The House passed legislation laying out the parliamentary rules for the year last week. The bill included a little-noticed provision blocking Congress from shifting funds to prevent a 2016 shortfall in the Social Security disability insurance program.
The Social Security Administration’s actuaries have projected the disability insurance program’s fund will run out of money sometime in 2016. This will result in a 20 percent benefit reduction for nearly 11 million Americans.
This new House rule creates a legal obstacle that would make it harder to shift funds from the Social Security retirement account to the smaller disability account. Transfers like this have been done routinely in the past under both Republican and Democratic presidencies.
If the disability fund can’t be replenished, benefits will have to be cut. This will force some of the most economically vulnerable people in our society deeper into poverty.
Congress could prevent the shortfall by raising taxes, cutting benefits, or both; however, cuts are being favored by the Republican majority Congress. Many Republicans have lamented the rise in the need for disability benefits, which they have suggested is something of a welfare sham.
Fraud appears limited to relatively few cases in the disability program. A report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that about 0.4 percent of disability beneficiaries were likely receiving improper payments. This was thought to be because the beneficiaries were working before or after they began receiving checks.
While it is true that more and more people are on disability, this is largely a result of an aging workforce which is more likely to become hurt or sick. About seven in ten disability recipients are at least 50 years old.
Representative Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) said that the reallocation of funds would only be a temporary solution that would avoid making real changes to “the fraud-plagued disability program.” He and his allies argued that a simple reallocation would irresponsibly and unfairly transfer money from future retirees to those who currently have a disability. However, in 1983, Congress created an imbalance by moving funds in the opposite direction—from the disability program into the retirement program, which was approaching a shortfall.