Social Security Advocates Call for Clean Debt Ceiling Bill

What You Need to Know

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has proposed a debt-ceiling bill that would result in cuts around 23% to most federal agencies, according to a Social Security advocate.
The Social Security Administration, which is already underfunded, would be among those agencies, he said.
The House plans to vote on the bill this week.

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (NCPSSM) and 30 other senior advocacy groups urged House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Friday to pass a clean bill to lift the debt ceiling, saying the spending cuts in the Republican’s plan would hurt older adults.

The groups told McCarthy as well as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in a letter “to swiftly pass a clean debt limit bill — freestanding legislation, without any other provisions.”

On April 19, McCarthy proposed a bill that would raise the U.S. debt limit for about a year and cut federal spending.

McCarthy said the House would pass the bill this week but “dodged when asked whether he had already secured the 218 Republican votes he needed,” Bloomberg reported.

The plan would increase the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, enough to stave off a U.S. payments default until March 31, 2024, at the latest.

Max Richtman, CEO of NCPSSM, wrote in an op-ed published Monday in The Hill that House Republicans are “demanding spending caps that will shortchange almost every federal agency,” proposing “to freeze spending at FY 2022 levels (a whopping $4.5 trillion in cuts), which would amount to an estimated 23% reduction for everything except the military and veterans programs.”

The Social Security Administration, “for one, needs more — not less — funding to do its job for the American people,” he wrote.

Without proper SSA funding, Social Security claimants “have suffered through field office closings, interminable wait times on the agency’s toll-free phone line, and lengthy delays in Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) hearings,” Richtman said.

Impact of a Debt Default

In the letter, the groups told the lawmakers that “we’re at the precipice of an economic calamity.”