The Social Security Administration’s (SSA) trustee report on the condition of the Social Security Trust Fund has been running late for several months. Consequently, there has been much speculation about what the SSA would say about when the Trust Fund is set to run out of money. 

On Tuesday, the report was finally released, and the answer is here.

“The combined asset reserves of the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance (OASI and DI) Trust Funds are projected to become depleted in 2034, one year earlier than projected last year, with seventy-eight percent of benefits payable at that time,” SSA said in a press release announcing the release of the report. 

“The OASI Trust Fund is projected to become depleted in 2033, one year sooner than last year’s estimate, with seventy-six percent of benefits payable at that time. The DI Trust Fund is estimated to become depleted in 2057, eight years earlier than last year’s estimate, with ninety-one percent of benefits still payable,” the report continued.

The report also found that the asset reserves of the trust funds increased by $11 billion in 2020 and that the “total annual cost of the program is projected to exceed total annual income, for the first time since 1982, in 2021.”

“The Trustees’ projections in this year’s report include the best estimates of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Social Security program,” Kilolo Kijakazi, Acting Commissioner of Social Security, said in the announcement. “The pandemic and its economic impact have had an effect on Social Security’s Trust Funds, and the future course of the pandemic is still uncertain. Yet, Social Security will continue to play a critical role in the lives of 65 million beneficiaries and 176 million workers and their families during 2021.”

The report does not show that Social Security will cease to exist in 2034. Instead, it shows that Congress must take some sort of action to shore up the program’s finances, or perhaps to change how it calculates how Social Security is funded. 

According to CNBC, the costs were lower in 2020 than usual for something of a morbid reason: More older Americans died last year, due to the pandemic, than they typically do. 

“Senior administration officials said in a press briefing Tuesday afternoon that a spike in deaths among retirement-age Americans in 2020 helped keep the programs’ costs lower than projected. They added that the ultimate, long-term impact of the coronavirus is less clear as costs and revenues return to their extended forecasts.”

However, CNBC said that the safety net “deteriorated over the past year as Covid hastened retirements and caused a contraction in the size of the U.S. labor force.” 

 Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist, and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters