PRIORITIES • Protect Our Future • Policy to

Defend Social Security

Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.

Social Security is the closest thing this country has to a promise. You work, you pay in out of every single paycheck for 40 or 50 years, and when you're done, that money comes back to you. It isn't charity, and nobody handed it to you. You earned it.

I spent years of my career expanding care for seniors in rural places — towns where the hospital is an hour away and the specialist is farther. I sat with people whose entire monthly income was a single check from Social Security. They weren't looking for a handout. They'd worked their whole lives — on farms, in classrooms, on job sites — and this was the deal.

The promise of Social Security is about 6 years from breaking. In June, the program's own trustees reported that the retirement trust fund runs dry in 2032. When it does, benefits get cut 22% automatically, across the board, for everyone — roughly $500 a month gone from the average retiree's check. A woman living on $1,900 a month suddenly living on $1,480.

Both parties have known this was coming for years. Neither will touch it, because the arithmetic is uncomfortable, and the next election is always closer than 2032. So the plan — the actual plan — is to let it happen and blame the other side when it does. I'm not willing to let that happen — not to my parents' generation, not to yours.

No single lever solves this alone, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you something. That's the fight I intend to lead, and I intend to bring this district with me.

Here’s what I’ll do — and why

Go get the waste first. Corporate subsidies that have never faced a review. Contracts nobody read. The billions in improper payments the inspectors general flag every year while Congress files the report and moves on. That money goes back into Social Security. Waste first. Always.

No cuts to the check — and no moving the goalposts on anyone close to retiring. Two guarantees, flat out. I won't vote to cut a dollar from anybody's earned benefit, and I won't change the retirement age on people at or near retirement. You planned a life around a number, and Washington doesn't get to move it on you at 61. Beyond that, I won't pretend the rest solves itself. If we're still short, every option goes in front of the country in the open, and people get a say before anything is decided — not after it defaults in 2032.

Find the money in the places nobody looks. I'm running on sunset reviews — making programs prove they still work, with corporate subsidies, contracts, and tax carve-outs first in line. Social Security and Medicare are permanently exempt from that, and I will never put them on the chopping block. The reason to review everything else: every dollar lost to a contract nobody read is a dollar that isn't keeping the promise this country made.

Never hand it to Wall Street or the insurance industry. Every few years someone floats privatizing Social Security — moving your retirement into the market, where a bad decade could wipe out 30 years of work, with fees skimmed off the top the whole way. Your retirement should not be somebody's product. The people pushing this have wanted their hands on the largest pool of money in the world for decades, and they'll keep coming back for it. I'll fight it every time, and I don't take a dollar from the industries that keep proposing it.

Make the annual raise match what seniors actually buy. Benefits get a cost-of-living adjustment every year, but it's calculated off a basket of goods built around working-age spending. Seniors spend huge amounts on healthcare, prescriptions, and housing — and costs are rising faster. That means every year the "adjustment" quietly falls short. A cost-of-living raise should reflect the cost of the life you're actually living. I'd recalibrate it to a senior-weighted measure, so the check keeps pace with the bills that land in your mailbox.

Stop taxing the people who have nothing but Social Security. Your Social Security benefits can be taxed — and the income thresholds that trigger it haven't been updated since 1984. A tax meant for a small number of high-income retirees now reaches ordinary ones. Under the working-class tax cut I'm fighting for, no one pays federal income tax on their first $150,000 — which means if you're living principally on Social Security, your benefits aren't taxed at all. You already paid tax on that money when you earned it. Taxing it a second time was never the deal.

Stop the leak inside the program itself. Between 2015 and 2022 Social Security paid out close to $72 billion it shouldn't have, most of it overpayments sent by an agency running decades-old systems with too few people to catch the error. Then it comes after the beneficiary. In 2025 the agency began withholding up to half of a monthly check to claw that money back — a woman who did nothing wrong losing half her income because a federal computer got it wrong. The inspector general has published the fixes for years and they sit unimplemented. I'd implement them, staff the agency to catch errors before the money leaves, and cap recovery so nobody loses their housing paying for somebody else's mistake. Every dollar that stops going out the wrong door stays in this program.

And fix the service while we're at it. Field offices have closed, phone waits run an hour, and disability claims sit for months while someone too sick to work waits on an answer. In rural communities, these closures aren’t merely an inconvenience. Accessing help can eat up half a day. Starving the agency is a benefit cut with a longer fuse. One standard: can a 78-year-old in Colusa County get a straight answer without losing a day of her life.

Keep the promise alive for the people who haven't made it yet. The reason to fix this now is the people who won't retire for 30 years — the ones told their whole working lives it won't be there when their turn comes. It should be. They pay in out of every check exactly like their parents did, and they've earned the same guarantee.

What this means for Our District

Social Security runs through one committee in the House: Ways and Means. Our congressman has sat on it for over 20 years — the exact committee responsible for this program. The year he joined it, the trustees projected the money would last until 2041. That was 36 years to work with. It's now six. Only one Democrat on that committee has taken more corporate PAC money than Congressman Thompson.

The record is on paper. In 1999 he said he could support privatizing Social Security in a "measured way." In 2000 he voted against repealing the tax on seniors' benefits. In 2013 he voted to make the Simpson-Bowles plan the basis of the federal budget — a plan that raised the retirement age to 69 and slowed the annual raise. In March 2015 he voted against a budget that set the yearly raise by a senior-weighted index.

He has put his name on good bills. But more than two decades on the one committee with jurisdiction has produced no plan, no bill of his own, and no fix. There is no Social Security plan anywhere on his website — the seniors page hasn't been touched since February 2024, before the trustees moved the date to 2032. At some point that stops being bad luck. Either the will isn't there or the way isn't, and from where I sit it looks like both. When the committee that runs this program is stocked with the members corporate money likes best, the program is nobody's priority. In a district with this many retirees and fixed-income families — people in Lake, Colusa, Sutter, and Yuba counties for whom that check is the budget — that's the difference between making it and not. I take no corporate PAC money, no special interest money, and no foreign money. Seniors are the constituency I answer to.

The bottom line

This is a solvable problem. We know the date, we know the math. What's missing is a Congress willing to say so before the deadline instead of after. So let's be the ones who fix it — protect every dollar people spent a lifetime earning, and hand our kids a promise that still means something. Our parents kept this promise for us. Let's go keep it for them.

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