When President Biden leaves the Oval Office in January, the Social Security plan will be nine years away from insolvency—but that timeline would shrink to six years if Donald Trump goes ahead with his campaign platform. That’s according to a new warning from nonpartisan watchdog group the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which says neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump have offered realistic plans to fix the program’s finances. The cost of Trump’s proposals, though, would cause Social Security to collapse more quickly, the group warns.
The reasons for this are the projected economic fallout that would ensue as a result of Trump’s plans to end taxation on Social Security benefits as well as on overtime pay and tips, and his call for large new tariffs and mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants. As the chart below shows, the cumulative drop in revenue for the program over a 10-year period would be $1.3 trillion at the low end and, in the worst case, $2.75 trillion.
