John Larson

For a short period in the early 1990s, I lived in East Hartford, Connecticut. It’s the kind of place that could have had it all: beautiful climate, good land, strong working families, proximity to opportunity, and the foundation of a community built to last.

Instead, East Hartford became a place that was always waiting. Waiting for investment. Waiting for leadership. The promise is always just over the horizon.

I heard that same message again earlier this year at a conference with advocates, attorneys, and people who live inside the Social Security system every day. The stories were not new. “We’re treading water. That’s okay. Our time will come. Support is on the horizon.”

But when?

U.S. Rep. John Larson has been in Congress since 1999. He started his federal career with a balanced budget and a strong independent Social Security Administration. Larson has served through multiple periods of Democratic control. Including moments like the 2008 financial crisis, when bold action wasn’t just possible, it was necessary.

If Larson’s strategy is to wait for the right moment, for East Hartford and Social Security, then I think it’s a fair question to ask: when exactly was that moment supposed to be?

Because he has had plenty of time.

We’ve had majorities. We’ve had unified government. We’ve had windows where Social Security could have been meaningfully strengthened. And yet here we are, still talking about underfunding, still dealing with backlogs, still asking frontline workers and beneficiaries to carry the burden of delay.

At some point, “our time will come” stops being a strategy and starts being an excuse.

What makes this more concerning is the approach. Too often, Larson’s focus is on bravado: on calling out what’s broken, drawing hard lines, assigning blame. That may generate headlines, but it does not rebuild a system under strain.

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A member of Congress in a safe district has a unique kind of freedom. They don’t have to govern from fear of the next election. They have the space to reach across the aisle, to temper their own ambitions, and to build the kind of bipartisan coalition that actually produces results.

We’ve seen what that looks like. Tip O’Neill understood that legislating meant working with the other side, even when it was uncomfortable. Ted Kennedy built a career on turning deeply held convictions into laws that could pass, not just statements that sounded good.

That is the standard.

And it’s a fair question to ask why John Larson has not met it. Every year of his inaction has compounded the damage: longer wait times, more errors, more frustration, and more people falling through the cracks. It feeds a broader narrative that the government cannot deliver. And that narrative doesn’t just sit there; it benefits those who argue the system should be torn down or radically reshaped.

I like John Larson. Unfortunately, his leadership fails to produce results. It substitutes messaging for progress; it doesn’t just stall reform. It strengthens the hand of figures like Donald Trump, who point to that dysfunction as proof that government itself cannot work.

Now, we are at a point where the Social Security Administration is not going back to what it was. You cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Yet, Larson has no vision for the future. His Social Security 2100 Act was always dead on arrival, even in a Democratic majority.

What we need now is leadership willing to take risks and reinvent public service. That means real, sustained, bipartisan investment. It means modernizing systems, rethinking workflows, and building a service model that meets people where they are before they hit a crisis point. It means doing the hard work of coalition-building in a divided government, not introducing bills designed to signal rather than pass.

At the end of the day, a vote for John Larson, is not just a vote for the status quo. It is, in effect, a gift to the very forces that want to dismantle confidence in public institutions altogether.

Serious legislators don’t wait for agreement. They build it. In a safe seat, the constraint isn’t politics. It’s choice.

Leland Dudek is former acting commissioner of Social Security, writing in his personal capacity.