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Andy Markowitz is an AARP senior writer and editor covering Social Security and retirement. He is a former editor of the Prague Post and Baltimore City Paper.
Video: AARP CEO on Social Security’s 90-Year Legacy
Few things reach as broadly into American life as Social Security.
Some 69.4 million people — about 1 in 5 U.S. residents — received a payment from the program in April 2025. Most of them are retired older adults, many reliant on their earned benefits to put food on the table and pay the bills. Almost every working American pays into the system via payroll taxes, with the promise that Social Security will be there for them, too, when they need it.
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That promise has been there since the program’s inception nearly 90 years ago. That’s why poll after poll shows overwhelming, bipartisan public support for Congress to prioritize Social Security’s long-term financial health, maintaining the program’s ability to provide uninterrupted benefits and quality customer service.
And it’s why AARP has been fighting for decades to protect and strengthen Social Security, a commitment Dr. Myechia Minter-Jordan, AARP’s CEO, reiterated in a May 14 video message kicking off our 90-day countdown to the program’s 90th birthday.
“We are honoring this milestone and doubling down on our fight to protect Social Security for the next 90 years,” Minter-Jordan said.
A nine-decade legacy
Social Security was born on Aug. 14, 1935, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, establishing a national social insurance program with guaranteed benefits for retired workers.
The program now provides critical financial support not just to retired workers but to their spouses, children and survivors, and to people sidelined from work by disability.
“Through decades of economic upheaval and social change, Social Security has kept millions of Americans out of poverty — Americans who earned it with every paycheck after a lifetime of hard work,” Minter-Jordan said.
Over that time, she said, AARP has “fought cuts to the cost-of-living adjustment, pushed back against using Social Security to address budget deficits and opposed efforts to privatize it.”
More recently, she noted, AARP has focused attention on the program’s customer service crisis, spotlighting “inexcusably long wait times” for people to get phone and in-person help from the Social Security Administration and demanding answers from the agency on how it would make improvements while shedding more than 12 percent of its workforce.
“Today, the stakes feel particularly high,” Minter-Jordan said, adding that AARP activists have sent more than 2 million messages to Congress via emails and calls to raise concerns about proposed service changes.
“For 90 years, Social Security has never missed a payment,” she said. “AARP and our millions of members across the country are not about to let that happen now.”
Learn more about AARP’s fight to protect Social Security and see more coverage of the program’s 90th birthday.
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