The Social Security Administration SSA

Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935, creating old-age insurance financed by a payroll tax on workers and employers and run by a three-member Social Security Board. The first monthly check, for 22 dollars and 54 cents, went to Ida May Fuller of Vermont in January 1940. The board became the Social Security Administration in 1946 and spent the next half century inside larger agencies, ending in the Department of Health and Human Services. Congress made it an independent agency again on March 31, 1995, with a single Commissioner serving a six-year term.

The agency runs two big programs. Social Security proper, formally Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance, pays monthly benefits to retired workers, their spouses and survivors, and workers who can no longer work because of a disability, financed by the 12.4 percent payroll tax and paid out of two trust funds. Supplemental Security Income, created in 1972 and funded from general revenue, pays a monthly benefit to low-income people who are aged, blind, or disabled. Together they deliver about 1.5 trillion dollars a year, the largest single item in the federal budget, and lift more people out of poverty than any other government program.

SSA also maintains the earnings records of nearly every worker in the country, issues Social Security numbers, decides disability claims through state agencies and administrative law judges, and runs the verification behind E-Verify. Before 2025 it employed about 57,000 people in roughly 1,200 field offices, teleservice centers, and processing centers, with headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland. Its administrative budget, about 15 billion dollars, is a sliver of the benefits it pays.

Social Security's finances are the long-running problem. The trustees project that the combined trust funds will be depleted around 2034, after which incoming payroll taxes would cover only about 80 percent of scheduled benefits unless Congress acts by raising revenue, reducing benefits, or both. In 2025 the agency cut thousands of staff and closed some offices, changed identity verification rules, and gave the Department of Government Efficiency team access to its data systems, a move litigated up to the Supreme Court. Field office waits and phone service became a measure of whether the smaller agency could keep up with record numbers of retiring baby boomers.