Could a Term-Limited Trump Finally ‘Fix’ Social Security?

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“If Kamala Harris had won this year, my guess is she would not have set up Social Security reform for eight years,” Fichtner speculated. “She would have been running for reelection in four, and that puts off the third rail. The silver lining here is that President Trump has now a second term. He cannot run for a third.”

A Bipartisan Commission in 2026?

Acknowledging that it is hard to predict what will happen in Washington in the next few months — let alone the next few years — Fichtner observed that the usual pattern is to see the incumbent president’s party lose seats during the midterms.

“The Republicans have the house going into the next Congress starting in 2025, and by a very small margin,” Fichtner said. “If you were just betting today on history, you would bet that the Democrats would retake the House in 2026 going into 2027.”

In Fichtner’s view, a Democratic House, a Republican Senate and a Republican President Trump could be a “good mix” to do Social Security reform in 2027 or 2028. At that time, an insolvency deadline of 2033 or 2034 will feel a lot closer, but there will still be time for thoughtful debate.

“Come back and talk to me in two years and we’ll see,” he said. “There’s still going to be five or six more years after that before the real panic ensues.”

What About a Secure 3.0 Act?

Apart from discussing the Social Security funding outlook, Fichtner also considered the prospects for other retirement reform legislation in the next Congress. He noted that a growing number of policy experts are already starting to speculate about a Secure 3.0 Act, for example.

For his part, Fichtner is not so sure this is the right time for such a law, given how much change remains undigested under both the original Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (Secure) Act and its Secure 2.0 Act successor.

“I like to remind people that, with Secure 1.0 and Secure 2.0, we’ve had more beneficial changes for retirement security than we had had in the previous 15 or 20 years,” Fichtner observed. “There’s been a lot of movement on the policy side, and I actually think we need some additional time for full implementation.”

The truth of the matter is that there’s a lot of things in Secure 2.0 that employers are still grappling with, Fichtner noted.

“I think we want to see how it all works out,” Fichtner suggested. “Employers are still learning the rules and the processes. If there’s a Secure 3.0 Act next year, I think it should be more about verifying and validating where we are still seeing real barriers to adoption of annuities and the broader uptake of defined contribution plans.”

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