Red State Workers Could Lose Out on Disability Benefits as Trump Administration Rewrites Eligibility Rules

That’s because the Trump administration is rewriting the disability eligibility rules, ostensibly to modernize the program, in ways that will make it even harder for aging blue-collar workers like Tincher to get benefits. Hundreds of thousands just like him would become ineligible for aid.

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“The Trump administration does not think that simply being 50 years old is a disability,” said a senior administration official who would speak only on condition of anonymity. In the 1970s, when the current rules were written, the official said, many more jobs involved manual labor, but in the internet age that isn’t true anymore. Workers in their 50s with physical injuries are thus receiving disability benefits “when they don’t need to be,” given that they could get a more sedentary job in the modern economy.

The administration has also justified cuts like these on fiscal grounds: The federal budget deficit is massive, the Social Security retirement system could become insolvent in less than a decade and savings need to be found.

But the disability program is paid for, via payroll taxes, by its own trust fund, separate from the one for the retirement program. So reductions in disability payments would not help the retirement system stay afloat. Indeed, cutting eligibility for disability could result in more disabled workers claiming retirement benefits early, actuarial experts note, which would only increase pressure on the retirement system. Meanwhile, the money in the disability fund, which is projected to remain solvent through at least the end of this century, would just sit there, unused.

The Trump administration’s upcoming proposed regulation would make two hugely consequential changes to the Social Security Administration’s disability system, according to four SSA officials with knowledge of the plans. First, it would modernize the job listings that Social Security’s disability adjudicators and judges use to decide if there’s work available in the U.S. economy that a manual laborer could do despite physical impairments — like a low-skilled desk job at a computer or driving for Uber or DoorDash. Second, the new rule would almost entirely remove age as a criterion, in most instances making a 50-plus-year-old like Tincher no more eligible for assistance than a 20-something.

Under the current system, eligibility for benefits ticks up at ages 50, 55 and 60, as workers become more medically vulnerable and less adaptable. Disability adjudicators use a series of grids that consider an applicant’s age, work experience and education level to determine whether they may have the skills to do another, less strenuous job. (The adjudicators make a yes-or-no decision on eligibility; each person who qualifies then receives a set amount based on their lifetime earnings. Once the person starts receiving Social Security retirement benefits, they no longer receive disability payments.)

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Separately, the Trump administration is preparing a proposed regulation that would eliminate or sharply cut the Supplemental Security Income benefits of roughly 400,000 extremely poor and disabled people. This second regulation would reduce support for adults and children with severe disabilities who are living in low-income households, as well as elderly people living with their adult children on tight budgets.

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Warshawsky was unable to get the disability regulation across the finish line before Trump lost the 2020 election. But Russell Vought, the powerful head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and one of the originators of Project 2025, picked up on this first-term agenda item and has pursued it again this year.

The disability restructuring was “Russ Vought’s No. 1 priority for the Social Security Administration from Day 1,” said Leland Dudek, who was acting commissioner of the agency from February to May. In February, Dudek said, his staff met with Vought’s staff on multiple occasions; together, they “dug up what was done four years ago,” he said, indicating that the new proposed rule will be similar to a 2020 draft that was leaked to the press. (The senior Trump administration official said that Dudek is “disgruntled” and that the disability changes are no more of a priority for Vought than the rest of the administration’s “deregulatory agenda.” In the past, Vought has publicly pressed for fewer veterans and others to receive disability benefits.)

To opponents of the forthcoming regulation, including many still inside the Social Security Administration, Warshawsky and Vought’s conception of the modern economy neglects the fact that workers like Tincher grew up in a different world. They started their working lives at a time when most people didn’t have personal computers, when it wasn’t as common to get a high school education and when physical labor offered a path to eventual retirement security. To switch the rules now pulls the rug out from under them just as they’re reaching their most vulnerable years, officials and experts said.

Related:

In ‘Janesville,’ When the G.M. Plant Closed, Havoc Followed

Readers will also finish “Janesville” with an extremely sobering takeaway: There’s scant evidence that job retraining, possibly the sole item on the menu of policy options upon which Democrats and Republicans can agree, is at all effective.

In the case of the many laid-off workers in the Janesville area, the outcomes are decidedly worse for those who have attended the local technical college to learn a new trade. (Goldstein arrives at this conclusion, outlined in detail, by enlisting the help of local labor economists and poring over multiple data sets.) A striking number of dislocated G.M. employees don’t even know how to use a computer when they first show up for classes at Blackhawk Technical College. “Some students dropped out as soon as they found out that their instructors would not accept course papers written out longhand,” Goldstein writes.

It makes you realize how challenging – and humiliating – it can be to reinvent oneself in midlife. To do so requires a kind of bravery for which no one gets a medal.