Basic income is everywhere these days. The idea that anyone could receive monthly payments to supplement–or even replace–their regular income has found a foothold at a time when many people have not experienced meaningful growth in their take-home pay in years. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is running on a platform built around basic income, and trials of the model, in various forms, have taken root everywhere from Stockton, California, to Jackson, Mississippi .

Most of the existing basic income test programs in the U.S. are funded by philanthropy or private dollars and operate in small areas. If the policy is ever going to be workable as a state or federal policy, we’ll need to figure out how it might be funded and administered on a larger scalee. Yang, for instance, has proposed a simple Value Added Tax that would generate a stream of funding to pay for a basic income program.

If this sounds radical or unprecedented, it’s not. In an effort to advance the practical conversation around basic income and how it might be implemented, the National Academy of Social Insurance, a nonprofit research organization, conducted an exploratory analysis of how the model could be broadly applied in the U.S. NASI found that a basic income program could, fairly easily, be implemented in the U.S. through existing government mechanisms.

First, the historical context: In response to the upheaval of the Great Depression, in which nearly a quarter of Americans found themselves out of work, Roosevelt appointed a Committee on Economic Security to develop a program to help stabilize people’s livelihoods. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, a member of the committee, defined economic security as “the assurance of an adequate income” to every person throughout their lives (NASI uses the term “assured income” throughout the report to mimic this Roosevelt-era language). That adequate income ended up taking the shape of various programs passed by the Roosevelt administration, including Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and Workers’ Compensation.

But since the concept of this multifaceted societal safety net was first designed, says NASI CEO William Arnone, the terms of financial instability have shifted. “When you look at the risks facing a lot of people today when it comes to income security, there are major gaps that neither social insurance or social assistance, which we’d call welfare, are addressing,” Arnone tells Fast Company. In the 20th century, the biggest threats to people’s livelihoods were old age, unemployment, and illness. Today, unemployment is low and the majority of people have access to healthcare. The major issue now is that financial instability, instead of being concentrated in old age, is spread out across the spectrum of people’s lives. Many people who work, even full-time, do not take home enough income to qualify as economically stable.

To figure out how to address this more contemporary concern, NASI explored the concept of an assured income that Americans would get on a regular basis. In conducting this analysis, NASI wanted to keep the idea of an assured income grounded in the realities of how it might be actually be distributed.

One avenue, Arnone says, could be through the existing social security program. “Social security, in the past, had a minimum benefit for workers with low career earnings that’s been eroded, and there are now proposals to restore and expand it,” Arnone says. That benefit, called the Special Minimum Primary Insurance Amount, is delivered as a monthly payment tied to prices. In the 1970s, when it was introduced, the Special Minimum PIA was $170 per month, and around 200,000 people benefitted from it. The benefit was designed to effectively replace Social Security payments for people whose lifetime earnings were too low to deliver a secure retirement. In 2013, the Special Minimum PIA was set at $804 per month, and fewer than 75,000 people received the payments. Advocates have called for increasing the Special Minimum PIA so it can meaningfully meet the financial needs of recipients with low lifetime earnings. “There would be a natural platform to deliver a minimum level of income that is not related to your earnings to people who would be eligible for Social Security,” Arnone says. Because it would fall under the parameters of Social Security eligibility (being over 66, or meeting other criteria around disability or status), this form of assured income would not be universal. But it would create more of a support system, not attached to lifetime earnings, for people later in life, which is a significant concern as people’s ability to retire with financial stability has grown shaky in the current economy.