The Trump administration is reportedly plotting a major overhaul of Social Security that could see hundreds of thousands of older Americans lose their disability benefits.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) is considering eliminating age as a factor in determining eligibility for disability payments, or raising the current threshold from 50 to 60, sources told The Washington Post.
Right now, the SSA looks at a person’s age, work experience, and level of education to decide if they can move on to other types of work before giving them disability payments. People over 50 are more likely to be approved because age is often seen as a barrier to retraining or changing careers.
Jack Smalligan, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute and a former official at the Office of Management and Budget, said that if eligibility were cut by just 10%, about 750,000 people could lose benefits over the next ten years. There are also 80,000 widows and children who could lose benefits because their spouse or parent is disabled.
Barton Mackey, a spokesman for the SSA, told the Post that the agency is working on “proposing improvements to the disability adjudication process to make sure our disability program stays up to date and can be run more smoothly.”
Conservatives say that change is needed because people are living longer and many disabled workers could move to desk or office jobs that are less physically demanding.
Smalligan’s research, on the other hand, shows that older people who lose their disability benefits often have trouble finding new jobs, which means they have to start using their retirement benefits much sooner than they had planned.
The overhaul is reportedly a top priority for Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, a top Trump ally and former Project 2025 architect who featured as the Grim Reaper in a bizarre AI-generated video posted by the president last week.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, blasted the proposed changes, calling them part of a broader Republican effort to slash Social Security.
“This is Phase One of the Republican campaign to force Americans to work into old age to access their earned Social Security benefits, and represents the largest cut to disability insurance in American history,” Wyden told the Post.
“Americans with disabilities have worked and paid into Social Security just like everybody else, and they do not deserve the indignity of more bureaucratic water torture to get what they paid for.”
White House spokesman Kush Desai told the Daily Beast: “President Trump will always protect and defend Social Security for American citizens. The only policy change to Social Security is President Trump’s working families tax cut legislation that eliminated taxation of Social Security for almost all beneficiaries—which every single Democrat voted against.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the Social Security Administration for comment.
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