Social Security Cuts Betray the Social Contract

Social Security Is a Promise Between Workers and Their Government

Every month, 73 million Americans—including retirees, people with disabilities, and those who have lost a family member—rely on a Social Security check to meet their needs, from making rent to buying groceries, after a lifetime of paying into the system. But despite its overwhelming popularity, the Trump administration is taking a wrecking ball to it. The effort by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut the fundamental safety net program’s offices, personnel, and services is ripping out the rug from underneath poor and working-class Americans and undermining their trust in government.

Social Security—signed into law in 1935 by Franklin D. Roosevelt—“represents the basic part of our social contract: that we as a collective will take care of our own,” Roosevelt Institute President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins said on Scripps News last week. It’s the government’s job to ensure “people get the money that they’re owed,” not to make it harder for them to retire in dignity by taking away basic services—like the administration’s (now-abandoned) proposal to end phone services in a disingenuous hunt for fraud.

Social Security provides the “economic security that people expect from their American government after a lifetime of work,” said Wilkins, and for most retirees, payments make up more than half of their monthly income. “This isn’t Twitter,” she said. “This is the basis of millions of Americans’ financial security that we’re playing with.”

The Trump administration’s destruction of Social Security and other safety net programs could also worsen existing inequalities by “shifting the burden to America’s mothers, sisters and daughters, who will have to help their families cover the gap,” Roosevelt Fellow Jessica Calarco writes for MSNBC. “Elon Musk is cutting federal spending, but women will end up paying the price.”

There are real concerns about Social Security funding dwindling in the next few decades without congressional action, a policy problem that needs to be addressed seriously. But “the answer isn’t to tear it down,” said Wilkins. “The answer is to rise to the challenge of what Americans expect and deserve from their government.”

To put it simply, “it’s to invest.”

The Abundance Agenda Needs to Ask: Who Holds Power in the Economy?

The government needs to deliver for people, and to do so, it needs to build. The basic premise of the new book Abundance, by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is easy to get behind. In a new blog post, Elizabeth Wilkins writes about what else is needed to realize such a sweeping vision: contending with an imbalanced economy.

The long-standing crisis of disinvestment in public power, paired with the more recent crisis of DOGE’s sledgehammer to the administrative state, has “left the Left defending anemic institutions that couldn’t deliver,” Wilkins writes. There’s no other choice: “We will have to build anew, and better than we have before.”

But what’s actually constraining our political possibilities? “Eliminating veto points, worthy though it may be, will not eliminate either the problem of concentration in markets that can also choke or distort supply, or the problem of special interests with disproportionate power,” writes Wilkins.

Read the blog post: “On Abundance: Where We Agree, Where We Disagree, and How to Move Forward”

Previewing Next Week’s Jobs Data

Consumer and business sentiment has suffered recently due to the Trump administration’s uncertain economic policies. What does that mean for the March jobs report? In a new blog post, Roosevelt Principal Economist Michael Madowitz previews what to expect in next Friday’s data and explains that tariff threats could contribute to some volatility.

Read the blog post: “Will March Jobs Data Confirm or Refute Increasingly Pessimistic Sentiments About the Economy?”

What We’re Talking About

What We’re Reading

• The administration’s reckless layoffs have left agencies without important stewards of economic data and statistics, casting doubt on the reliability of such data now and into the future. “It would be a bad sign for a software company to cancel all beta testing if you expect to keep making better software,” Michael Madowitz told Politico. “This feels like the same sort of thing.”
  • DOGE’s purge of federal workers is also an attack on their labor rights, Oxfam America’s Jackson Gandour writes, showing why we need reforms to protect worker power in both the public and private sectors.
• Doordash and buy-now-pay-later company Klarna are teaming up to allow customers to pay for food deliveries in installments, worrying consumer advocates that the firms are counting on increased profits from late fees and that low-income Americans are increasingly relying on credit for small purchases.
  • “There’s a good economic case for financing investments over the long term, and we have stretched the definition of durable goods in a lot of ways,” Madowitz told Business Insider. “Delivered food may in fact be the least durable good we’ve tried this with.”
• The Supreme Court will hear a case about South Carolina’s attempt to eliminate Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, and a ruling could potentially give “states broad power to exclude health care that is unpopular or politically disfavored,” Roosevelt Fellow Rachel Rebouché told the Associated Press.