Former vice president Joe Biden led a small team of lawmakers that considered a Social Security cut as part of a broader package of legislation designed to reduce the federal budget deficit.

The talks didnt pan out, and represented just one of several attempts by Congress and the Obama administration to slow the growth of the national debt.

Bidens participation exemplifies his desire to cut deals with Republicans and his political moderation, traits hes highlighted on the presidential campaign trail.

Since President Donald Trump took office, fiscal responsibility has faded as a top concern, with Republicans larding the national debt with corporate tax cuts, and Democratic presidential candidates, including Biden, only pushing to make Social Security and Medicare more generous. (Progressives maintain that because Social Security and part of Medicare are self-funded, they cannot contribute to the debt.)

Biden was a member of an administration whose theory of the case was that to get to where we essentially needed to go, we had to put everything on the table, recalled Jared Bernstein, who served as Bidens top economic adviser and has not endorsed in the presidential primary.

I think that theory has been shown to be wrong, Bernstein said. And that since then, economists and policymakers have done a serious and critical rethink of fiscal policy.

Larry Summers and Jason Furman, centrist former Obama economic advisers, wrote an op-ed in Jan. 2019 describing how Washington should end its debt obsession. Their analysis is part of a broader trend in recent years of economists associated with the Democratic establishment rethinking deficit hysteria amid a period of low inflation and interest rates.

Throughout the Obama years, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) railed against including Social Security in any sort of legislative deal aimed at deficit reduction. In his White House bid, Sanders has highlighted his stalwart support of social programs over the years, while noting the contrast with Biden .