Sponsor
Christopher Van Hollen
Senator · D-MD
Senator · D-MD
The bill raises revenue and tightens estate-tax rules while consolidating Social Security trust funds to simplify funding and improve transparency, but it increases tax and compliance burdens for many estates and creates risks to disability benefit prioritization and budget treatment.
Seniors and retired workers: consolidating OASI and DI into a single Social Security Trust Fund simplifies funding flows and administration, potentially making payroll-tax credits and benefit payments clearer and easier to manage.
All Social Security beneficiaries: the bill directs annual appropriation of amounts equivalent to specified payroll taxes to the consolidated Trust Fund, providing clearer, more predictable financing flows after 2027.
Seniors, retirees, and disabled beneficiaries: Trustees must include separate actuarial analyses for disabled, retired, and survivor beneficiaries in reports, improving transparency about cost drivers for each group.
Estate taxpayers with assets between $3.5 million and $15 million: many who were previously exempt will now owe estate tax, increasing tax liabilities for small-business owners, homeowners, and middle-class families.
Disabled beneficiaries: pooling OASI and DI assets may make it politically easier to draw down funds intended for disability to cover retirement shortfalls, risking reduced prioritization of disability benefits.
Workers and taxpayers: consolidating separate trust balances could obscure the financial status and timelines for disability versus retirement benefits, complicating targeted policy responses to shortfalls in one program.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Cuts estate/gift tax exclusions to $3.5M, limits spousal portability, adjusts estate tax rates, and merges Social Security trust funds with payroll-tax appropriation rules.
Official title: Amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to return the estate, gift, and generation skipping transfer tax to 2009 levels, and for other purposes.
Introduced March 25, 2026 by Christopher Van Hollen · Last progress March 25, 2026
Changes estate and gift tax law to return exclusion amounts and the rate table to roughly 2009 levels, reducing the basic exclusion from $15 million (indexed) to a fixed $3.5 million and adding limits on the spousal unused exclusion; those tax changes apply to decedents and gifts after December 31, 2026. It also merges the two separate Social Security trust funds into a single Social Security Trust Fund, transfers existing assets into that fund, requires payroll-tax equivalents to be appropriated to the combined trust fund beginning with the first fiscal year after January 1, 2027, and directs more detailed actuarial reporting by the Trustees.