Despite widespread concerns that Social Security will soon be forced to reduce benefits, one economics journalist recently argued these fears are overblown.
“Few deceptions in American politics are quite so pernicious as the notion that the Social Security trust fund exists,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s economics reporter Joseph C. Sternberg on Thursday. “Again this week we’ve received another warning that trust funds that are essentially nonexistent are on the verge of running out of money they already don’t have.”
Sternberg argued that, although the Social Security Administration’s two trust funds (for working-age disability and old-age retirement programs) will theoretically be empty by 2034, the program has overcome similar threats in the past.
“The programs for several decades received more income via payroll-tax revenue than they paid out in benefits,” Sternberg claimed. “Congress directed the surplus into the trust funds, on the theory that the pot of money would be available later if tax revenues fell below benefit payouts. But rather than invest those surpluses into the private sector as a large defined-benefit pension manager would, Congress directed that Social Security ‘invest’ only in special-issue U.S. Treasury bonds.”
He continued, “The trust funds therefore represent borrowing by one hand of government from another. This transferred the cash to Congress to spend in the flush years, while putting the Treasury on the hook to redeem the bonds out of general revenue or borrowing once Social Security payouts began to exceed payroll-tax revenue. The Treasury already has been funding a portion of Social Security benefits since 2010, the year in which benefit payouts exceeded payroll-tax collections for the first time. The cost in 2025 was $160 billion and will hit $300 billion a year by 2030.”
For these reasons, he characterized the current alarm over Social Security’s fate as misplaced.
“So when you get word that the trust funds will ‘run out of money’ soon, that’s a political rather than a fiscal warning,” Sternberg concluded. “The previous political-economy equilibrium regarding Social Security is expiring, and a new one will have to be found.”
He later added that America would benefit from “a relatively stable immigration policy and perhaps several years of information on how artificial intelligence will transform the economy’s productivity” before figuring out how to handle Social Security.
Speaking with AlterNet in May, former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley similarly disputed the widespread concern that the program is headed toward insolvency.
“This isn’t true — but it is often repeated,” O’Malley told AlterNet at the time. “Social Security is a pay as you go program. It is not funded by deficit spending. It is more akin to an insurance company. People's premiums and benefits are paid out from those premiums. Even the surplus — which because of income inequality is being depleted sooner (2032) than thought in 1983, even that was built up by payroll tax, not borrowed money. “
He also said that “an utter devaluation of the dollar — which Trump is causing and risking in so many reckless and self/serving ways (bitcoin), would be really bad for everything in US including Soc Sec, it is not true that Social Security depends on deficit spending for its support or benefits. (Except a small portion of admin expenses).”
In contrast to the positions held by Sternberg and O’Malley, a June analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) predicted benefit checks will need to be reduced by an average of $500 per month if the program reaches its “go broke” date. Without such cuts, the CRFB asserted, the Social Security Administration’s payments will eventually entirely deplete the fund.
“Applying this projected reduction to current state-level data, we estimate an across-the-board monthly cut would range from $459 to $556 across the 50 states and the District of Columbia,” the report explained.
A recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also blamed President Donald Trump for weakening the Social Security program by gutting its staff.
“In just 15 months, the Trump Administration has pushed out more than 8,000 Social Security Administration (SSA) workers — causing SSA’s largest one-year staffing reduction on record,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote. “This 14 percent cut has compromised SSA’s ability to reliably serve seniors, bereaved families, and people with disabilities. By January 2026, SSA had fewer employees than at any time since 1967, when the agency was not yet responsible for administering Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and served 52 million fewer beneficiaries.”
