At These Key Moments, AARP Stood Up for Social Security

“It became, gradually, this very popular program that was politically untouchable,” he says.

Despite Social Security being labeled the “third rail” of American politics, plenty of elected officials have tried to scale back the program. Indeed, Sweeney says one of AARP’s biggest wins came in 2012, when lawmakers proposed using a more conservative inflation index to calculate the annual COLA.

In 1972, AARP pushed lawmakers to make those COLAs automatic rather than subject to a congressional vote, as they had been since Social Security’s inception. That campaign was successful, and three years later, the first annual COLA landed in beneficiaries’ bank accounts, increasing benefits by 8 percent.

Under that law, annual COLA changes are tied to a federal inflation measure called the Consumer Price Index for Urban Workers (CPI-W). But in 2012, as President Barack Obama and members of Congress were debating ways to reduce federal spending, the COLA method was suddenly on the table. AARP and other groups went into overdrive, pressing lawmakers to abandon the stingier inflation gauge, known as the Chained CPI, which over time would have reduced benefits. 

Such a move would “take $112 billion out of the pockets of current and future Social Security beneficiaries in the next 10 years alone,” AARP’s then-CEO, Barry Rand, wrote in a November 2012 letter to Obama and members of Congress. He called the change “inappropriate and unwarranted,” noting that “Social Security is not the cause of our current large budget deficits.”

The measure did not gain traction, and by 2014, Obama had dropped changing the COLA calculation from his budget proposal.

“There’s probably 100 small things like that that we’ve done over the years,” says Sweeney. “It’s the kind of work AARP does day in, day out … so that when you need Social Security, it’s there for you, and it’s strong.”

Attendees wearing Social Security-themed AARP shirts await the start of an event for John Kasich, governor of Ohio and 2016 Republican presidential candidate, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Customer service in the spotlight

Fast-forward to March 2025, when the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced in a call with reporters that it would no longer allow beneficiaries to confirm their identity over the phone and would instead require them to do so in person or online. That would mean people who did not have an online My Social Security account would have to go to a local Social Security office to apply for their benefits.

Sweeney says he and AARP colleagues quickly huddled to discuss the announcement and decided within an hour that AARP had to oppose it.

“We put together an effort to really push back on that and to try to get that reversed,” he says. The key? Talking to people in AARP’s state offices across the country about how it would create hardship for older adults in their communities.

“The Alaska office was the one that really stuck with me,” Sweeney recalls. “They said, ‘Look, in Alaska, there are lots of people who would have to fly on an airplane to get to their nearest Social Security office.’”

AARP quickly activated its members “so that they were communicating directly their concerns,” he says. “I think we had about 2 million people over the course of two weeks who sent emails to Congress urging them to push back on this.”

Within a month, the SSA had dropped the plan.

In late July, AARP quickly came out against a new SSA plan to limit telephone access for four routine services, including reporting a change of address to the agency or getting a tax document. The proposal, which sought to require the use of an online identity verification system, would have steered more than 3.4 million customers a year to local Social Security offices for services now fully available by phone.  

After AARP asked SSA officials to reconsider, the agency revised its proposal to make using the online verification optional. Kingson, the Syracuse professor, says AARP’s membership is its most powerful advocacy tool.

“For most of the issues around Social Security, engaging the American public is probably the single most important thing we can do to protect the system,” he says. “And AARP has one of the best mechanisms [for accomplishing that].”

The next round

Sweeney says AARP is already preparing for the next big fight: shoring up Social Security’s finances. The 2025 annual report from the program’s Board of Trustees, issued in June, projects that the program’s trust funds will run short of money in 2034. Unless Congress acts to address the shortfall, beneficiaries will face an estimated 19 percent cut in their monthly payments.

AARP pushed Congress to address the last solvency crisis in 1983, which was key to protecting benefits for all beneficiaries. The organization did not oppose the bill that eventually passed and was signed into law. But it did object to some of the specific provisions, in part because the measure gradually raised the full retirement age, says David Certner, AARP’s longtime legislative counsel, who recently retired. To avert a shortfall this time, Congress will have to increase the tax revenue that funds Social Security, reduce its overall spending on benefits (for example, by raising the full retirement age again) or adopt a plan that combines both approaches.

“It is going to be a tough fight for sure,” Sweeney says. But he’s confident lawmakers will act, because they won’t want to go home and tell their constituents they will face a nearly 20 percent reduction in Social Security payments.

AARP has already been pressing members of Congress to consider the various options now rather than wait until the trust funds are near depletion — and to address Social Security transparently and with full deliberation rather than turning the issue over to a fast-track commission, as many lawmakers have advocated. 

“My job is to go and talk to people on Capitol Hill in Congress about the issues that matter to our members,” Sweeney says. “And I always remind them that for an average AARP member, for an average person over the age of 65 or 67, that [Social Security] payment is everything. It’s the food on their table, it’s their health care costs, it’s how they pay for a roof over their head.”