can be extended — and benefits improved (like adding hearing, dental and vision coverage) — by increasing Medicare tax rates on high‑income households, closing loopholes that allow high‑income business owners to avoid Medicare taxes, dedicating Net Investment Income Tax revenue to the Part A Trust Fund, reducing overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans, and crediting an expanded set of prescription drug negotiation savings to the trust fund.
Poll after poll clearly indicates large majorities of Americans support strengthening Social Security by increasing revenue, not by cutting the earned benefits of our nation’s workforce, today or in the future. Likewise, Medicare enjoys overwhelming popular support regardless of party affiliation and age and proposals to cut or privatize the program are conversely unpopular. Congress does not need a commission to hide behind unless the goal is to confuse the public about benefit cuts. As the wealthiest nation on the planet, we are clearly capable of protecting Social Security and Medicare while also addressing other priorities – all that is missing is the resolve to prioritize the needs and desires of the vast majority of the American people over the uber-wealthy and large, profitable corporations. If Congress can muster the will to do the right thing, our nation can pass the test that was so clearly expressed by Hubert H. Humphrey when explaining the goals of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal:
“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life—the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”
The impending depletion of Social Security’s and Medicare Part A’s Trust Funds reserves provides members of Congress with a unique opportunity to prove to the American people that it can fulfill its obligation to preserve and strengthen Social Security and Medicare by directing new revenue into the program, not by cutting the earned benefits of current or future generations of workers. Members of Congress have been elected to take hard votes – votes that are good for the people they represent.
Social Security and Medicare are too important to millions of Americans for Congress to take shortcuts or empower fast-track commissions to do their job. This is an opportunity to show that Washington can work, that it can deliver the results the American people are demanding, and that it can achieve this goal without waiting until the very last minute to act.
Thank you for providing me this opportunity to share the views of the millions of members and supporters of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.
