In every presidential election, Democrats and Republicans lob charges and claims about the venerable old-age programs Social Security and Medicare. Older Americans are more reliable voters, and these types of attacks — which at The Fact Checker we call “Mediscare” — appear to have resonance. But caveat emptor — the claims are often misleading.
In her first campaign rally as the likely Democratic nominee, Vice President Harris falsely said that the GOP blueprint for governing in a new administration proposed cuts to Social Security. In a campaign speech after Harris replaced President Biden as former president Donald Trump’s opponent, Trump falsely claimed that Harris voted to cut Medicare and would raise the age to qualify for full Social Security benefits. Let’s take a look.
“His extreme 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. We know we need to take this seriously. Can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages. But here’s the thing. When you read it, you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”
— Harris, remarks in Milwaukee, July 23
Harris is referring to a Heritage Foundation report called “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page manifesto chock full of detailed conservative proposals — large (eliminating federal agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service) and small (eliminating T and U visas, which allow victims of human trafficking and crime to enter the United States). It’s not an official campaign document, and Trump has distanced himself from it, but a CNN review found that 140 people who worked in the Trump administration contributed to the report. (This is the ninth edition of the Mandate report since 1981.)
Yet Harris’s advice to read the report, popularly known as Project 2025, would prove to be a disappointment on this particular issue. Social Security is only tangentially referenced in the report, and there is no proposal to do anything with it, let alone “cut” it.
The report contains some Medicare recommendations, mainly to promote Medicare Advantage plans, which are managed by insurance companies with federal funds. Just over half of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, compared to traditional Medicare, which is run by the government and favored by Democrats.
“Her comment about cutting Social Security and Medicare is pure misinformation,” said Matthew Tragesser, a Heritage spokesman. “The Mandate makes tweaks to Medicare, but it really can’t be called a cut. The Mandate also never calls to cut funding for Medicare. Mostly, it advocates to push Medicare Advantage, which is the private-sector piece of Medicare that we think works more efficiently.”
The Harris campaign appears to be using Project 2025 as shorthand for all of Trump’s proposals, whether they are in the report or not. In a similar vein, the official X account of the campaign, Kamala HQ, on Sunday posted a video of GOP vice-presidential nominee JD Vance out of context.
“JD Vance endorses Project 2025: ‘We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power … I don’t think there’s a compromise that we’re gonna come with … Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re gonna keep losing.’”
Ben Domenech, who conducted the interview in the video for the Federalist Radio Hour, cried foul, saying the post is “falsely claiming he’s talking about Project 2025 when it’s almost four years before it existed.”
The Harris campaign defended making the link to Project 2025, saying Vance has deep ties to Heritage.
“Project 2025 is a blueprint for many of the dangerous policies we know that a second Trump term would include, and it is indisputable that in his first term, Donald Trump repeatedly tried to cut Social Security,” said campaign spokesman Joseph Costello. “If you listen to Trump speak for 30 seconds, it is crystal clear that a second term would be far more extreme and utterly unhinged than his first term, and with the Supreme Court coronating him as a king, there would be nothing stopping Trump from trying again to gut critical benefits and succeeding.”
When he was president, Trump left traditional Social Security alone, but his administration attempted, without success, to reduce benefits for Social Security Disability Insurance as well as Supplemental Security Income, which is administered by the Social Security Administration.
In this election, Trump has ruled out any changes to Social Security and dragged the rest of his party with him. Even the most conservative caucus in the House has pulled back on proposals to improve Social Security solvency.
Since 1995, the trustees of Social Security have warned, year after year, that a financing crunch would occur early in the 2030s, resulting in an immediate cut in benefits, unless Congress took action to address the problem. The Biden-Harris administration also has made no proposal, except to say in Biden’s 2024 budget proposal that “the Administration is committed to protecting and strengthening Social Security and opposes any attempt to cut Social Security benefits for current or future recipients.”
As president, Trump regularly proposed reductions in spending to providers in Medicare — which earned him attacks from Democrats. Most of these so-called cuts were not coming at the expense of seniors; they were intended to reduce out-of-pocket costs for seniors by making the program more efficient. Ironically, most of Trump’s proposals were borrowed from his predecessor, Barack Obama, who couldn’t get them through Congress because Republicans, in turn, attacked him for the proposals.
“I will not raise the retirement age of Social Security by one day, not by one year. We’re not going to raise it at all. You can bank on it. You can bank on it. They’re going to raise it. They’re going to raise it way up.”
— Trump, remarks at Turning Point Believers Summit, West Palm Beach, Fla., July 26
This is illogical. Democrats have always opposed raising the retirement age as a fix for Social Security. They prefer higher taxes on wealthy Americans.
Trump may be making this absurd accusation because he once backed raising the retirement age — leaving him vulnerable to this charge.
In a 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” published when Trump sought the presidential nomination of the Reform Party, Trump made an emphatic case for raising the retirement age from 67 to ensure the long-term health of the program.
“A firm limit at age seventy makes sense for people now under forty,” Trump wrote. “We’re living longer. We’re working longer. New medicines are extending healthy human life. Besides, how many times will you really want to take that trailer to the Grand Canyon? The way the workweek is going, it will probably be down to about twenty-five hours by then anyway. This is a sacrifice I think we all can make.”
“As vice president, she [Harris] even cast the tiebreaking vote to cut Medicare by $237 billion. Your Medicare. And remember Social Security is going to be wiped out because she’s going to put the illegals coming into our country into that system. It’s going to wipe out that system. You’re not going to have Social Security, you’re not going to have Medicare.”
— Trump, in the same speech
We scratched our head when we first saw this, but it turned out to be another illogical claim. Harris cast the tiebreaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a catchall bill that included provisions to lower prescription drug costs for seniors, such as imposing a monthly cap of $35 for insulin and requiring the federal government to negotiate to lower the prices of some drugs.
So how is this “cutting” Medicare? It’s not. The $237 billion figure refers to a 10-year estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that these drug provisions will reduce the federal budget deficit. In other words, this is a good thing — and certainly not a cut.
As for the claim that undocumented workers will “wipe out” Social Security and Medicare, Trump has previously earned Four Pinocchios for making this argument.
Undocumented immigrants improve the health of Social Security and Medicare by paying payroll taxes without receiving benefits. In our fact check, we calculated the figure for Social Security payments made by undocumented immigrants is about $27 billion a year. For Medicare, it should be at least $6 billion, as the Medicare tax is about 23 percent of the Social Security tax.
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