Jessica LaPointe on Demonstration to Save Social Security

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/08

Jessica Lapointe is the American Federation of Government Employees Council 220 (SSA field workers) National President.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Numerous organizations are involved in a campaign to save Social Security in the United States. Why should people be more aware of this issue? How does it impact every ordinary American at some point in their life?

Jessica LaPointe: The campaign is called “Save Social Security, Fund It to Fix It.” Americans should be aware of this campaign because, as you mentioned, Social Security affects everyone from cradle to grave at some point in their lives in the United States. You contribute to Social Security through your payroll FICA dollars, meaning that every time you work, a portion of your paycheck is allocated to this fund. Individuals must oversee how these funds are administered.

In this case, Social Security is administered by Congress, and unfortunately, Congress is not managing your earned Social Security dollars to benefit the average American. The typical American contributes to Social Security throughout the year, particularly if they earn less than $168,000, which includes most middle-class Americans. Therefore, timely access to the benefits and services funded through FICA is a rightful expectation.

The administrative budget, which also comes from your FICA dollars, has been significantly reduced by Congress over the past decade and a half, coinciding with the record retirement of baby boomers. As a result, service delays are increasing. We are currently experiencing a 27-year low in staffing levels. With the proposed additional cuts of half a billion dollars to Social Security by the House, we could face a 50-year low in staffing levels despite a record number of beneficiaries.

Due to understaffing, field offices will continue to close in communities, as in Cleveland. Overpayments will also continue accumulating on individuals’ records; we currently face $23 billion in overpayments because insufficient staff can accurately manage benefit reporting changes.

If this trend continues, Social Security will be on the verge of collapse. The proposed budget cut of half a billion dollars will result in staff layoffs lasting over a month.

Thus, while current service delays and an unresponsive agency due to understaffing are significant issues, they will only worsen. To save Social Security, Congress must adequately fund it. Traditionally, we operate at 1.2 percent of benefit payouts, referred to as outlays, but this has decreased to less than 0.95 percent. Less than one cent of every dollar in benefit payouts is spent on operating costs. For comparison, private insurance companies operate at about 20 percent of benefit payouts. Hence, operating at 1.2 percent is highly efficient, but Congress continues to erode this efficiency.

Jacobsen: This issue does not necessarily align with the dominant political parties in the United States. It is more about the specific orientations of these parties. Are Republicans more opposed to funding Social Security than Democrats?

LaPointe: Republicans in the House have voted to cut half a billion dollars from Social Security’s operating budget. In contrast, Democrats voted unanimously to restore that funding through the Rupert Burger Amendment. You can review the voting records of Congress on Social Security to draw your conclusions.

The Alliance for Retired Americans provides that information on our website, afgec220.org. We have those voting records attached to our literature as well. Americans need to start examining this information. With the upcoming elections, including the House elections, where every seat is contested, and the presidential elections, it is crucial to review the lawmakers’ records on Social Security. By and large, Democrats tend to vote in favour of supporting Social Security funding. In contrast, Republicans tend to vote for cuts in Social Security funding, whether it be administrative costs, earned access to timely benefits and services, or full benefit payouts. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration addressed solvency concerns by raising the retirement age, a benefit cut to seniors and reduced life expectancy.

Democrats like Congressman Larson, Senator Sanders, and Senator Warren have introduced comprehensive legislation to expand solvency by scrapping the benefit contribution-based cap and lifting it so that everyone, including millionaires and billionaires, pays their fair share year-round. Since everyone contributes to the collective success of this nation, it is only fair that all should contribute to Social Security. You can research this for yourself; do not take my word for it. Democrats generally support protecting, modernizing, and expanding Social Security, while Republicans vote to cut, defund, and limit access to it, causing catastrophic delays. Currently, it takes over eight months to get an initial disability decision, whereas it took just two months in 2010 before the baby boomers began retiring in record numbers.

Jacobsen: I have two points of contact which come to mind now. What do opinion surveys and polls indicate about what Americans want regarding Social Security? How does implementing this human right in the United States compare to other developed countries?

LaPointe: Great question. An exit poll at the last presidential election, possibly a Gallup poll, indicated that 78% of Americans believe the Social Security Administration needs more funding to support its operating costs and ensure timely benefits and services. This demonstrates that Social Security is a widely popular program, regardless of political ideology. Most Americans view Social Security as important both to the nation and personally. The data does not lie; Social Security is the greatest anti-poverty program in our nation’s history. It currently lifts a million children out of poverty annually. For 65% of Americans, Social Security is their only income during retirement.

When individuals retire after paying into the program their entire working lives and encounter an unresponsive agency, they feel their money has been stolen. Underfunding operating costs effectively steal money from hardworking families because the funds are not being returned to them. Where is the money going if it is not benefiting the contributors?

