[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 13849]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]





                 SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY TRUST FUND

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from New 
York (Mr. Reed) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. REED. Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of important issues before the 
House this week, but I wanted to take an opportunity to raise an issue 
that we have been working on in our office for quite some time.
  We, as a body, Mr. Speaker, will be faced with an opportunity, 
hopefully, to resolve this issue here shortly in the next few months, 
and that is the issue of the Social Security disability insurance trust 
fund.
  Not a lot of people are aware--and I just read the Social Security 
trustees report over the summer--that the disability trust fund goes 
insolvent in 2016. That means millions of Americans who rely on Social 
Security disability benefits are looking at a situation where their 
benefits are going to be cut 20 percent because of the insolvency of 
the Social Security trust fund--2016, Mr. Speaker, that is right around 
the corner.
  When I raised this issue 2 years ago with the White House, with Jack 
Lew--our Treasury Secretary--in our Committee on Ways and Means 
hearing, I asked him 2 years ago: What is the plan? What is the 
solution to this problem?
  What I was ultimately told was this is what we are going to do: we 
are just going to take money from the Social Security retirement fund 
and move it over to the disability trust fund and bail it out.
  Well, in my private life in business, I knew a lot of businessowners, 
and what that essentially was, it is robbing Peter to pay Paul because 
the Social Security retirement fund is on a path to insolvency just a 
few short years down the road.
  I said we could do better. That is why I was glad to join with my 
colleague, Sam Johnson, who chairs the Subcommittee on Social Security 
here in Washington, to change the rules to make sure that that solution 
would not be the one that we follow here in 2015 and 2016. We can do 
better.
  You know why we can do better? It is because we care. We care about 
the people that are in the disability trust fund, and we need to listen 
to those people. This is what their experience is with the disability 
trust fund today. They are frustrated. It is a bureaucracy. It is a 
mess.
  We have overpayments. We have fraudulent payments. We have a system 
that penalizes people returning to work, rather than trying to 
incentivize them and stand with them when they return to work.
  We had an individual by the name of Mike Zelly come before the 
committee and testify to us, and he is in the disability trust fund. He 
was in a horrific automobile accident 36 years ago and has been in a 
wheelchair ever since.
  These are the people we should listen to. These are the people that 
know the disability trust fund the best. What his testimony to us was, 
he says we should seize this opportunity to fix this problem, take care 
of the bureaucracy, make sure the overpayments don't occur because, 
when an overpayment occurs to a disability recipient, guess who has to 
pay it back? It is the disability recipient because of the Social 
Security Administration's incompetence. That is not right. That is not 
fair.
  Most importantly, what he talked about in his 36 years in the 
disability trust fund is that, when he tried to return to work, he was 
faced with obstacle after obstacle of a bureaucracy that said, if you 
do that, you will lose your benefit. That is not right.
  Mike Zelly offered ideas on how we can improve the system to 
streamline this bureaucracy. This is the process someone in the Social 
Security disability trust fund has to go through in order to try to go 
back to work. We need to simplify it, and we need to stand with the 
American work ethic for the people in the disability trust fund that 
want to return to work.
  There was a recent Brookings Institution report that came across my 
desk that I read. There was 40 percent return on the beneficiaries in 
the disability trust fund that indicated they would like to return to 
work, but because of the bureaucracy, there was fear. There was a sense 
that, if they did that, they would lose their benefit, and they just 
couldn't risk it.
  That is why we are offering commonsense reforms here out of our 
office, out of the Committee on Ways and Means, out of this House, 
hopefully, shortly, so that what we can do is make sure that those 
disability trust fund recipients don't look at a 20 percent cut in 
2016.
  We will hold them harmless, and we will make sure we do what is 
necessary in order to make sure that our obligations and promises under 
the disability trust fund are met to those individuals because that is 
the right thing to do.
  We cannot lose this opportunity to modernize the Social Security 
disability trust fund to make sure that we stand with those that want 
to return to work and believe in the American work ethic like we do.
  I ask my colleagues to join with us on a bipartisan basis, and there 
has been an indication of bipartisan work that we have been able to 
show here in the initial conversations.
  Let's modernize the disability trust fund; let's cure the waste, 
fraud, and abuse, but most importantly, let's stand with the 
individuals like Mike Zelly who want to return to work because it gives 
him dignity and it gives him a sense that he is contributing rather 
than being in any way a burden on the system.

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