Six years out from insolvency. An automatic 22% benefit cut barreling down on retirees in 2032. And the Republican candidate for Senate in New Hampshire is out there promising to “do it again.”
“It’s the younger generations that are going to bear the biggest burden,” John Sununu said at an event this year. Then came the part he’s proud of: “I was willing to do it before. I’m willing to do it again.”
He’s talking about the George W. Bush campaign to carve Social Security open for partial privatization — the overhaul he backed from the chamber, 2003 to 2009. To Sununu, that’s “responsible leadership.” To anyone living on a Social Security check, it’s a threat.
His Democratic opponent, Rep. Chris Pappas, has called him a “leading figure” in efforts to “privatize Social Security,” and Sununu is furious about the label. At a WMUR candidate forum he insisted his agenda “didn’t privatize anything,” that it kept a “guaranteed government benefit, equal to, or greater than, we have today,” funded by taxation, and would have “made the system solvent.”
It is Sununu, not Pappas, running a cynical campaign to scare America’s grandmothers. The only “solvency” he offers comes from shrinking the program’s guarantee. Call it “solvency reform” and it’s still what it always was: peel a slice of the program off into private accounts the stock market could drain and future retirees could outlive — a gamble with seniors’ money Republicans lost the nerve to finish, back on the table two decades later with the same salesman attached.
And here’s the part the salesman won’t quote. Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute found last year that the Bush-era redesign would have given low- and middle-earning workers “total Social Security benefits 3-8 percent above those scheduled in current law.” That sounds helpful until you notice what it says: benefits a few points above what current law already promises — and current law, in 2032, promises a 22% cut. “Progressivity” is the polite word for trimming the rich slightly more than the poor. That isn’t retirement security. That’s adjusting who gets scalped first. Slashing the program, that is.
Sununu boasts he “never voted to cut benefits” in 12 years in Congress and “never will.” He never had to vote for cuts. He was part of the push that wanted to set the table for someone else to do the cutting — and now he’s running on it. His record is a record of redesigns that would have changed the benefit formula and steered contributions into private accounts that don’t pay out what the system’s promise does. He says he “wants to secure the system for today’s retirees, but also for young people.” He never names the mechanism. He never names the price.
Pappas has put a real record on the table. He fought raising the retirement age. He’s worked to expand the program rather than retreat from it. In 2024 he helped pass a bill increasing benefits for government workers who also draw public pensions — teachers, firefighters, police officers whose second check has long been treated as a reason to dock the first. That’s the bill Sununu’s allies say “made the funding problem worse.” It may have added to the liability. It also did what the alternative won’t: put money in the pockets of working people who earned it.
At an event this summer Pappas said Americans “at the very, very top of the income spectrum” must “pay their fair share.” Sununu’s camp treats that line as a punchline, as though “the rich should pay more” were a slogan rather than the starting position in any honest negotiation over a funding gap that, yes, will not be closed by taxing only the top 1%. Pappas is right that the top must pay more. He’s right the top alone can’t close the gap. He’s also right that pretending otherwise — by reaching instead for benefit cuts dressed as “solvency” — is the actual political scam being run on retirees in this race.
Sununu has put nothing on the table. No new mechanism. No new revenue. No new eligibility rule. Just the same 2003-era blueprint, the same carve-out, the same guarantee a shade smaller than the one it replaces — and still no cut, because the word was never used. There is no responsible path to solvency that doesn’t begin with real revenue from those most able to contribute, and no bipartisan “comprehensive reform” of the kind Sununu touts that doesn’t end with a smaller check than current law already promises — even before the 22% haircut. Sununu knows this. He backed the last version of this con knowing this.
Pappas isn’t trying to “scare seniors.” He’s trying to keep the lights on. Sununu isn’t offering “bipartisan reform.” He’s offering retirees another twenty years of being told to hold tight while the people who broke the system design the next round of “solutions.”
Sununu is using the 2032 cliff as a campaign prop for the answer he gave twenty years ago. Pappas is using the 2032 cliff as an argument for why the answer cannot again be what it was twenty years ago. That is the choice New Hampshire voters face in November: a candidate who admits he’s willing to do it again, and a candidate who has actually done the work of defending the program — and wants to do more.