But yes, the idea is that what people thought might have been a conspiracy theory—that the Republicans want to privatize Social Security—is no longer considered a conspiracy theory. That’s the widely held belief that that sort of the nefarious plan, why Republicans are doing this sort of death by a thousand cuts. That’s a choice that they’re making, right? Social security is extremely efficient, popular, and well-managed when the workers have the resources to do that. But if you keep taking more and more resources away from the program, it makes it more and more impossible for the workers to do the job, and that’s where we’re at right now. And then that’s an excuse to privatize.

Jacobsen: And when there is this pretty standard as a process of defunding: watch dysfunction, people get mad, dismantle it, and private industry comes in to save the day in the United States. Is that a conscious process, a common routine to formulate a type of, not in these words, class warfare, economic warfare? Because they’re not doing this to the wealthier. They’re doing this to people who are poorer and at the end of their working life, hopefully, correct?

LaPointe: Yes, exactly. These are the people that need it. This is who the program was designed to help—our middle-class Americans and people who need Social Security to rely on, to live on. So it isn’t fair. You pay into a program your entire working life expecting it to be there for you, only to discover that the agency is non-responsive. And then we haven’t even gotten into the benefit solvency, the looming solvency threat, in about ten years. Only 80 percent of benefits will be able to be paid out, and comprehensive legislation would fix that. For example, the Social Security 2100 Act on the Senate side is the Social Security Expansion Act, where you see scrap the cap legislation. The contribution and benefits base is about $168,000 annually, so the average American pays into that all year. However, the wealthier Americans stop paying in, depending on their income, as of January 1st or March 1st if you’re a millionaire. And yes, if we can scrap that cap and have people paying their fair share all year round, then benefits will be solvent, right? But right now, they’re considering raising the retirement age, as they did in the 80s under the Reagan administration.

Studies show that raising the retirement age is causing people’s life expectancy to shorten because they have to work longer and expose themselves to the hazards of stress and working conditions past when they otherwise would have to. So people are living less based on raising that retirement age, and we do not favour that. Regarding the people we partner with, the Alliance for Retired Americans and Social Security Works don’t favour raising the retirement age because that’s a benefit cut. It’s harmful to retirees. So that’s the two-fold of our Save Social Security, Fund It to Fix It campaign. We call for Social Security to be expanded, modernized, and protected. We’re calling for the Social Security Administration to be fully funded to meet public demand, to restore the 1.2 percent operating budget, and to pass solvency legislation that scraps the cap, doesn’t cut benefits, and doesn’t raise the retirement age.

Allies are good for the working class and the American people. They are due right by the constituents of lawmakers who were voted in to protect these rights, and they need to start doing that. About 20 percent of the caseloads of congressional leaders are Social Security questions about benefit delays, overpayment issues, and other problems plaguing the administration due to underfunding and understaffing. If nothing else, Congress could focus its caseloads on other important issues like the environment and other concerns that people would call about once they shore up this social security problem. But they have to have the will to do that. We see they’re going to have the will of their constituents start to vote for people with their best interests in mind. That’s why this election is so important because it has a lot of fringe issues that people are fear-mongering about, especially from Republicans—what bathroom people should be using, what education should be happening in schools or lack thereof, or defunding education. This must be about important issues, and Social Security should be on the ballot box in November.

Jacobsen: And how does this affect people with disabilities as well?

LaPointe: Well, currently, it takes somebody who is no longer able to work and earn income due to a disability about eight months to get a decision on an initial disability application. It takes two and a half years to reach the hearing level. Our state-run disability determination services are incredibly understaffed, and there is a pay disparity there. They’re not getting paid adequately to make the high-level decisions that they’re making, so you can’t recruit and retain people for those jobs. That’s the same at the Social Security Administration. You can’t recruit and retain top talent to handle our complex programs because our pay disparity is about 30 percent compared to the private sector. So, it affects people who can no longer work due to a disability because they can’t get benefit decisions timely. People end up going bankrupt; people end up dying. I said 30,000 Americans are dying while waiting for a Social Security decision on their benefits, for example.

When I started in 2009, I was a claim specialist at the Social Security Administration. I took a disability application from a woman who was living in her ex-husband’s basement. She was in dire straits and very much needed these benefits to get herself out of extreme poverty. I remembered her plight and her situation when I was taking her application. When her decision was approved after two months, I called her and wanted to make her day by telling her her benefits had been approved. She started crying and told me that this phone call saved her life because she had planned to take it if her benefits were not going to be approved within the week. She had a whole plan. I was with her at that moment, thinking, wow, what an important job I have and we have here at the Social Security Administration. We’re saving lives. That was in 2009; it took two months to get a decision. Nowadays, it takes eight months. In 2024, she would not have made it. Tens of thousands of Americans are in that same situation, who are just not making it due to the long service delays, especially our disabled population, who can’t work while they’re waiting to get a decision. To qualify, they can only work minimally or can’t even get their foot in the door to be considered for a decision.

