"To bolster retirement security for older African Americans who have spent a lifetime working, the Biden Social Security reform plan will raise benefits for vulnerable beneficiaries—including widows and widowers, low-wage workers, and long duration beneficiaries who may have exhausted all other assets. In addition, Biden proposes to boost average benefits across the board while putting Social Security on a long-term path to solvency by raising payroll taxes for workers with more than $400,000 in earnings."
In the 118th Congress' waning days, the House of Representatives and the Senate passed legislation that will effectively boost Social Security benefits for nearly 3 million public-sector workers. President Joe Biden signed the bill on Jan. 5.
The Social Security Fairness Act of 2023 eliminated two provisions that reduced the Social Security benefits paid to public-sector workers.
One is the Windfall Elimination Provision, which reduced Social Security payments if beneficiaries received pensions from employers that did not withhold Social Security taxes from their salaries. This affected an estimated 2.1 million people, or about 3% of all Social Security beneficiaries. This provision most affected retirees of state and local government jobs such as teachers, firefighters and police officers.
The other is the Government Pension Offset, which reduced Social Security payments for spouses and surviving spouses of retirees who received government pensions. This affected about 750,000 people, or about 1% of all beneficiaries.
The law would cover payments starting in January 2024, so some beneficiaries would receive retroactive payments along with higher rates going forward.
The Social Security Fairness Act had been dormant in committee until September, when a bipartisan House majority used a rare maneuver, a discharge petition, to bring it to the floor.
On Nov. 12, 2024, the House passed the bill, 327-75. The Senate followed on Dec. 21, 2024, passing it, 76-20. Both chambers' votes were heavily bipartisan.
At a White House signing ceremony, Biden said the bill "is about a simple proposition: Americans who have worked hard all their life to earn an honest living should be able to retire with economic security and dignity — that's the entire purpose of the Social Security system."
The decision comes with a cost: The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, estimates that enacting the new law would add $196 billion to deficits over a decade.
In their 2024 report, Social Security's trustees projected that the program's trust fund would be depleted by 2033, while moving funds from a related disability program trust fund could extend that date to 2035.
Passing the new law would accelerate that insolvency date by six months, the Congressional Budget Office projected. And once insolvency hits, current law mandates a 23% cut in benefits.
We rated Biden's separate promise to put Social Security on a path to long-run solvency a Promise Broken, and the new law underscores that assessment.
"We should be talking about how to prevent this cut, not make it bigger and happen sooner," Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group advocating for fiscal balance, said in a statement.
The law Biden signed did not affect every Social Security beneficiary, but it will boost benefits for about 3 million Americans. We rate the promise Compromise.
As president, Joe Biden has been consistent and clear that he would not cut Social Security benefits.
But did he expand them, as he promised in his 2020 campaign?
No.
In his final budget proposal, covering fiscal year 2025, Biden advocated improving Social Security benefits, "especially for those who face the greatest challenges making ends meet." But he provided no details, and as usually happens with presidential budget proposals, Congress ignored the proposal.
Biden's budget proposal also expressed a willingness to work with Congress on improving benefits for Supplemental Security Income, a Social Security program providing extra income for people with disabilities. But nothing concrete followed.
Lawmakers offered several bills to increase Social Security benefits during the second half of Biden's presidency, but none advanced.
One bill, which had Senate and a House versions, would have increased benefits, including creating a new minimum benefit for certain low-wage earners. Other legislation would have changed the program's inflation-adjustment calculation in a way that could have benefited recipients.
A different bill would have adjusted benefits based on the cost of living in the recipient's place of residence; another bill would have temporarily increased benefits for widows or widowers who had been in two-income households and would have allowed children of deceased, disabled or retired workers to remain eligible for benefits through age 25 if they were full-time students.
None of these bills progressed in either chamber.
We rate this Promise Broken.
It took 10 months after Joe Biden was inaugurated for Democrats to submit legislation on one of his key promises: to expand and increase Social Security benefits.
On Oct., 26, Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., introduced H.R. 5723, which includes many of the proposals that Biden outlined during his campaign. The measure had attracted 196 co-sponsors by mid-December, all of them Democrats, and on Dec. 7, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security held a hearing on the measure.
The bill would not only expand benefits but would also address the issue of Social Security's long-term solvency, which is the subject of a separate Biden campaign promise.
Some of the bill's key provisions on benefits are:
The measure has not formally advanced in the two months since it has been introduced, but its introduction is enough to move this promise to In the Works.