A bipartisan group of eight senators introduced a bill on July 14 that does something almost unheard of in Washington: it forces Congress to vote on Social Security’s finances instead of talking about them. The PROMISE Act, sponsored by senators from Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) to Dick Durbin (D-IL), would hand an independent advisory board the job of drafting a solvency plan and guarantee it an up-or-down floor vote. That a bill guaranteeing a vote counts as bold legislation tells you what the actual scandal is. Congress has known the numbers for over a decade. It just hasn’t been willing to act on them.
I’ve spent 30 years in institutional investment management, and I’ve built a career on a simple premise: markets, not politicians, are usually the more honest actuary. A private pension trustee who ran a fund the way Congress has run Social Security’s trust funds, aware of the shortfall for decades and doing nothing, would be sued into oblivion. Congress gets reelected.
The numbers, from the Social Security Board of Trustees’ 2026 annual report, are not in dispute. The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund will exhaust its reserves in the fourth quarter of 2032, three months earlier than last year’s projection. At that point, incoming payroll tax revenue would cover 78% of scheduled benefits, an automatic cut of roughly 22% for every retiree, current and future, unless Congress acts first. Combine OASI with the smaller disability fund and the deadline moves to 2034, with 83% payable. The 75-year actuarial deficit widened to 4.42% of taxable payroll this year, up from 3.82%. Depletion doesn’t mean the checks stop. It means the reserves run out, and the program falls back to paying only for what comes in the door that year.
That is a fiduciary failure by any definition. I’ve spent a career applying to other people’s money. Social Security’s trustees have flagged this exact shortfall in essentially every annual report since the 1990s. The 1983 reforms were the last time Congress treated the warning as an emergency rather than a talking point. Everything since has been a rounding error against a widening gap, three decades of documented notice with no corresponding action. The PROMISE Act doesn’t fix the math. It just puts someone on record.
Fixing the math means picking from a short menu, and the public is living longer than the program’s design assumed, which makes a gradual increase in the full retirement age a serious, overdue option rather than a third rail. Raising or eliminating the payroll tax cap, now $184,500, is the lever most favored on the Left. Neither works alone; most credible scoring shows it takes some combination of both, phased in now, to close a gap this size without a cliff-edge cut landing on people already retired.
Waste and fraud are real and worth fixing on their own terms, but they are not a solvency plan. The Social Security Administration’s own inspector general found the agency made nearly $72 billion in improper payments from fiscal 2015 through 2022, with $23 billion still uncollected as of the end of fiscal 2023. That’s under 1% of benefits paid over that period. Commissioner Frank Bisignano says the agency is “eliminating waste, fraud, abuse and ensuring program integrity,” and it should. But recovering every dollar of that $72 billion wouldn’t move the depletion date by more than a few weeks against a $30.3 trillion 75-year shortfall, up from $26.1 trillion in last year’s report.
CALIFORNIA DOUBLES DOWN ON PENSION DEBT — AND DARES CONGRESS TO BAIL IT OUT
The more interesting idea on the table is the one closest to my own trade. Cassidy and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) have proposed borrowing $1.5 trillion to seed a separate investment fund, invested in a diversified portfolio the way a pension or a 401(k) would be, modeled on the approach the Railroad Retirement Trust has used since 2001. I like the instinct. Payroll taxes sitting in Treasury bonds for decades are a return profile no private fiduciary would accept for a pool of assets with a 75-year time horizon. But researchers at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research ran 10,000 simulations of the Cassidy-Kaine structure and found it fails to fully repay its own borrowing in roughly two-thirds of scenarios under realistic return assumptions, worse under conservative ones. The instinct to invest is right. Borrowing $1.5 trillion to place a leveraged bet on it is not how a fiduciary manages a promise this large; a smaller, unleveraged allocation of ongoing reserves into low-cost index funds, phased in gradually, captures the same upside without staking the program on a market cycle.
None of these levers is painless, which is exactly why Congress has ducked all of them for 40 years. The PROMISE Act’s real contribution isn’t a solution. It’s a mechanism that finally makes ducking the vote harder than casting it.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.