It’s not good. We’re not taking care of our citizens. We don’t care for the people who have paid for this program and expect it to be there for them. This is a promise, right, that they were given. Congress promised them a Social Security Administration to rely on and took that promise away. They need to be held accountable for that.

Jacobsen: If you were to make an economic dividing line between those who receive these benefits and those who do not, what is the socioeconomic level at which that exists about receiving Social Security benefits in general? And how might individuals who are above that line not necessarily understand the necessity of such a program to help those who, either due to disability or old age or simply having to put in the time and accept that promise, need it and deserve it?

LaPointe: So you’re not getting rich when you live off Social Security. The average Social Security benefit is about $1,700 a month. We’re talking about retirement, old age, survivor, and disability insurance benefits that are paid for by FICA. To qualify for that benefit, you must be below certain income levels or of a certain age where you no longer have an income limit. This benefit is designed to keep people out of extreme poverty and off the streets and ensure that people lead a dignified life when they can no longer work. It’s a moral imperative.

During their working careers, workers in this country have all contributed to the collective success of this country, even to the success of millionaires and billionaires. Take Amazon, for example; these workers drive the vehicles, keeping the roads functioning. These workers have dedicated their entire lives to the collective success of a prosperous nation. They deserve to retire with dignity. Sixty-five percent of Americans only have Social Security to rely on in retirement. If this program goes away, you won’t see a country where older people are off the streets, not having to beg for money.

So, are we going to take care of people who have paid into the program and contributed to the collective success of our nation, or are we just going to abandon them and abandon the promise to them that they would be able to retire with dignity and have income in their retirement to fulfill their needs? We call this serious money. This isn’t playing around with money but keeping the lights on money.

As Social Security workers, we used to be able to sit down with a customer and go over their benefit options and discuss their break-even point so they could make an informed decision on when to retire, whether to accumulate delayed retirement credits and keep working, or whether they needed the money now due to a poor life expectancy prognosis. We used to be able to sit down and make those decisions, print out benefit matrices, and go over the math. We don’t have time to do that anymore.

We are an intake agency. We are an agency that puts out fires. We must intake all these appointments and get people into pay because of the long service delays. That is the agency’s main priority. So, people cannot make informed decisions anymore, which is unfortunate because this is the money they have to rely on and live off of for the rest of their lives. This is the only payout they can count on for the rest of their life because Social Security, once paid out, is paid out from the time they qualify until death. It also affects children who have experienced the loss of a breadwinner or a parent who has passed away. I lost my father when I was nine years old and went on Social Security. Without Social Security, I wouldn’t have had access to food, housing stability, income stability, and education to allow me to move forward in life. That would have been a real struggle for my mother, who was struggling with poverty herself when my father passed away. This program not only saves lives, but it also levels the playing field for children to get ahead. It lifts a million children out of poverty a year. Continuing this program, as promised, is vital to our nation’s success.

Jacobsen: So, Congressman Jimmy Gomez who is the Chair of the Congressional Dads Caucus, John “Bowser” Bauman of Social Security Works and member of Sha Na Na, Jimmy Gallagher of the California Alliance for Retired Americans, and others are part of this collective move. How can people get involved, and what is the importance of getting people and others together to show a sort of communal activism across the country and setting an example?

LaPointe: Social Security workers, AFGE (the American Federation of Government Employees), which is who I work for, the Social Security Administration, and then people who are dedicated to preserving the program, lawmakers who are dedicated to fighting for legislation that’s going to protect, expand, and modernize the program, constituency groups like Social Security Works, the Alliance for Retired Americans, and the American people all have a decision to make. They must decide whether they will sit this one out and allow people’s earned benefits to deteriorate and the program to collapse or whether they will get out, speak out, and do something. That’s a choice everyone is making right now. We are choosing to get the word out, raise awareness, show up, and have these conversations with our family and friends, with the media, with people on the streets, in offices, on the Hill. This is the path forward for this nation if we want to take care of one another.

Everyone has a choice, and the people you see showing up have chosen to get out and speak out. The time is now to do that. There’s no further delay. We can’t afford any further delay. We all have to get out there and make some noise if we want the program to be here for us, not only when we retire but also for those who need it now and for future generations, our children and our grandchildren. The youth often say, “Oh, Social Security, I don’t expect that to be here for me,” so it’s not on my radar. Well, with that attitude, it won’t be. We have to fight for everything in this country. We have to fight for it. The time is now to fight for Social Security to be here.

Jacobsen: Jessica, thank you for the opportunity to talk today. 

LaPointe: Thanks. Bye.

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