Americans are deeply divided over how Social Security should change, but recent polling shows there is little support for ending the program outright. A Pew Research Center survey conducted Nov. 17 to Nov. 30, 2025 found 6% of U.S. adults said Social Security should be “phased out as a government program,” while 81% said benefits should not be reduced in any way.
That debate is no longer abstract. The Social Security Board of Trustees said on June 9, 2026 that the combined trust funds for retirement and disability benefits are projected to pay full scheduled benefits until 2034, after which 83% of benefits would be payable under current law. That gap is forcing elected officials and voters to confront the same question from very different directions: protect the program, trim it, or expand it.
Polling shows broad support, with little appetite for ending the program
The clearest recent measure of public opinion points away from a phaseout. In Pew’s late 2025 survey, 18% said some reductions in benefits for future retirees need to be considered. Within that group, 12% said Social Security should be maintained at a reduced level, while 6% said it should be phased out as a government program.
The larger bloc took the opposite view. Pew found 44% said Social Security should cover more people, with greater benefits, and 37% said it should be kept about as it is. That adds up to 81% who said benefits should not be reduced in any way.
The pattern was similar in Pew’s April 8 to April 14, 2024 survey. That poll also found 79% opposed reducing benefits in any way, including 40% who supported broader coverage and greater benefits. Only 19% said future reductions should be considered, and 6% said the program should be phased out.
Partisan differences were real, but they did not produce majority support for cuts. In the 2024 Pew survey, 77% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and 83% of Democrats and Democratic leaners said benefits should not be reduced in any way.
The trustees’ 2026 report laid out the fiscal problem in blunt terms. The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund is projected to become depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032, with continuing income sufficient to pay 78% of benefits at that point. The combined retirement and disability trust funds are projected to become depleted in 2034, with 83% of scheduled benefits payable then.
The report said Social Security’s cost exceeds total income in 2026, as it has since 2021, and will remain higher than income throughout the 75-year projection period. The trustees also reported a 75-year actuarial deficit of 4.42% of taxable payroll for the combined trust funds.
Demographic pressure is part of the story. Social Security’s 2026 Fast Facts and Figures says there were 2.6 workers paying Social Security taxes for each beneficiary in 2025, and that ratio is projected to fall to 2.3 to 1 by 2035.
Those numbers help explain why the policy debate is so tense. The trustees did not call for a specific fix in the summary materials, but they said legislative action will be needed to prevent depletion of the retirement trust fund.
The immediate future of Social Security is set by current law, not by polling. The trustees said the disability insurance trust fund is projected to remain able to pay full scheduled benefits throughout the 75-year projection period ending in 2100, while the retirement side faces the earlier shortfall.
That difference matters because public concern tends to focus on the whole program, even though the finances are not identical across its two trust funds. Under the trustees’ 2026 assumptions, full combined benefits remain payable until 2034, but the retirement fund alone reaches trouble sooner, in 2032.
The politics remain difficult. Pew’s surveys show Americans do not agree on whether benefits should expand or stay the same, but they do agree far more on what they do not want: reductions, especially a phaseout. That leaves lawmakers with a narrowing timetable and no broad public mandate for the most sweeping cut.
For now, the most concrete date in the debate is June 9, 2026, when the trustees again warned that the projections had not materially improved. Unless Congress changes the law, the report says, benefit payments after depletion would be limited to incoming revenue.