Social Security benefits serve as a lifeline of financial support for tens of millions of vulnerable individuals across the country. This includes retirees, survivors, and disabled individuals. According to the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) monthly statistical snapshot for August, there are over 11 million recipients of disability benefits, with around 1.1 million of those beneficiaries qualifying for both Social Security and the Supplemental Security Income.
A recent proposal made by the Trump Administration aimed to change the role played by age or education in the determining process for disability benefits applications. If this proposal were to be passed, several hundred thousands of beneficiaries would have their benefits cuts, if not lose eligibility altogether.
Now, however, the Trump Administration has communicated to the co-founder of a non-profit organization that it will no longer be moving forward with this proposal. Here is what you need to know.
How are disability benefit claims determined?
When a disability claim is submitted to the SSA, the agency considers a number of factors when decided whether or not to approve the claim. This includes the applicants ability to perform substantial work by comparing the claim against a list of jobs. As such, factors such as age and education also play into the determining process. For applicants aged 55 and older, age is taken under consideration in particular as a number of jobs consider it as a limiting factor.
Under the Trump Administration’s proposal, the age being considered as a limiting factor would be moved from 55 to 65. During the Trump Administration’s first term in office, a similar proposal had also been drafted up. Mark Warshawsky, a former Trump official at the SSA, argues that “lifespans are increasing and people are working further into old age.”
Warshawsky, who worked on this kind of rule making during the first Trump Administration, also claims that the current rules “embody the view that middle-age workers … cannot adjust to new types of jobs, especially if they have modest educations, performed only physical labor, and are unskilled — even when new work is available that is sedentary and requires little training.”
According to estimates from a September paper by Jack Smalligan, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, “the proposed regulation reduced eligibility by 10%, 500,000 people could lose access to Social Security disability insurance benefits over 10 years.”
”Supplemental security income benefits would also be affected by the regulatory changes, although the exact impacts weren’t yet clear,” Smalligan further noted.
Trump Administration abandons proposal
Media speculation regarding this proposed rule change has been spreading far and wide in recent months, however, the White House claims to have “not seen any such proposal.”
“The only policy change to Social Security is President Trump’s working families tax cuts legislation, which eliminated taxation of Social Security for almost all beneficiaries – something that every single Democrat voted against,” According to a White House official who spoke with Nextgov/FCW.
Last month, over 160 House Democrats wrote a letter to SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano in protest of the proposed rule change.
“This proposal comes as the Trump Administration is making extreme changes at SSA that threaten the integrity of Social Security and access to earned benefits for seniors, people with disabilities, and survivors,” they wrote.
“It’s a lost opportunity to use far more current data about both jobs in the economy and about the requirements of those jobs,” Smalligan stated. “There is an ability in a less rigorous way, to use the [newer] data to some extent, but without the regulatory restructuring that was being contemplated, that would be a much more limited application.”
“It is already very challenging for Americans with disabilities to meet the exacting standards for being approved for disability benefits, and the proposed changes would have made the system much worse,” Jennifer Burdick, an attorney specialising in clients seeking disability benefits at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, shared with Nextgov/FCW, adding that Bisignano made “the right choice.”