Kamala Harris repeats dubious claim that Donald Trump would cut Social Security

In the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats have repeatedly targeted former President Donald Trump as a threat to Social Security.

Vice President Kamala Harris, just over a week into her status as the presumptive Democratic nominee, repeated the line during a July 30 rally in Atlanta. 

"Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare," Harris said.

For this fact-check, we will focus on Trump’s plans for Social Security. We’ll cover Harris’ claim about Medicare in another fact-check.

During his many years in the public eye, Trump has provided his critics with a rich vein of statements expressing openness to cutting Social Security. But the Harris campaign ignores most of what Trump has said during the 2024 campaign — namely, that he will not cut Social Security and Medicare.

We previously rated a similar claim by President Joe Biden — whom Harris succeeded as presumptive nominee — Mostly False. The evidence the Harris campaign provided to PolitiFact for this article was essentially the same as Biden’s campaign gave us for our earlier fact-check. It’s no more persuasive now.

The key threat to the long-term viability of Social Security, the universal income-support program for older Americans, is a shortage of workers feeding their tax dollars into the system, plus a growing number of retirement-age Americans qualifying to receive benefits.

As the baby boom generation has increasingly shifted into retirement, fewer workers are paying into the system. 

Unless changes are made, such as increasing the retirement age or paring benefit levels, the trust fund that supports Social Security is poised to run out in the 2030s. If nothing is done, significant cuts would take effect.

However, cutting Social Security has long been the "third rail of politics" — touch it and you die politically — so even making smaller cuts to avoid bigger ones down the road has been controversial.

That’s why both Biden and Trump pledged in their 2024 campaigns not to cut the program.

Prior to the 2024 campaign, Trump has flirted with support for Social Security cuts. 

At least two occurred during the 2020 presidential campaign: a 2020 Fox News town hall that was clipped and shared June 12 by the Biden campaign and a 2020 interview with CNBC. 

And before he became president, Trump periodically opined that Social Security needed to be cut or privatized, including in a 2012 interview with CNBC; a 2004 appearance on MSNBC, and a 2000 book, "The America We Deserve," in which he called Social Security "a huge Ponzi scheme" and said he’d consider privatization.

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Paul Ryan

stated on March 31, 2010 in a speech to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs

In 2004, "20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. ... Another 20 percent were receiving almost 40 percent."

"The solution to the Great Social Security Crisis couldn’t be more obvious: Allow every American to dedicate some portion of their payroll taxes to a personal Social Security account that they could own and invest in stocks and bonds," he wrote. "We can also raise the age for receipt of full Social Security benefits to 70."

The Harris campaign also noted that as president, Trump submitted budget proposals that included cuts to Social Security. These were never implemented, due to opposition in Congress.

However, Harris (and Biden before her) glossed over what these cuts involved. The proposed cuts were focused on two parts of the program — Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income — not the more widely used old-age and survivor benefits. 

SSDI benefits people with physical and mental conditions that are severe enough to permanently keep them from working. SSI payments are limited to low-income Americans — older adults, or adults or children who are disabled or blind. 

While these cuts would have affected close to 10 million Americans, the pool of those who receive old-age and survivor benefits is almost seven times as large. The Harris campaign’’s decision to frame Trump’s record as cuts to "Social Security" may leave people assuming that Trump sought to cut old-age and survivor benefits, when he didn’t.

Biden and Harris both cited a March 11 remark by Trump on CNBC that, with regard to entitlement programs such as Social Security, "there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting."

But this is the exception to the rule for Trump during this campaign cycle, and he immediately walked back his CNBC comments. 

In an interview with the conservative outlet Breitbart News, Trump said he would "never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt" Social Security. He added, "We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them."

The rest of Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric is more aligned with his comment to Breitbart — that he does not intend to cut Social Security — than the openness to cuts that he suggested to CNBC. 

More than a year before the CNBC appearance, Trump posted a video to his campaign website in which he says not "a single penny" should be cut from Social Security. "DO NOT CUT the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives," Trump said. "Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it."

Trump has repeatedly said he would not cut Social Security at campaign rallies in Michigan and Georgia and in multiple posts on his Truth Social platform.

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, told PolitiFact in June that he "will continue to strongly protect Social Security and Medicare in his second term."

Harris said, "Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security."

Before the 2024 campaign, Trump said about a half dozen times that he’s open to major Social Security overhauls, including cuts and privatization. Most recently, in a March CNBC interview, Trump said of entitlement programs such as Social Security, "There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting." 

However, Trump quickly walked that statement back, and the CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the current presidential campaign. His campaign website says that not "a single penny" should be cut from Social Security, and he’s repeated similar lines in campaign rallies.

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give it a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.