Shocking: The Trump Administration Grabs the Third Rail With Both Hands

Last week, President Trump signed a proclamation celebrating Social Security’s 90th birthday, suggesting that his “one big beautiful bill” would “strengthen Social Security for generations to come.”

Unfortunately, Trump’s mega bill does exactly the opposite. It does absolutely nothing to address Social Security’s looming insolvency in 2035, and instead would suck $1.6 trillion out of its trust fund over the next decade, hastening its insolvency by two years, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

What should really be concerning to “generations to come” is the shocking statement by Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, that the child savings accounts included in the mega bill are a “back door for privatizing Social Security.”

Social Security has long been described as the “third rail of American politics”—touch it and die. Presidential candidate Mike Pence in 2023 proposed privatizing it, and his presidential campaign promptly died. President George W. Bush made privatization his highest priority in 2005, but not even Republicans would bring it up for a vote. Good thing too. If it had succeeded, American retirees would have lost more than half their retirement savings in the Great Recession. Voters handed Democrats control of both Houses of Congress the next year.

President Eisenhower warned that there may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Though Bessent quickly realized his gaffe and the White House tried to backtrack, the cat was out of the bag.

As descendants of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the cabinet that created our country’s most popular, effective government program, let us be perfectly clear: turning Social Security over to private investment firms and the tender mercies of Wall Street would be a breach of American workers’ most precious guarantee of income security.

Social Security’s untouchable longevity is attributable to its structure—not a government giveaway, but an earned insurance benefit. Workers pay into it from every single paycheck in their life. Some 75 million Americans rely on it for old-age security, disability insurance, and survivors’ benefits. Privatization would be a stupid way to celebrate its birthday.

Nine out of ten Americans want Social Security to remain a priority for the nation no matter the state of budget deficits, according to a 2024 study for the National Institute on Retirement Security. And it’s nonpartisan: support comes from 90 percent of Democrats, 86 percent of Republicans, and 88 percent of Independents.

Though Trump insists that he wouldn’t harm a hair on Social Security’s head, his own history belies his ongoing blithe assurances. His hugest unachieved social policy goal at the end of his first term was the complete termination of Social Security’s principal funding source, the payroll tax. And he told the World Economic Forum when running for reelection in 2020 that a second Trump term would mean cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—the latter already successfully decimated in his mega bill giving trillions of dollars of tax cuts to the rich.