[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 160 (Wednesday, September 16, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5624-S5625]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Social Security

  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, we have recently seen yet another 
manufactured crisis by the Democrats for the benefit of the upcoming 
election. This is in regard to scaring the people about some notion 
that only Republicans would think about taking away Social Security and 
Medicare. It is not true that any Member of this Congress will do that, 
but it always comes up as TV advertising against the Republicans; you 
are going to scare old people into thinking Social Security is going to 
be gone if you vote Republican.
  So this is another election season. If there are not any real issues 
regarding Social Security, the Democrats make one up, and they do it, 
of course, to scare the people into believing that some people want to 
destroy the program, not realizing that it is such a part of the social 
fabric of the American population that nobody would think of doing it.
  We saw it in the last Presidential election when Secretary Clinton 
didn't have a basis to attack then-Candidate Trump on Social Security 
because Trump campaigned on the basis that he wasn't going to cut 
Social Security, but that didn't stop them from making things up. With 
their lacking any real ammunition, Clinton's allies here in the U.S. 
Senate decided to manufacture a crisis.
  Now, why does something that happened in 2016 come up now? It is an 
example that this is an ongoing situation, and it is happening in 2020.
  Back in 2016, three prominent Democratic Senators conjured up false 
claims about a nominee for the position of public trustee of the Social 
Security and Medicare trust funds. That nominee happened to be a 
Republican who was nominated--can you imagine this?--by a Democratic 
President. He was already on there as having been nominated for another 
term.
  The false claims published in the Huffington Post were that this 
nominee, promoted by President Obama, was a Koch brothers-funded 
individual because he worked at an educational institution that 
received grants from the Koch Foundation. I don't know whether they 
even made an attempt to connect this individual to the Koch funds, but 
it is irrelevant at this point. The Democrats claimed that this single 
individual somehow duped all of the other trustees, including all of 
the other Obama administration officials, into buying off on 
assumptions that would lead to an overstatement of the financial crisis 
facing Social Security.
  According to the three Democratic Senators, this was so bad that the 
Chief Actuary of Social Security felt compelled to write special notes 
to trustee reports and identify how shocking the assumptions were. Of 
course, that would have meant that one single public trustee who 
happened to be a Republican duped outstanding Democrats who were also 
trustees: Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell, 
Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, and then the additional Democratic public 
trustee. If you had bought into the Democrats' allegations at the time, 
it would have meant that all of those Obama officials had been duped 
and had been too inept to see what had been going on and that only the 
Chief Actuary could have seen the light.
  Well, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance at that time 
investigated those allegations and showed that they were flatout lies. 
Even the Washington Post identified the lies in an op-ed titled: ``The 
showdown Democrats don't need to have.'' The Post concluded that the 
ultimate victims of what they called ``petty politicization'' would be 
``the perceived nonpartisanship and objectivity of key government 
reports--that is, the very values Senate Democrats claim to be 
upholding.''
  The Democrats used their misinformation campaign to run a smear job 
on a very qualified and well-respected nominee. They also used it to 
run ads against anyone who voted in favor of that nominee, including 
ads against me in my most recent reelection.
  Unfortunately, even though Social Security's Chief Actuary was 
clearly implicated in the Democratic lies, he remained silent as then-
Chairman Hatch and even the Washington Post identified how ridiculous 
and false the Democrats' claims were.
  The Chief Actuary's position, apparently, is that, even if his office 
is being implicated as supporting clearly false and very public claims 
during an election season, he will just sit quietly and let them go by 
rather than admit to or apologize for being used once it is pointed out 
to him that he is being used.
  All of that was 4 years ago. It is 2020 now, and it is all happening 
again. Here we are in another Presidential election season, and, of 
course, like clockwork, we are getting another round of misinformation 
from the Democratic candidate and his supporters in the Senate. The 
Washington Post Fact Checker labels the current scheme in a headline 
that reads: ``Biden campaign attacks a Trump Social Security `plan' 
that does not exist.''
  Now, that was a Washington Post article. Not often does the 
Washington Post talk about things that might defend Republican 
positions against the Democrats.
  This time around, the misinformation stems from a letter written to 
Social Security's Chief Actuary by four Democratic Senators, including 
the minority leader, the ranking member of the Committee on Finance, 
and Senator Sanders, who has been counseling former Vice President 
Biden.
  In a letter, these Democrat Senators asked the Chief Actuary to 
analyze hypothetical legislation--now, those words ``hypothetical 
legislation'' have to be emphasized--what they say, even they wouldn't 
support eliminating payroll taxes. Of course, those Senators could 
easily find the information that they were seeking by looking at the 
latest Social Security trustees' report. Instead, for purely political 
reasons, they wanted to draw in the Chief Actuary once again
  The same Actuary of 4 years ago is being used here once again, and 
the Chief Actuary at Social Security seems to gladly have played along 
and written a response. He wrote that his office was not aware that 
anyone had proposed the hypothetical legislation.

