Social Security commissioner predicts program will last 'for another 90 years'

Frank Bisignano, the commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA), said Monday the program will last another 90 years.

“This is a long journey. It’s 90 years old. It’ll be around for another 90 years,” Bisignano said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

The SSA will release its annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) on Wednesday, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports data for September inflation, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI).

For this year, the SSA increased benefits for the roughly 75 million recipients of Social Security by 2.8 percent. The Senior Citizens League projects the program’s COLA for 2027 will be 3.5 percent, which would be the fourth-highest adjustment since 2008. 

That would boost the average monthly Social Security benefit check, which the federal government first sent in 1937, from $1,941.76 to $2,009.72, based on August data from the SSA.

“People are very, very grateful for it, and they look forward to it,” Bisignano said Monday of the annual COLA.

Annual inflation, as measured by the CPI, was 3.4 percent in August. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland projects the BLS will measure year-over-year inflation as 3.6 percent in September.

Earlier this year, Bisignano and other Trump administration officials said Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund will cover only 78 percent of scheduled benefits starting in the early 2030s.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have since proposed multiple solutions for the program’s impending funding shortfall, while President Trump reiterated his view last week that the federal government should invest Social Security’s trust fund in the stock market.

“I wanted to ride with Social Security being fully invested in the stock market in the first month of my first year,” Trump said in the Oval Office during an event to tout his administration’s investment accounts for children.

“Had we done that, Social Security right now would be the richest entity anywhere in the world. … I was met with tremendous criticism by the Democrats and some Republicans, because … they felt it was risky,” the president added.