Copyright Los Angeles Times
Republicans’ hostility to Social Security in general has been well-documented over the years. Less widely recognized is their antagonism for one component of the program: disability coverage. As a target, disability had ebbed as disability rolls declined, along with unemployment, during the economic recovery of the last few years. But it’s back. Despite promising repeatedly not to cut Social Security benefits, President Trump is contemplating a change in disability standards that could deprive as many as 750,000 potential recipients their eligibility for benefits over 10 years. That’s the judgment of the Urban Institute, which undertook a painstaking analysis of the changes under discussion at the White House and the Social Security Administration. Such a change, amounting to a 20% cut in the share of applicants who qualify for disability benefits, would be “the largest-ever cut to Social Security Disability Insurance,” argues the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It would be even larger than the Reagan-era disability cuts, which the Reagan administration was forced to reverse amid fierce opposition from governors, courts, beneficiaries, and advocates.” According to government disclosures and outside reporting, the administration is contemplating two major changes to disability standards, which it describes generally as “improvements to the disability adjudication process.” One is likely to be largely innocuous: removing numerous outdated occupations, such as “nut sorters” and “egg processors,” from its database and adding occupations that have emerged during the digital age, such as web designers. This effort, which has bipartisan support, is important because disability judges sometimes have approved or disapproved disability benefits based on the putative availability of old jobs that no longer truly exist. The second change would involve the weight given to an applicant’s age in judging whether they’re truly disabled. Disability professionals regard age as a critical factor in determining an applicant’s eligibility, due to the recognition that “the ability to adapt to new work decreases with age,” as Jack Smalligan of the Urban Institute noted. “The approach begun in the Trump administration’s first term could result in unprecedented cuts to disability eligibility and benefits — especially for those over age 50.” A Social Security Administration spokesperson told me by email that it is “constantly reviewing improvements to the disability adjudication process to ensure our disability program remains current and can be more efficiently administered. ... We’re at the initial phase of our regulation agenda and will not have anything further to report anytime soon.” The spokesperson added: “Once a proposal is fully developed, it will be shared publicly through the standard rulemaking process with a public comment period. As with any rulemaking, we will consider and analyze public comments before deciding whether to finalize the rule.” Currently, Social Security Administration guidelines group applicants into four categories, ranging from younger person (under 50), to near retirement age (60 and older). The disability program combines those categories with physical characteristics and educational attainment to determine whether an applicant should receive benefits. What’s under discussion is either eliminating age as a factor altogether, or eliminating it for applicants younger than 60. Before examining how this would affect older workers, let’s take a look at the disability insurance program generally. Critics of Social Security often hold that disability shouldn’t be part of the program at all. “Do you really think that Social Security disability insurance is part of what people think of when they think of Social Security?” Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director during his first term, commented to a CBS interviewer in 2017. “I don’t think so.” As I pointed out then, Mulvaney’s beef was with his fellow Republicans — disability benefits were added to Social Security in 1956, under Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. The roots of the GOP animosity toward disability insurance are hard to fathom. That’s because disability is to some extent a red-state phenomenon. The highest rate is seen in West Virginia, where 8.9% of the population aged 18-64 was receiving benefits in 2015, followed by Alabama (8.5%), Arkansas (8.4%), Kentucky (8.2%) and Mississippi (7.9%). The ranking is unlikely to have changed significantly since then. The lowest rates were in Utah (3.0%), California (3.2%), Colorado (3.3%) and North Dakota (3.%). One common misconception cherished by the disability program’s critics is that benefits are easy to get. The truth is exactly the opposite. Disability standards are stringent, and they’re applied stringently. Two-thirds of applicants are initially denied, and only 10% or so of applicants win benefits on appeal, even after several rounds of reconsiderations. All in all, only about 41% of all applicants end up with checks. The Republican assault stepped up during the Great Recession, when disability rolls rose sharply. The Republican theme was that the rolls were brimming with malingerers, layabouts and fraudsters devoted to ripping off the taxpayers. The truth is that the sources of the increase were well understood by those knowledgeable about the program. They had everything to do with America’s demographics, the economy and changes in the disability program rules approved by Congress in the 1980s. The largest single driver of higher disability rolls was Congress’ expansion of the definition of disability in 1980 to include psychological and neurological impairments rather than merely musculoskeletal conditions. It became fashionable to denigrate these impairments as “subjective” or unserious. “Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts,” sneered Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a doctor). “Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everyone over 40 has a back pain.” Paul’s numbers were flagrantly wrong. The Social Security Administration classifies anxiety as a subset of mental disorders that constitute a total of 3.9% of disability claims. The category encompasses post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias or compulsions that result in “marked difficulties” with working or living in society. Paul wanted his audience to think of “anxiety” as the mild sense of dread you might experience when contemplating going to work on a bad hair day. That’s not how it was defined by Social Security. As for the economy, disabled people always have more difficulty finding employment than others; when desk jobs disappear and all that’s left are laborers’ positions, the opportunities for the physically and mentally challenged dwindle. As it happened, disability rolls peaked in the recession’s aftermath, reaching 8.95 million in 2014. They’ve declined every year since then, to 7.23 million in 2024. Another 1.1 million people receive disability benefits as spouses or children of disabled workers. That brings us to the proposals under consideration in Washington. They reflect regulations that were completed but never implemented during the first Trump administration. The age issue had been raised in 2015 in a paper co-written by Mark Warshawsky, then of George Mason University, who would subsequently serve as a deputy Social Security commissioner throughout the first Trump term. Under the existing age standards, he asserted, “a 50-year-old who can perform only sedentary work and is unskilled is presumptively disabled, while a 49-year-old is not. ... Given increases in the average human lifespan, the age cutoffs and loose standards for age-related disability are ripe for reform.” Among other flaws, he wrote, the age standard “assumes jobs require physical exertion. .... The economy has shifted away from exertional jobs that require direct physical labor and toward more sedentary jobs, owing to computerization and mechanization.” He recommended that “age be eliminated as a deciding criterion.” That may not be so simple, since federal law requires that an applicant’s age be taken into consideration in disability determinations. Warshawsky, who is now associated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, still holds that view. Current rules, he wrote me by email, “fail to recognize the new reality that most people are working past what were once traditional retirement ages, such as 55, 60, 62, and even 65. Defined benefit and retiree health plans in the private sector have largely disappeared, with few exceptions; there is no mandatory retirement; the Social Security normal retirement age is now 67; and healthy lifespans have lengthened considerably across earnings groups.” He attributed criticism of the age change to “a shocked sensibility” that it may produce “lower disability awards in the future.” Disability advocates reply that the minimizing or eliminating the weight age plays in disability determination proposed changes would target “older applicants already determined to have significant medical impairments by discounting the barriers they face due to their age in continuing to do substantial work,” observes Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The economic impact on affected households could be substantial. Disabled workers shut out of eligibility “would be forced to spend any retirement savings faster and claim their Social Security retirement benefits at a younger age, permanently reducing their — and possibly their family’s — monthly Social Security retirement benefits by up to 30 percent,” Romig wrote. In any case, the real-world workplace is still tougher than it looks from the outside. A 2010 study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that 45% of workers 58 and older held jobs that were physically demanding or involved difficult working conditions. It may be true that the changes in disability standards haven’t been made final. But they’ve been on the table since the beginning of Trump’s first term. The best bet is that they’re coming back, so consider this a forewarning.