[[Page S5625]]

Nonetheless, he identified that, without payroll tax revenue and no 
replacement from the general fund, the trust funds would run out of 
money pretty quickly.
  Of course, this is obvious to anyone who has even slight knowledge of 
these programs, but information was not the aim of the Democratic 
Senators' letter. Instead, it was to put forward a silly hypothetical 
case that doesn't correspond to anything that anyone has or is 
proposing. Of course, they attributed it to the President of the United 
States.
  I know you all now see the purpose of this replay--because it is an 
election year. They used the Chief Actuary's response to claim that 
authoritative sources have shown that President Trump has a plan to 
essentially defund Social Security, and in due course they engaged in 
the cottage industry of groups which exist here in Washington, DC, that 
regularly scare seniors and the disabled, especially before an 
election, about some sort of backdoor plan or Trojan horse plan to 
destroy Social Security, and the Democratic Senators used the Chief 
Actuary's response to feed the Biden campaign with a false talking 
point about Social Security.
  So you see the motives of these Senators in their using the Chief 
Actuary as their tool. You see it pretty clearly. The Biden campaign 
has run ads, stating, among other mistruths, ``If Trump gets his way, 
Social Security benefits will run out in just 3 years from now.''
  Let's go back to the Washington Post. Even the Post's Fact Checker 
gave those ads four Pinocchios, meaning that they contained a whopper 
of a lie. The Fact Checker also concluded: ``To make a long story 
short, Democrats ginned up a letter from the chief actuary to describe 
a plan that does not currently exist.''
  In a followup letter that Ranking Member Kevin Brady of the House 
Ways and Means Committee and I wrote to Social Security's Chief 
Actuary, we expressed our concerns about the Democrats having, once 
again, used his office for political purposes, and, once again, it 
refers back to the 2016 era that I have already talked about. From his 
response, we learned a few things.
  First, we got confirmation that no one has a plan to defund Social 
Security, including the President of the United States. That confirms 
that the Democrats' letter was just pretty silly, but not oddly, pure 
politics.
  Second, we got confirmation that the Democratic Senators, during the 
2016 election, published lies in the Huffington Post article, invoking 
the Chief Actuary in an effort to smear a trustee nominee.
  Third, we learned that Social Security's Chief Actuary feels 
compelled to respond to any hypothetical posed to him by any Senator, 
independent of how silly or blatantly political it would be.
  Of course the Chief Actuary shouldn't be so compelled. With that 
latter lesson, it would be easy for a Republican Senator to ask the 
Chief Actuary to analyze hypotheticals corresponding to the allegations 
made by Senator Sanders, one of the authors of the letter, concerning 
the ``hypothetical legislation'' about Vice President Biden's history 
on Social Security.
  Senator Sanders, during the primary, has run political ads 
characterizing Biden's record on Social Security, saying that Biden's 
claim that he has always protected Social Security are ``patently 
false.''
  It wouldn't be hard to send a hypothetical in for analysis by the 
Social Security Chief Actuary to get an answer to reinforce Senator 
Sanders' views that former Vice President Biden has not acted to 
protect Social Security.
  It wouldn't be hard to send a letter to the Chief Actuary asking 
about how Senator Sanders' plans to reform Social Security--which 
Senator Harris has cosponsored--would harm the middle class by raising 
payroll taxes, with no corresponding benefits for people with incomes 
below Biden's $400,000 threshold for defining who is rich and who is 
not.
  It certainly wouldn't be hard to construct politically charged 
hypothetical legislation and ask the Chief Actuary about it in order to 
make political points and use the Actuary's position for political 
purposes.
  It happens that the Chief Actuary doesn't exist for the purpose of 
political interference.
  In my view, though, none of those would be a proper use of Social 
Security taxpayer resources, in the same way that the Democrats are 
wasting resources using the Chief Actuary for political purposes. So 
Democrats should stop wasting Social Security's resources trying to 
construct false and misleading political points to use in elections to 
feed their political base and dark money groups who then use the points 
in social media and attack ads against Republicans. But that is how 
they wasted the taxpayers' money--by writing the letter and eating up 
the time of the Chief Actuary for nothing other than pure partisan 
politics.
  They should also stop politicizing Social Security's actuaries and 
the Social Security trustee's position in their transparent attempt to 
mislead the public and try to score political points about Social 
Security.
  The American public should--especially during even years, in the 
runup to elections--turn a deaf ear to scare tactics that Democrats 
continue to use on Social Security beneficiaries. But when senior 
citizens who aren't sophisticated in the operation of the Federal 
Government or the uses of politics to scare people--they might believe 
this stuff. So you are doing a disservice to a lot of people who 
shouldn't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
  As well, I think journalists should be more responsible when 
reporting on these political shenanigans, although I will note that 
even the most recent ploy was at least called out by fact checkers and 
given four Pinocchios.
  Rather than acting like demagogues on Social Security, we should do 
what we can to improve these programs. Social Security trustees across 
administrations have continually and consistently recommended 
addressing the projected trust fund shortfalls since protected benefits 
will continue to outpace revenues.
  Some sort of reform is inevitable, but outside of broad reform, there 
are many programmatic improvements that can help make the programs work 
better for beneficiaries and today's workers.
  While not as encompassing as broad reforms, there are plenty of areas 
that we and Social Security Commissioner Saul continue to monitor and 
work to reduce backlogs and improve services.
  Just recently, for example, the Senate passed by unanimous consent a 
bill that we entitled ``Improving Social Security's Service to Victims 
of Identity Theft Act.'' That was sponsored by this Senator and Senator 
Sinema. This bipartisan effort will help people who fall victim to 
identity theft by providing improved services from Social Security with 
a single point of contact.
  In my view, more bipartisan work to improve the programs is the way 
we should go. Partisan attacks to scare beneficiaries into believing 
that people are out to destroy people's retirement and disability 
benefits do nothing to help working, disabled, and retired Americans.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Young). The Senator from New Hampshire