A group of eight centrist senators is attempting to compel Congress to revamp Social Security, in what many in Washington see as the first real effort at overhauling the government’s biggest program in more than a decade.
The push, led by retiring Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), sets the stage for a major confrontation later this year with potential consequences for the 59 million seniors who currently receive benefits.
Their bill, the PROMISE Act, does not directly cut Social Security benefits or raise taxes to avert the program’s approaching budget shortfall. Rather, it would task a bipartisan board with writing a plan to keep the pension system funded for another 50 years, likely through trillions of dollars in tax hikes and benefit cuts. The legislation would also establish parliamentary rules aimed at pushing Congress to act on the board’s proposal.
Even if it passes, the bill would likely only spawn another fight over Social Security in the next Congress, which would still have to approve the board’s proposal to be pushed into law. But senior groups are mobilizing now to stop what they see as an effort to slash retiree benefits, while deficit hawks argue failure to act risks putting the U.S. government on a dangerously unsustainable debt trajectory.
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The group of eight is targeting the “lame duck” period after the November midterm elections but before the new Congress begins in January as their best chance of success. President Donald Trump has promised to reject cuts to Social Security, and former President Joe Biden never pursued a deal with Republicans on the program.
“This is the first time that Social Security solvency has gotten serious legislative attention on a bipartisan basis in several decades,” said Shai Akabas, vice president of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a centrist think-tank that supports the plan. “It is a major breakthrough in conversations that have long been stagnant.”
As it stands, Congress has roughly six years to pass legislation before automatic reductions as large as 25% snap into effect for Social Security beneficiaries, according to the latest estimates by the Social Security Board of Trustees. The wave of baby boomers exiting the workforce and entering retirement, coupled with generally longer lifespans, has meant that the program’s payment costs exceed its incoming tax revenues.
There has been no consensus about how to head off this long-approaching cliff. In December 2010, a bipartisan commission led by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles proposed roughly $4 trillion in deficit reduction measures in benefits cuts and tax hikes. President Barack Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner came close to a deal on the “Simpson-Bowles” proposal, but it fell apart and similar talks have never since resumed.
The current plan grew out of Durbin’s conversations with Bowles, to whom the senator vented in private conversations that Congress was not dealing with big issues like Social Security, according to a Durbin aide.
Durbin began meeting last year with colleagues about legislation to force floor action on Social Security, and Durbin held a meeting in his office in early September 2025 with Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), Angus King (I-Maine), Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), Cassidy and Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). Durbin and Crapo were the last two members of the Senate to have served on Simpson-Bowles.
The PROMISE Act that emerged tasks the existing Social Security Advisory Board with coming up with a plan to extend the program’s solvency for 50 years, starting from the point of passage. That board has seven seats, only four of which are currently filled — two by Democrats and two by Republicans.
The bill would then be referred to the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. If those committees do not advance the measure, the bill would be automatically discharged to the floor of each chamber. To be incorporated into the bill, any amendments would also have to extend Social Security’s solvency for a half-century.
Last Wednesday, the Senate Finance Committee held its first hearing about the PROMISE Act, the first step toward a vote.
Even without including concrete policy changes, this proposal faces significant hurdles.
Trump would have to face charges that he’s abandoning a core campaign pledge since the 2016 presidential election. (A White House spokesperson declined to comment.)
AARP — the roughly 40-million-members-strong seniors’ organization — has begun urging lawmakers to reject the bill, highlighting polling that suggests 85% of Americans support maintaining or increasing benefits. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has begun calling for Senate Democrats to reject benefit cuts and instead stand behind financing Social Security by repealing the existing limit on payroll taxes for those earning more than $184,500 per year, arguing “the Democratic Party is ever to regain the faith of ordinary Americans it must stand firm on the issue of Social Security.”
Even conservatives who have long called for Social Security reform are mobilizing against it. Grover Norquist, the antitax crusader who leads the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, said in an interview that he has begun lobbying congressional Republican leadership to oppose the bill. Norquist called the legislation a “very real effort by the left” to convince Republicans to support tax hikes.
One Senate Democratic aide, granted anonymity to candidly assess legislative dynamics, said, “I will eat my shoe” if the bill passes this year.
Durbin acknowledged those odds: “Miracles do occur,” he said.
In another potential sign of the legislation’s radioactivity, half of its original sponsors — Cassidy, Durbin, Tillis and Republican John Cornyn of Texas — are leaving the Senate at the end of this year. (Cassidy and Cornyn lost their primaries against Trump-backed challengers.)
A fifth, King, is 82 and will not face voters again until 2030, should he choose to run again.
But supporters are adamant that Washington is running out of time to act, particularly given recent tremors in the economy. The federal debt has exacerbated volatility in the bond market and raised borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans and more. It is possible to fund the Social Security trust shortfall by issuing more debt, but that could drive interest rates only further.
“The bond market could force senators to come to the table,” said Ben Harris, vice president and director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. Harris was skeptical the legislation would pass, but added: “Trump has pledged to leave Social Security benefits untouched, but Trump has also done a lot of things he promised he’d never do. I think there is potentially a window.”
The legislation’s backers also say the proposal, by making an independent board responsible for crafting the policy, is carefully designed to insulate lawmakers from political pressure.
“Groups on the left and right will demagogue it, and it’s an uphill battle,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president for the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “But it’s pretty low risk because you’re asking the Social Security Advisory Board, basically a bunch of nonpoliticians, to come up with a plan.”
The attempt to shield lawmakers from the bill’s political ramifications is part of what most frustrates its opponents. The upcoming departure of about a dozen senators this fall means those lawmakers can vote for the bill free of political consequence. Trump is not going to face voters again.
Durbin’s office denies that the legislation amounts to a “fast track” or a “commission” bill, pointing out that it preserves the typical Senate procedure by requiring 60 votes for passage.
That’s not how Social Security advocates see it. Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, a progressive group founded during the Obama administration to oppose cuts to the program, summed up the legislation as creating “a process with less input from the public to cut Social Security in the least democratic way possible.”
“But you do have to worry, and we are worried,” he said. “They always try in the least accountable moment. For all the times they have failed, they only have to succeed one time for seniors to lose.”
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