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Returning to his old school, he noted that enrolling there as a student in the 1970s had been a turning point. "I wasn't an Ivy Leaguer: I'd gone to a junior college. . . ." He pauses a bit before summing up. "It was important for me to be here," Kenneth Apfel says of his experiences at Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He went there in his late 20s, after a few years as a college administrator in Massachusetts, to study in detail the inscrutable ways of bureaucrats and politicians. Last week he came back to visit the school as a very big bureaucrat, indeed. In September, just shy of his 49th birthday, Apfel was sworn in as commissioner of the U.S. Social Security Administration. Observers noted that this most generation-linking of all government programs had its first Baby Boomer at the top. He became the man in charge of getting 50 million checks delivered each month, sending money to about 16 percent of all the people in the country. He's the man with about 65,000 employees looking toward the agency's Baltimore headquarters for direction. He's the man who sits in the Washington-insiders' budget huddles. And he's the man expected to help us figure out what the heck should be done to save Social Security.His term will end in 2001, along with that of his boss, President Clinton. But 2001 is just the start of the significant dates looming in the administrative viewfinder: In 2012, just before Apfel and a lot of his fellow Boomers hit conventional retirement age, annual Social Security spending is likely to start exceeding its annual revenue from taxes on paychecks. By 2019, benefits may start nibbling at trust fund principal. And 10 years later the trust fund reserves could be so depleted that current income wouldn't cover but three-fourths of the expected benefits. |
 U.S. Social
Security Commissioner Kenneth Apfel, LBJ Class of '78,
shared his thoughts about the future of Social Security
during a fall brown bag lecture at the LBJ School. Prior to
his appointment as Social Security Commissioner in September
1997, Apfel served as President Clinton's Assistant
Secretary for Management and Budget in the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services and as Associate Director for
Human Resources in the President's Office of Management and
Budget. This is a reprint of an editorial that appeared in
the Austin American- |
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Kenneth Apfel visits with second-year student Laura Uribarri after his talk in the Student Lounge last November. Apfel, who became Commissioner of Social Security in September, was selected by his fellow LBJ School alumni to receive the 1997 Distinguished Public Service Award. Photo by María de la Luz Martínez |
The situation is serious, Apfel concedes. But doom and disaster are optional. The Social Security system will have to change, he says, but it isn't going away. At a deep level--"in my bones"--Apfel is convinced that the program providing federal benefits for retired workers will continue. He's a lot less certain about the exact form the program will take. It will not continue just as it is, he says. Things have to change. |
