President Trump announced a deal to have majority control of more than 60 billion barrels of proven Venezuelan oil reserves. Amy Jaffe, the director of the Global Energy, Climate, and Sustainability Lab at New York University, joins CBS…
Page F1From§Eachthe noon edition — 31 August 2026
Social Security nears cliff, risking seniors $500 a month; Trump secures 65 million barrels of Venezuela's oil.
As it ran on the front
Two filings arrived this week concerning large numbers. The first: Social Security is nearing what the wire calls a cliff's edge, a term this desk will translate as a projected shortfall that puts monthly checks at risk of a five-hundred-dollar cut for recipients who have paid into the system for decades. The second: the administration announced a deal for control of sixty-five million barrels of oil reserves in Venezuela.
Reconciling the two: sixty-five million barrels, at a benchmark price near ninety dollars a barrel — a number carried elsewhere on this page — comes to just under six billion dollars in oil, newly under U.S. control, filed the same season a monthly benefit for retirees is filed as at risk.…
…(cont) This desk does not know what the Venezuela oil will fund, hon. The deal announcement does not say. The Social Security shortfall announcement does not say what would close it, either. What can be said, without adjectives, is that one number went up — barrels acquired, control secured — while the other number is projected to go down, for people who are, on the whole, no longer working and did not negotiate this deal.
The gap here is not mysterious. It is the difference between an asset the government just acquired and a liability the government has had, by law, since 1935. Assets get press conferences. Liabilities get cliffs.
This desk has requested the line item connecting the two — whether any portion of newly controlled oil revenue is earmarked for the Social Security trust fund. As of filing, no such line item exists in either announcement. It may exist later. This desk will check.
In the meantime, the reconciliation stands as filed: sixty-five million barrels secured, five hundred dollars a month at risk, and no arithmetic offered connecting the first number to the second.
“They tell granny there's no money for her five hundred bucks a month, then turn around and grab sixty-five million barrels of somebody else's oil. There's money. It's just never earmarked for the people who need it.”
“The Venezuela deal secures energy resources that benefit every American, including seniors. Whether any of that revenue touches the Social Security shortfall is a separate ledger — a fair question, actually, one we don't have an answer to.”
The receipts
The Social Security Administration said in a statement that the fund can dole out only 78% of total scheduled benefits.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.