The Social Security retirement program will be unable to pay full benefits by 2035, according to a new report issued Monday by the Trump administration.
Without reforms, the report says, payments to beneficiaries would have to be cut by 25 percent starting in 2035 to keep the program solvent.
The report said the program’s roughly $3 trillion in reserves will be depleted by 2035.
The government will have to tap into those reserves beginning in 2020, when the costs of the program will begin exceeding the income it receives from taxes.
The trust fund for Medicare that pays for hospital care will run out of money by 2026, an unchanged prediction from last year’s report.
Medicare’s overall costs are expected to rise to 5.9 percent of the gross domestic product by 2038, up from 3.7 percent in 2018.
“Every day that passes, the problem gets bigger and the solutions become more difficult to implement,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan advocacy group.
A 16-year runway, she noted, means that today’s 51-year-olds will not be able to collect their full benefits unless there is action.
She also had a message for Democrats who are calling to expand the program’s benefits.
“Certainly we should be focused on saving Social Security and Medicare before we start promising to expand these programs,” she said.