[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 44 (Wednesday, April 20, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: April 20, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
URGING RESPONSIBLE STEWARDSHIP OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY TRUST
FUND
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentleman from Alabama [Mr. Bachus] is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. BACHUS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, on February 8, I said that there
was a cancer eating away at our Nation's Social Secrity trust funds. I
warned that unless this Congress acted soon, the future financial
security of not only our senior citizens but each and every one of us
would be at risk. On February 8, I predict that the Social Security
disability trust fund could become insolvent by the end of this year.
At that time, some scoffed at my suggestions.
In fact, my call for action was no exaggeration. My assumptions were
confirmed by a recent report by the Social Security board of trustees.
The 1994 Annual Report of the Social Security board of trustees
states that this fund will have a $4 billion deficit by the end of
1995. By the end of the century, the disability trust fund will have a
negative balance of $78 billion. That deficit will almost double by the
year 2003 to $144 billion, if Congress and the Clinton administration
do not take steps to correct this impending financial nightmare.
An editorial in Monday's Washington Post only confirms my fears. The
Post has charged, as I have, that ``the federal disability programs are
out of control.''
The Social Security board of trustees is again recommending that
contributions intended to support our senior citizens be shifted out of
Social Security's old-age and survivors' trust fund and into the
disability trust fund.
Mr. Speaker, stealing from Social Security's old-age and survivors
fund and from every working American and senior citizen to prop-up the
disability trust fund is irresponsible and unwise. This so-called
temporary fix is no fix at all.
There is a more rational and reasonable solution. On February 8, I
introduced House Joint Resolution 319. This legislation directs the
Secretary of Health and Human Services to examine the underlying causes
of the shortfall in the disability fund and report back to the Congress
on possible solutions.
Transferring money from the old-age and survivors trust fund to prop
up the disability trust fund without fixing the underlying problems in
the disability programs, as President Clinton has proposed in the
budget, is not the answer.
Sooner or later, attention must be focused on a responsible solution
to this growing problem--the urgent need for top-to-bottom reform of
the Federal disability programs. Nothing short of a complete overhaul
of the process and the policy behind the determination of who is
disabled and how and to what extent they should be compensated will do.
I urge my colleagues to join me in promoting responsible stewardship
of the Social Security disability trust fund. Did we not learn from the
$110 billion savings and loan debacle? We must address the problem now
or face up to a $144 billion problem 9 years from now. Join me in
cosponsoring House Joint Resolution 319.
Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record a copy of the article in the
Washington Post of Monday, April 18, 1994, referred to earlier:
Sneaking Up on Policy
The Federal disability programs are out of control. In the
mid-1980s the two main programs together had an enrollment of
4.9 million. By 1993 the number had risen to 7.3 million, an
increase of 50 percent in just eight years. Costs had
meanwhile doubled, to more than $50 billion. The disability
programs together--the insurance benefits paid to disabled
workers through Social Security and the welfare benefits paid
to the disabled poor through the Supplemental Security Income
or SSI program--now rank fourth in size on the federal
entitlement list, behind only the old-age part of Social
Security and Medicare and Medicaid.
The benefits may well be all or mostly legitimate. That's
less the issue than the fact that the programs achieved their
present expanse through a process that was almost
unwittingly. You will look in vain for clear and explicit
discussions over the years, after which majorities of
Congress voted deliberately to achieve the present result.
Instead, the programs grew piecemeal and were largely
ratcheted up in size through the courts. Advocates dropped
fragments of language into the statutes that then became the
bases of lawsuits expanding eligibility far beyond the points
that most members likely ever dreamed they were voting for.
Thanks to a 1990 Supreme Court decision based on one such
insertion, many of the new recipients of SSI benefits on
grounds of disability are children. A new report by the
Congressional Research Service also observes that more than a
fourth of Social Security disability awards are now given for
mental as distinct from physical disorders; for the looser
SSI, the figure is more than half.
No one disputes that many children of needy parents have
serious disabilities, or that psychological factors can be
disabling--and it may be necessary for the government to act
in both such cases. But to have legitimacy, a major policy
change needs to be explicitly made. You can't minimize such a
transformation while slipping it into law and then, as its
costs become apparent, just saying it will endure. In 1978
Congress passed and Jimmy Carter signed something called the
Middle-Income Student Assistance Act, which basically removed
most family income limitations from college student aid. The
nature of the legislation was not well understood at the
time; most of the income limits have since been restored.
Likewise, under the rubric of welfare reform, the
administration and advocacy groups are now discussing making
child care more or more or less an entitlement for all near-
poor and poor single parents whether they are on welfare or
not. But it's enormously expensive and should not be turned
into law as a kind of footnote. Legislators have a
responsibility to publicly face what they are authorizing and
to face as well the fiscal questions that follow.
As to disability, the administration and Congress both are
looking for ways to rationalize the policies into which the
government has stumbled and to cut the programs back. Sooner
or later they'll do it, but in the meantime people are left
again with the damaging impression that the giving and
getting of government benefits is mostly a game of grab. The
right way to make major policy of this sort is through the
front door, not the back.
____________________