Social Security is six years from an automatic 22% benefit cut, and for the first time in years, Congress is producing actual legislative proposals rather than just warnings.
If Social Security is going to be part of your retirement plan, two specific bills introduced in June 2026 deserve your attention, because whatever Congress eventually does to fix the program will likely be shaped in part by what’s moving now.
Here’s what each bill does, how they differ, and why the political pressure surrounding both is unlike anything Washington has felt since 1983.
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The House commission bill: A structured path to a vote
Representatives Tom Cole (R-OK) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) introduced the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act, H.R. 9187, in June 2026, modeled explicitly on the 1983 Greenspan Commission that produced the last major Social Security overhaul.
The bill does not change benefits or taxes directly. What it does is create a 13-member independent Commission on Long Term Social Security Solvency, appointed by the president and congressional leaders from both parties, charged with producing a solvency plan within one year that receives a guaranteed floor vote in Congress once both parties reach consensus.
The structure matters. The difficulty of Social Security reform has never been a shortage of ideas. The problem has always been that no party wants to own the pain of any fix individually. A commission with guaranteed floor consideration is a mechanism designed to force both parties to share the political risk simultaneously, removing the incentive to let the issue drift until it becomes someone else’s crisis.
Cole has introduced versions of this legislation across seven Congresses. This is not the first time the bill has been introduced. What is different now is the timeline.
The 2026 Social Security Trustees Report moved the OASI depletion date to Q4 2032, one quarter earlier than last year’s estimate, partly because the One Big Beautiful Bill reduced trust fund revenue by lowering taxes on Social Security benefits.
H.R. 9187 has been referred to two House committees and has drawn praise from the Bipartisan Policy Center Action, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Progressive Policy Institute, a cross-spectrum coalition not easily assembled.
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The Senate payroll tax proposal: Go directly at the cap
On June 23, 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Moreno (R-OH) published a joint op-ed in the New York Times announcing they are working on legislation to lift the payroll tax cap entirely. Under current law, the 12.4% Social Security payroll tax applies only to the first $184,500 of annual earnings in 2026. Any wages above that amount are exempt. A worker earning $90,000 pays the tax on every dollar, while a worker earning $400,000 pays it on less than half.
The senators’ proposal would remove that cap, requiring workers and their employers to pay the payroll tax on all earnings. The Peterson Foundation estimates the change would generate $3.4 trillion over 10 years, and the SSA’s own estimates find that eliminating the cap without adjusting the benefit formula would close roughly two-thirds of the program’s 75-year funding gap.
The proposal has critics on both sides. The Tax Foundation argues that removing the cap without corresponding benefit changes would sever the earned-benefit link that makes Social Security politically durable, effectively transforming part of it into a general income redistribution mechanism.
The Bipartisan Policy Center testified before the Senate Finance Committee that lifting the cap should be part of a solution, but not the whole solution, cautioning that “there is no credible reform package that relies exclusively on one side of the ledger.”
Why neither bill alone is enough
Both proposals represent real progress, but it’s worth being precise about what each one does and doesn’t do.
The commission bill doesn’t change a dollar of benefits or taxes. It creates a process. Whether that process produces a viable result depends entirely on whether the commission achieves the bipartisan consensus required to trigger a guaranteed floor vote. If it doesn’t, the bill produces nothing except a report.
The payroll cap bill, if passed in its current form, would meaningfully extend Social Security’s finances, but the Peterson Foundation analysis indicates it would not fully close the long-run gap on its own.
Any single-lever fix applied today would require either a payroll tax increase to 16.65% or a 25.2% benefit cut to restore 75-year solvency. Lifting the cap is a large step, but it moves the line rather than completing the fix.
The most likely eventual outcome is what it was in 1983: a negotiated package combining elements from multiple proposals, with the political pressure of the deadline finally forcing action that would not otherwise happen.
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Bottom line
Congress has known Social Security needs fixing for decades, but the problem has always been just far enough away to defer. That calculation is changing. With OASI depletion now projected inside a single presidential term, every senator and representative elected this November will serve during the period when the program either gets fixed or starts paying reduced benefits.
For retirees and anyone trying to get on track for retirement, the practical response is the same regardless of which legislative path succeeds. Don’t build a plan that requires Social Security’s full current benefit to survive unchanged.
Some combination of higher taxes for workers and adjusted benefits for future claimants is the near-certain shape of any solution. Planning for that range of outcomes now is more reliable than waiting to see where the lines land.
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