The Social Security Administration’s Office of the Chief Actuary keeps a very particular kind of stationery: dry, unfailingly polite, and capable of detonating a fiscal grenade. On September 15, 2026, Chief Actuary Karen P. Glenn sent one of these letters to Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, scoring a Supplemental Security Income overhaul that would cost the federal government an additional $316 billion over the next decade. It arrived, as these things do, with a straight face and a clean conscience — and an awkward footnote: the same week the letter went out, the SSA’s own inspector general was still trying to explain why the agency cannot stop overpaying people whose bank accounts it never bothered to check twice.
An Actuary’s Gift, Itemized
The letter to Pelosi scores a seven-provision proposal drafted by Dr. Wendell Primus of the Brookings Institution, and it is, structurally, a marvel of quiet generosity. Provision A raises the SSI federal benefit rate by $70 for individuals and $105 for couples. Provision B triples the general income exclusion. Provision C triples the earned income exclusion. Provision D excludes 40 percent of Social Security benefits from the SSI income calculation entirely. Provision E quintuples the countable resource limit, from $2,000 to $10,000 for individuals, while sheltering up to $50,000 in retirement savings from counting against eligibility at all. Provision F eliminates the consideration of in kind support (food, shelter, a couch to sleep on) as income. Provision G has the IRS hand SSA a list of people who might qualify but haven’t applied.
Total combined cost through 2034: $316 billion, layered on top of a baseline SSI program the actuaries already project will cost $722 billion over that same window. The single largest line item is not the benefit increase everyone will read about in the press release; it is Provision G, the outreach provision, at $135 billion, more than the benefit hike and the resource limit changes combined. Glenn is admirably honest about the uncertainty here, noting flatly that “the actual effect that this provision would have on participation is uncertain.” One might call that the actuarial equivalent of a shrug, delivered at a cost of $135 billion.
A Proposal With a Long, Familiar Résumé
None of this is new, and that is precisely the point worth dwelling on. Provision D, the 40 percent Social Security exclusion, is lifted nearly verbatim from a 2024 Brookings paper by Primus and coauthors. Primus, notably, already has a different SSA-scored proposal circulating through Congress; a broader solvency package he sent to then Minority Whip Steny Hoyer produced its own actuarial letter in January 2025, one dealing with the OASDI trust funds rather than SSI alone. Provision E, the resource limit increase, is essentially the text of the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, and the broader package overlaps substantially with the SSI Restoration Act, reintroduced this past March by Rep. Adelita Grijalva, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, and Rep. James Moylan, with 30 cosponsors.
What is missing from the Pelosi letter is a bill number. This is not legislation being scored; it is an idea being pre-scored, run through the actuary’s office by a private economist working through a member’s office, presumably so that whoever eventually introduces the combined package can wave around a $316 billion figure with an official SSA letterhead attached to it. It is a perfectly normal way to legislate in Washington, and it is also, if you squint, a way of credentialing an idea through an agency whose job is arithmetic, not politics, so that the arithmetic can later be cited as though it settled the politics.
The Resource Limit and the Inconvenient Auditor
Here is where the story gets uncomfortable for everyone involved. The SSA’s own Office of the Inspector General published its Fiscal Year 2024 compliance audit under the Payment Integrity Information Act in May 2025, and it found that SSA failed two of the ten reporting requirements, both in the SSI program specifically. The SSI improper payment rate climbed from 9.41 percent (roughly $5.3 billion) in 2019 to 10.62 percent (roughly $6.5 billion) in 2023, moving in exactly the wrong direction despite years of corrective action plans that read, in retrospect, like a to do list nobody finished.
The leading cause, according to the OIG, is unreported resources sitting in financial accounts above the current limit, and the agency’s own data shows that 89 percent of those overpayments occurred because a recipient’s circumstances changed after their initial approval, in the gap between reviews where nobody was looking. The OIG estimates $2 billion in overpayments could have been prevented in 2023 alone had SSA simply run its existing verification tool more often. It has not implemented that recommendation.
Into this specific, well documented gap, Provision E proposes to quintuple the resource limit and exempt up to $75,000 in retirement accounts for couples from ever being counted. But it is worth noticing that Congress is being asked to widen precisely the category of asset that its own watchdog just identified as the single largest driver of a persistent, unresolved overpayment problem, at the same moment SSA is finally rolling out zero dollar tolerance verification for the old, much smaller limits.
A Program on Autopilot, Redirected
The 2025 SSI Annual Report, which supplies the baseline assumptions for Glenn’s letter, tells a story of a program quietly shrinking relative to everything around it. SSI expenditures were 0.22 percent of GDP in 2024 and are projected to fall to 0.17 percent by 2049, a decline attributed to a shrinking pool of eligible citizens and benefits growing slower than average incomes. Recipient numbers actually dropped slightly between January 2024 and January 2025, from 7.30 million to 7.26 million.
Against that backdrop, the Primus proposal does not merely add to the program; it reverses its trajectory. The letter’s own table shows $104 billion in new costs against a $339 billion baseline for 2025 through 2029, a roughly 30 percent acceleration over five years, applied to a program the actuaries themselves describe as coasting toward relative irrelevance. That may well be defensible policy; poverty among elderly and disabled Americans is a real and measurable thing, and $688 a month, the current average SSI payment, buys considerably less than it did when the resource limits were last touched in 1989. But it is not the same claim as “modest technical fix,” which is how proposals like this tend to be marketed once the actuarial letter gets attached to a press release. Somewhere between the Brookings paper, the Grijalva bill, and Karen Glenn’s very polite letter, the size of the ask got lost in translation, and it is the sort of thing a $316 billion program deserves to have said about it plainly, in public, before anyone votes on it.
Bureaucracy Times 