Celebrate Today but Fight Tomorrow: Social Security’s Anniversary Is a Call to Action
August 14, 2025
By Jim Roosevelt
This should be a moment of celebration. But instead, on Social Security’s 90th anniversary, I find myself sounding an alarm.
The program my grandfather signed into law on this day in 1935 is under attack—not just in rhetoric, but through deliberate acts of administrative sabotage.
As the grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I carry the legacy of the New Deal. But I’m not writing today only as a descendant. I’m speaking as someone who helped run the Social Security program.
I served as associate commissioner for retirement policy in the Clinton administration from 1998 to 2001. My colleagues and I built the foundation for long-term planning, including the creation of the Retirement Research Consortium, which worked across five major universities.
The consortium was designed to support rigorous, independent research on retirement, disability, and health policy—helping the Social Security Administration (SSA) anticipate demographic shifts, assess solvency strategies, and make evidence-based decisions about the future of the program. The Trump administration went about eliminating those very functions, dismantling both the internal and the external capacity to steward the program’s future.
At the same time, though Elon Musk has stepped down from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his damage lives on. DOGE has already moved to consolidate political control over the Social Security Administration. To support Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, it has weaponized the Death Master File, giving itself the power to declare living people dead in Social Security records. And it used the SSA’s public email list to promote the lie that Trump ended taxes on Social Security benefits to mislead millions and politicize what has long been a nonpartisan institution.
Despite these attacks, Social Security is the most trusted and successful program in American history. It was born from the wreckage of the Great Depression but has adapted over generations. Through a series of major amendments, its protections have grown to cover not only retirees but also surviving spouses, children, and people with disabilities. While my grandfather envisioned a broader program from the start, he knew that progress toward a stronger social safety net would take generational advocacy.
For instance, soon after the original act was passed, the program was expanded to include survivors and dependents of deceased workers. In almost every decade since, new reforms have been added that expanded coverage, increased benefits, and shored up the program’s finances.
Each of these changes responded to the realities of a changing economy and workforce. The truth is that Social Security was always partial and is always evolving. Its legacy is not just what it has done, but the arduous path taken to keep the program alive for millions.
In all that time, the program has never missed a payment. It does not add to the deficit. By law, it cannot borrow.
And what do we have to show for that success?
The program keeps over 22 million people above the poverty line each year. For nearly half of all seniors, it is the majority of their income. For a quarter, it is all they have. It reaches children who have lost a parent and workers who can no longer work due to injury or illness.
It is especially critical for women, people of color, and people with disabilities—groups that have long faced systemic barriers to wealth accumulation. Without it, poverty rates among Black and Latino seniors would be far higher.
And it does all this with administrative costs of less than one penny on the dollar.
Yet the Trump administration’s approach makes clear it is willing to erode the program through the same playbook it is applying across government: Undermine public trust. Disrupt operations. Politicize neutral functions. In doing so, Trump officials make it easier to argue that Social Security—and our government more generally—is broken and must be scaled back or privatized to survive.
Let’s be honest about what this is. It’s a naked attempt to rewrite the American social contract. But I’m here to say: not on our watch.
My grandfather spoke of Social Security as a moral compact that binds generations together through mutual obligation. He knew then what we must remember now—that economic security is a prerequisite for democracy.
As we mark 90 years of Social Security, we owe it to future generations to defend what works. But we also need to think beyond the threats. We must prepare this program to meet the needs of today’s workers and families.
That means working creatively to fully fund the program and resist risky privatization schemes. It means building toward a more inclusive model that recognizes care work and addresses historic inequities. And it means asking even bigger questions such as what a 21st-century benefit package should look like.
But right now, Social Security is under assault. The best way to celebrate its 90th anniversary is to recommit ourselves to protecting and strengthening it—not just for those who rely on it now, but for everyone who will in the years to come as well.