Andrew Biggs and the Fight Over Social Security Reform

Andrew Biggs is the American Enterprise Institute economist whose Social Security reform ideas center on replacing the current earnings-based benefit with a flat anti-poverty payment, layering mandatory private retirement accounts on top, and rejecting the premise that most American seniors face a retirement crisis. He is one of the most cited voices on the right in the debate over what to do before the trust fund runs dry, and one of the most contested by progressive economists.

Who He Is

Biggs served as principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration under President George W. Bush, the agency’s top policy deputy, after earlier stints as associate commissioner for retirement policy and deputy commissioner for policy.¹² He has been a senior fellow at AEI since 2008, focusing on Social Security, retirement policy, and public pensions.³

President Biden nominated him to the Social Security Advisory Board in 2022 on the recommendation of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, and the Senate Finance Committee held his confirmation hearing on January 31, 2024.⁴⁵

What He Actually Proposes

The heart of Biggs’s reform plan, laid out in National Affairs, is a two-part system. The federal government would pay a flat monthly benefit set at the federal poverty threshold and indexed to wage growth. Every employer would then be required to offer a retirement plan with automatic enrollment and an employer match of at least 1.5 percent of pay, invested in low-cost index funds.⁶

In one version of the plan, single retirees would receive 28 percent of the national average wage and couples 41 percent, translating to roughly $19,557 and $28,637 based on projected 2024 wages. Brookings researchers have estimated this structure would cost about 20 percent less than current Social Security.⁷

The broader package includes several other moves:

Gradually raise the early retirement age from 62 to 65.
Eliminate the Social Security payroll tax for workers over 62 to encourage continued employment.
Eliminate the retirement earnings test.
Offer payroll tax reductions for families with children under 18.⁶

The design shifts the program’s purpose. Instead of replacing a portion of prior wages across the income scale, government-provided Social Security would exist to keep retirees out of poverty, and the market-based savings layer would do the wage-replacement work.

His Backup Plan If Congress Does Nothing

In 2024, Biggs and co-author Kristin Shapiro published what they called a “Simple Plan” for the moment the trust fund is depleted. Rather than the roughly 21 percent across-the-board benefit cut that would otherwise apply, they argued the executive branch has legal discretion to allocate remaining payroll tax revenue by priority. Their proposal caps monthly benefits at $2,050 in 2024 dollars, which they estimate leaves about half of retirees with their full scheduled benefits while progressively cutting higher-income beneficiaries by up to 40 percent.⁸

The legal hook is the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Morton v. Ruiz, which Biggs and Shapiro cite as authority for executive flexibility when appropriated funds fall short of promised benefits. Biggs has framed the plan as a negotiating lever: by protecting low earners automatically at the point of insolvency, it forces Congress to find funding only for the higher-earner portion of benefits, which he argues would break the political stalemate.⁹

Why He Thinks Deep Restructuring Is Acceptable

Underneath the proposals sits a factual claim that shapes everything else. In his 2025 book, The Real Retirement Crisis, Biggs argues that Americans have more retirement income today than ever, that the shift from traditional pensions to 401(k) plans has largely worked, and that the typical American senior is among the wealthiest in the world.¹⁰ He points to Federal Reserve survey data showing 86 percent of seniors view their financial situation favorably.⁸

On how U.S. benefits compare internationally, Biggs argues the fair comparison is other English-speaking countries rather than Scandinavian or Continental European welfare states, and by that measure he places U.S. Social Security benefits “in the middle of the pack.”¹¹

He has acknowledged real weakness on the private savings side. In work with Alicia Munnell of the Center for Retirement Research, he found that a median-wage worker contributing steadily from age 25 to 60 could theoretically accumulate $364,000, while the typical 60-year-old holds only $92,000. They attributed about two-thirds of that gap to the system’s immaturity and lack of universal coverage.¹²

Where He Stands on Privatization Now

Biggs was central to President Bush’s 2005 partial-privatization push. At a January 2005 forum, Bush identified him as a technical expert on the system, and Biggs argued that personal accounts invested in the market could yield higher returns than the trust fund.¹³ That plan combined “progressive price indexing,” which slowed benefit growth for higher earners, with personal accounts that would have let workers divert up to four percentage points of the payroll tax.¹⁴

