Supplemental Security Revenue Update in New Bipartisan Bill

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in Washington, D.C., plans to reintroduce a bill Thursday that would update federal anti-poverty programs that millions of Americans rely on to meet their basic needs.

Supplemental Security Income is a federal program that provides monthly benefits to adults and children who are blind, disabled, or age 65 or older with limited income or resources. Approximately 7.4 million Americans receive SSI benefits.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said in a statement that the upcoming bill, called the Supplemental Security Income Recovery Act, would expand and strengthen SSI benefits as everyday living costs increase.

Most of the bill’s 30 House and Senate sponsors are Democrats, including Warren and Reps. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois. They will be joined by Republican Rep. James Moylan of Guam and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“SSI is a critical lifeline for millions of Americans, but the program is 50 years outdated, leaving people behind and even punishing those who try to save,” Warren said.

SSI was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972. This was done to protect individuals from poverty. But because the program hasn’t been meaningfully updated since the 1970s, the poverty rate for SSI recipients is more than twice the national poverty rate, according to a new study by the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, Student Network, and a nonprofit partner of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

According to a study by the Roosevelt Institute, many SSI residents experience severe poverty, with children, racial minorities, and Southerners among the most vulnerable.

According to the Social Security Administration, the maximum monthly SSI payment in 2026 will be $994 for individual beneficiaries and $1,491 for eligible married couples. The bureau says it equates to about $12,000 a year for individuals and $18,000 a year for couples.

Many of the people in the program have severe mental, physical or cognitive disabilities that limit their ability to work, said Stephen Nuñez, director of stratification economics at the Roosevelt Institute.

“It’s not like they’re somehow abusing the system,” Nunez said. “Basically people have forgotten about them, so they’re just living a bare-bones, shabby life.”

Currently, SSI recipients are limited to $20 per month in non-employment income, such as Social Security benefits and pensions, an amount that has not been adjusted since 1974. If your income exceeds that amount, the Social Security Administration may reduce your benefits or limit your eligibility.

That threshold would be updated to $158 per month under the new bill, according to documents seen by CNBC.

Another provision proposes adjusting the earned income exclusion, another standard that currently prevents an SSI recipient’s first $65 of income from being counted as income, but which was intended as a work incentive when it was set at that level in 1972.

Your new bill will update that level to $512 per month.

It also seeks to update beneficiary resource limits (currently set at $2,000 per individual and $3,000 per eligible couple) that apply to certain assets such as cash, bank accounts, and investments. Those thresholds would increase to $10,000 per individual and $20,000 per eligible couple, which the proposal says would make it easier for beneficiaries to save for emergencies.

All new thresholds are adjusted for inflation and adjusted annually.

The benefit rate would also increase to 100% of the federal poverty level. The proposal calls for the benefit rate for couples to be set at twice the rate for individuals, which would also eliminate the marriage penalty. Currently, married couples receiving SSI receive 25% less than if they were not married.

The proposal would also eliminate other penalties for in-kind support, such as food or shelter, provided by friends and family.

Specifically, the bill would also make SSI benefits available to eligible residents of U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.

“Modernizing this program and expanding it to Guam and beyond is about economic equity and ensuring that all American communities receive the basic security that SSI was meant to provide,” Moylan said in a statement.

Lawmakers previously introduced another version of the Supplemental Security Income Recovery Act. A previous attempt, introduced in the House in January 2024, was referred to the House Ways and Means Committee and later that year to the Labor and Welfare Subcommittee.

For the latest proposal to move forward, lawmakers must agree on a cost, which the Roosevelt Institute calculates would cost about $61 billion a year based on the 2024 version of the proposal. That’s roughly the cost of a single tax provision in the “big, beautiful” tax law that President Donald Trump signed last year, the think tank said. The Roosevelt Institute estimates that fully funding the bill’s reforms would reduce poverty among SSI recipients by 60 percent.

“Change is needed as we move further and further away from our original purpose of helping seniors and people with disabilities escape poverty,” said Tracy Groeniger, managing director of economic security at Justice in Aging, a national organization that fights senior poverty. “You can’t just quit a program and sit around because you don’t want to spend money.”

Other, less comprehensive suggestions for updating specific features of SSI may have lower prices. For example, the Roosevelt Institute estimates that increasing benefits alone would cost $33.8 billion annually.

Another bipartisan proposal from 2025, the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, calls for adjusting asset limits for beneficiaries up to $10,000. The Congressional Budget Office has not yet provided a cost estimate for the latest version of the bill.

Two former Social Security Administration officials, Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, and Jason Fichtner, executive director of the LIMRA Retirement Income Institute, a research initiative within the insurance industry group LIMRA, said in a February op-ed in The Hill that SSI reform is “much more cost-effective than fighting poverty through Social Security.”

Expanding SSI would help lift Americans 65 and older out of poverty, thereby paving the way for lawmakers to have a “reasoned debate about retirement policy, especially Social Security reform,” Biggs and Fichtner wrote.