“It became, gradually, this very popular program that was politically untouchable,” he says.
Despite Social Security being labeled the “third rail” of American politics, plenty of elected officials have tried to scale back the program. Indeed, Sweeney says one of AARP’s biggest wins came in 2012, when lawmakers proposed using a more conservative inflation index to calculate the annual COLA.
In 1972, AARP pushed lawmakers to make those COLAs automatic rather than subject to a congressional vote, as they had been since Social Security’s inception. That campaign was successful, and three years later, the first annual COLA landed in beneficiaries’ bank accounts, increasing benefits by 8 percent.
Under that law, annual COLA changes are tied to a federal inflation measure called the Consumer Price Index for Urban Workers (CPI-W). But in 2012, as President Barack Obama and members of Congress were debating ways to reduce federal spending, the COLA method was suddenly on the table. AARP and other groups went into overdrive, pressing lawmakers to abandon the stingier inflation gauge, known as the Chained CPI, which over time would have reduced benefits.
Such a move would “take $112 billion out of the pockets of current and future Social Security beneficiaries in the next 10 years alone,” AARP’s then-CEO, Barry Rand, wrote in a November 2012 letter to Obama and members of Congress. He called the change “inappropriate and unwarranted,” noting that “Social Security is not the cause of our current large budget deficits.”
The measure did not gain traction, and by 2014, Obama had dropped changing the COLA calculation from his budget proposal.
“There’s probably 100 small things like that that we’ve done over the years,” says Sweeney. “It’s the kind of work AARP does day in, day out … so that when you need Social Security, it’s there for you, and it’s strong.”
Customer service in the spotlight
Fast-forward to March 2025, when the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced in a call with reporters that it would no longer allow beneficiaries to confirm their identity over the phone and would instead require them to do so in person or online. That would mean people who did not have an online My Social Security account would have to go to a local Social Security office to apply for their benefits.
Sweeney says he and AARP colleagues quickly huddled to discuss the announcement and decided within an hour that AARP had to oppose it.
“We put together an effort to really push back on that and to try to get that reversed,” he says. The key? Talking to people in AARP’s state offices across the country about how it would create hardship for older adults in their communities.
“The Alaska office was the one that really stuck with me,” Sweeney recalls. “They said, ‘Look, in Alaska, there are lots of people who would have to fly on an airplane to get to their nearest Social Security office.’”