At his 2024 Senate confirmation hearing, Senator Sherrod Brown pressed him on that history. Biggs told the committee he does not currently support privatizing Social Security and has not written in favor of private accounts since 2005. He said he favors a benefit structure “more focused on maintaining and protecting” benefits for the lowest-income retirees while reducing benefit growth for high earners.⁵ His current mandatory savings proposal sits alongside, not inside, Social Security itself, and would be funded by employer contributions rather than diverted payroll taxes.⁶

Where the Critics Push Back

Alicia Munnell of the Center for Retirement Research issued a detailed critique of the Biggs-Shapiro insolvency plan in November 2024. She argued it would “undermine support for the program” and “delay a real solution” by lowering the pressure on Congress to act, and characterized it as a move to convert Social Security from universal social insurance into a welfare program for low earners. She also questioned the legal footing, noting that legal experts doubt the current Supreme Court would defer to executive benefit-distribution decisions, particularly after recent rulings narrowing agency deference.⁹

Brookings researchers led by Wendell Primus grouped Biggs’s flat-benefit proposal with similar plans from Cato and the Progressive Policy Institute, calling them “radical changes” that would require deep benefit cuts for many future retirees and abandon the social insurance model. They argue elderly poverty, properly measured, is already around six percent and does not justify dismantling wage replacement. Their preferred fix is targeted adjustments to Supplemental Security Income and Medicare premiums.⁷

Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute has argued Biggs holds contradictory positions, criticizing public pension plans for assuming high investment returns while previously promoting private Social Security accounts on the basis of strong market gains. She also contends his push to move public employees from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k)-style plans overlooks recruitment and retention effects and the documented inadequacy of many workers’ 401(k) contributions.¹⁵

In July 2023 testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, Biggs made his own counter-case: closing the funding shortfall exclusively through tax increases on higher earners would be inconsistent with Social Security’s history, out of step with how government pensions worldwide are funded, and unnecessary given what he called record-high benefit levels and record-low elderly poverty.¹⁶

What He Says About Current Proposals

Biggs has been sharply skeptical of the bipartisan plan by Senators Bill Cassidy and Tim Kaine to create a sovereign wealth fund for Social Security. Their proposal would borrow roughly $1.5 trillion over five years for stock market investment. In a July 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed he called the idea “too good to be true,” and in a January 2026 analysis he ran over 1,000 market simulations and concluded there was only a 30 percent chance the fund would generate enough to repay the borrowed debt, and a 10 percent chance it would fail to cover any of it.¹⁷¹⁸

After the June 2026 trustees report projected the retirement trust fund would be depleted in late 2032 with only 78 percent of benefits payable afterward, Biggs argued the report’s assumptions on birth rates, productivity growth, and mortality were too optimistic.¹⁹²⁰ In a late-June 2026 podcast he put the true long-term funding gap at 4.8 to 5 percent of payroll, above the trustees’ official 4.4 percent, and framed the shortfall as a governance problem more than an economic one.²¹

1
U.S. Congress. Andrew G. Biggs Witness Biography
2
Obama White House Archives. President Obama Announces Appointment of Seven Individuals to Financial Oversight Board
3
American Enterprise Institute. Andrew G. Biggs
4
Social Security Advisory Board. President Biden to Nominate Retirement Expert Andrew Biggs to SSAB
5
Kiplinger. Social Security Board Nominee Biggs
6
National Affairs. A New Vision for Social Security
7
Brookings Institution. Insufficient Financing Should Not Provoke Dramatic Changes to Social Security
8
American Enterprise Institute. A Simple Plan to Address Social Security Insolvency
9
Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. A Simple Plan to Fix Social Security: Be Suspicious, Very Suspicious
10
American Enterprise Institute. The Real Retirement Crisis
11
American Enterprise Institute. How Generous Is Social Security
12
Los Angeles Times. Why Are 401(k)/IRA Balances Substantially Below Potential
13
Social Security Administration. Presidential Statements on Social Security
14
Financial Advisor Magazine. Would a 2005 Social Security Proposal Have Kept It Solvent
15
Economic Policy Institute. Andrew Biggs, Social Security, Pensions
16
American Enterprise Institute. Hearing on Protecting Social Security for All
17
The Wall Street Journal. A Risky Plan for Social Security
18
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. A Sovereign Debt Fund Cant Save Social Security
19
CNBC. Social Security Trustees Report Depletion Dates
20
SocialSecurityReport.org. The 2026 Trustees Report: Challenging the Optimistic Assumptions
21
Show-Me Institute. The Social Security Crisis Is Worse Than You Think With Andrew G Biggs