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President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Bill in Washington, August 14, 1935.
“The honest conversation is the conversation that can’t be had.”
That somewhat Zen-like pronouncement came from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) during a recent video discussion of Social Security with Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee. Kelly warned that Republicans would “all get thrown out of office [if] we told the truth” about their party’s plans for Social Security, calling it “political suicide.”
Social Security is “the third rail Republicans can’t stop touching,” in the words of a Politico headline. “Social Security and Medicare are wildly popular,” Politico notes. “So why do GOP Senate candidates keep talking about privatizing them?” But the Republican Party has been waging war on Social Security since its inception. This war, sometimes open and sometimes covert, may soon end in victory.
It began as Congress was debating the Social Security Act of 1935. Republicans attacked the program with rhetoric as extreme as that of today’s right. Rep. James W. Wadsworth (R-NY), for example, said the bill would create “a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.” Republican Daniel Reed of New York said, “The lash of the dictator will be felt.”
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Republicans who voted for the Social Security Act did so primarily for political cover. Historian Lewis L. Gould explains that, after failing to derail it, “most Republicans then went on record as endorsing the popular bill on final passage. That tactic enabled later generations of Republicans to disguise their party’s visceral and abiding dislike of Social Security.”
That “visceral and abiding dislike” remained. The GOP’s 1936 presidential candidate, Alf Landon, derided Social Security as “a fraud on the workingman” and “a cruel hoax.” The party’s 1940 presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, warned voters that “you will never collect a dollar of your Social Security.” The 1944 Republican Party platform attempted to paper over the party’s true feelings with language supporting many aspects of the New Deal, including Social Security, although the same platform “reject[ed] the theory of restoring prosperity through government spending and deficit financing.”
The GOP held its fire for the most part during the Eisenhower years, and its 1956 and 1960 platforms even boasted of adding people to Social Security’s rolls. But the party’s 1964 candidate, Barry Goldwater, had lumped social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare into a phenomenon he called “Welfarism.” Goldwater’s 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, said these programs would give “unlimited political and economic power … as absolute … as any oriental despot” while turning each recipient “into a dependent animal creature.” Goldwater said programs like Social Security would erode personal freedom “later on—after its beneficiaries have become its victims, after dependence on government has turned into bondage and it is too late to unlock the jail.”
Goldwater was more circumspect as a presidential candidate, but still drew unwanted press attention for remarking that Social Security should become voluntary. That idea, which would undermine its role as a universal social insurance program, has since become conservative orthodoxy.
With the congressional elections looming and their prospects rising, Republicans are openly preparing a frontal assault on Social Security and other social programs.
This war on Social Security has at times looked more like a covert operation. As president, Ronald Reagan even signed a compromise Social Security bill into law. But as a candidate in 1976, Reagan followed Goldwater’s lead by advocating partial privatization.
George W. Bush pushed aggressively for partial privatization. Gould, perhaps the country’s pre-eminent historian of the Republican Party, wrote in The Republicans that “a desire to remake Social Security was one of the few consistent policy priorities of … Bush’s public career.” Bush’s attempt failed, partly because of what Gould describes as Bush’s “hyperpartisan” approach. It was also deeply unpopular. “The more the president talked about Social Security,” wrote Gould, “the more his poll numbers dropped. By the end of the year the Bush initiative was dead.”
As president, Barack Obama signaled a willingness to compromise with Republicans on Social Security, as part of a “grand bargain” forced by Republican hijacking of the limit on federal government borrowing amounts, which typically was increased without controversy. With the debt limit taken hostage and Obama flirting with austerity, benefit cuts became a real possibility. Once again, however, Republican “hyperpartisanship” got in the way, and by 2016 the Democrats had largely pulled back from their openness to Social Security cuts.
In that year’s GOP primaries, Donald Trump’s promise not to cut Social Security made him unique among the party’s presidential candidates. But today, the GOP has brought its war back into the open. In April 2022, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), the chair of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, publicized a multipoint manifesto calling for ending funding for Social Security, Medicare, and other so-called “non-discretionary” programs every five years, unless a congressional majority explicitly voted to renew them. Unless Republicans suffered major defeats, Scott’s proposal amounted to a preprogrammed kill switch to cut or end the program.
Scott’s plan would also “force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt,” a reference to the projected depletion of its trust funds in a few years. It’s a misleading use of language. Scott would not “force Congress to issue a report” explaining what it will do when the Pentagon goes “bankrupt,” for example—although, by his definition, that happens at the end of each fiscal year. And Social Security, unlike most other government programs, has an ongoing source of earmarked revenue.
Scott also proposed that all Americans should pay some (federal) income tax “to have skin in the game, even if only a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.” The latter sentence refers to the fact that many Americans do not earn enough to pay federal income tax. That category also includes many of the elderly, dependent, and disabled Social Security recipients whose income Scott would eviscerate with his kill-switch plan.
Republican leaders hastily distanced themselves from Scott’s proposal. It was too honest, too soon. But, not to be outdone, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) proposed in August that Social Security and Medicare be voted on every year.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) jumped into the fray with a proposal first introduced in the Trump years to finance parental leave by having working parents borrow payments from future Social Security benefits. Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains that the Rubio proposal would result in retirement benefit cuts much greater than the value of their parental leave. And if a parent died before “paying back” their benefits under Rubio’s proposal, their heirs would be forced to pay it from the estate. Children would not only mourn the loss of a parent; they would also have to pay for the time that parent spent with them when they were born.
With the congressional elections looming and their prospects rising, Republicans are openly preparing a frontal assault on Social Security and other social programs. The three leading candidates to run the House Budget Committee if Republicans win say they’ll strive to once again use the debt limit to force unpopular policies into law. One of them, Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA), was explicit about his goals. “Our main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary—it’s got to be on entitlements,” said Carter.
Another candidate for that key position, Jodey Arrington (R-TX), cautioned his colleagues to keep the specifics to themselves for now because “this can get so politicized.” But Arrington has proposed raising the retirement age even further than it has been, which is a de facto benefit cut. The third, Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA), proposed means testing for Social Security and Medicare.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the probable House Speaker if Republicans prevail in November, endorsed the idea of refusing to lift the debt limit until their demands were met. That could precipitate a global financial crisis and create enormous cost for the U.S. government unless Democrats quickly capitulated. Rank-and-file Democrats pointed out that the debt limit ceiling was an arbitrary rule and called for its elimination (or for raising it to an astronomically high number). But Biden rejected their calls, saying “that would be irresponsible.” This demurral will make it harder for him to “not yield” to Republican attacks on Social Security and Medicare, as he has promised to do.
As for Politico’s question: Why? Why would Republicans pursue such a major and unpopular change in the social contract? Why would they want to cut or privatize Social Security? Because they’ve wanted to do it for 87 years. Because, despite its unpopularity, their ideology and self-interest demand it. And because, as Republican judges, governors, and presidents have demonstrated, the party has no interest in preserving democratic norms.
The GOP disregard for democracy has a pretty long history, too. In 2003, well before the rise of Trump, historian Gould wrote that many Republicans seek “complete electoral dominance,” motivated by “the ingrained Republican sense of entitlement as the natural governing party.” Gould, a neutral enough figure to have been consulted by Karl Rove in the 2000 election, questioned “whether modern Republicans really believe in the two-party system as a core principle of politics.”
That question has been settled in recent years. If Republicans retake Congress, their long war on Social Security seems likely to end in victory.
