Washington’s own budget office has put a date on the impending demise of the Social Security system. Fiscal year 2032, six years out, is when the trust fund that pays American retirees and survivors runs empty.
That projection came out September 17, when the Congressional Budget Office published its 2026 long-term projections for Social Security. The finding is one sentence: “the gap between Social Security’s outlays and revenues generally widens over the next 75 years, and the balance of the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund is exhausted in fiscal year 2032.”
CBO’s chief of long-term analysis, Molly Dahl, gave the Senate Budget Committee the arithmetic in March. If the fund is depleted and benefits are then paid only out of incoming revenue, as current law requires, benefits “would be reduced by 7 percent in 2032 and by an average of 28 percent per year from 2033 to 2036.” The total reduction over those five years is $2.7 trillion. Merging the retirement fund with the disability fund, which stays solvent another 30 years, moves the combined date only to 2033.
The Texas Nationalist Movement hears one objection more often than any other.
Ask Texans about independence and someone will answer within a minute that retirees would lose their Social Security. The warning is sincere, and it is aimed at the wrong government. Nothing about a vote in Texas cancels a benefit anyone earned. United States citizens already draw Social Security while living abroad, for life, and the Supreme Court has held that Congress cannot strip Americans of citizenship against their will. The movement’s position on what it would carry into any negotiation has been fixed for years: “Any Texan who has paid into the Social Security system and is currently receiving benefits should continue to receive them. This is non-negotiable.”
Meanwhile the government that actually runs the program has published the date its own math breaks, and the date is 2032.
In December 2025, 4,996,895 Texans were receiving Social Security benefits, and the checks for that single month totaled $9.38 billion, according to the Social Security Administration’s own tables. Annualized, that is roughly $113 billion a year, most of it going to the 3.7 million Texans who are retired workers. A 7 percent reduction across Texas is on the order of $8 billion in a year. A 28 percent reduction is on the order of $31 billion.
Texans are paying in the whole time. The payroll tax takes 12.4 percent of earnings up to $184,500 in 2026, half from the worker and half from the employer, and CBO notes that this single tax “accounts for 96 percent of Social Security’s revenues.” Forty-eight percent of beneficiaries will owe income tax on those benefits this year.
None of the decisions belong to Texas. Not the tax rate, not the wage cap, not the retirement age, not the benefit formula, not the date the fund empties, and not the fix, if there is one. Texans elect 38 of the 435 members of the U.S. House, which is about nine percent of one chamber of the body that will decide.
The federal books have one more feature that bears on this. CBO is required by law to project Social Security spending as though benefits are paid in full regardless of what the trust fund holds. The official baseline Washington uses to plan its own finances therefore assumes a solvency that the same agency separately projects will not exist after 2032. The gap between those two sets of numbers is roughly a fifth of what retirees have been promised.
One of these cuts requires a referendum that has never been scheduled. The other requires nothing at all. It arrives in 2032 on the published timetable of a government Texans fund, do not control, and cannot outvote.
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