The Social Security Administration is abandoning plans to promulgate rules that experts say would have resulted in thousands of people losing their disability benefits.
White House deputy chief of staff James Blair and SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano both told Jason Turkish, co-founder of the nonprofit disability advocacy group Alliance for America’s Promise, that the forthcoming regulations are not moving forward, Turkish wrote in an email update Wednesday.
The White House itself, however, said it had not seen such a proposed regulation, despite multiple reports that the administration is abandoning the overhaul.
“Despite media speculation about a potential rule change, the White House has not seen any such proposal,” a White House official told Nextgov/FCW. “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.”
SSA didn’t respond to a request for comment.
When the Social Security Administration decides to issue someone a disability benefit, they have to consider whether an applicant can do substantial work by comparing their claim against a list of jobs.
The agency still uses occupational data developed by the Labor Department in 1938 and last updated in 1991. Since 2012, SSA has been working on updating that data into a list of modern jobs with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The forthcoming proposed rule was expected not only to replace that outdated data, but also to change how other factors like age and education weigh into the process — changes that could affect eligibility and who gets benefits.
Experts, advocates and Democrats in Congress had warned that changes in the proposed rule could drastically cut eligibility for the Social Security Disability Insurance program.
These restrictions were expected to be especially acute among older people due to changes in how age is accounted for in the process.
Jack Smalligan, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, estimated in a September paper that if 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, said Smalligan. Overall, the overhaul was expected to be the most significant change to the two disability programs to date.
The abandonment of the planned regulatory overhaul comes as Democrats have hammered the Trump administration on Social Security for months, criticizing the work of the Department of Government Efficiency at the agency in cutting employees and sharing sensitive data across government agencies.
“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,” over 160 House Democrats wrote to Bisignano in a letter opposing the rule late last month.
A former Trump official at SSA, Mark Warshawsky, who worked on similar rulemaking in the first Trump administration that wasn’t finalized, has argued 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.”
Lifespans are increasing and people are working further into old age, Warshawsky said.
It’s unclear at this point exactly how the abandonment of the forthcoming proposed rule will affect SSA’s plan to move to the newer occupational data it’s been developing with BLS for years, although in the short term it almost certainly delays it.
It’s a “lost opportunity,” said Smalligan, “to use far more current data about both jobs in the economy and about the requirements of those jobs.”
Using such outdated data can block claimants from benefits if the government finds that they could be doing work that may have existed decades ago, when the data was developed, but no longer does, as the Washington Post has detailed.
“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,” he continued.
“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 who represents clients seeking disability benefits at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, told Nextgov/FCW in a statement, saying that Bisignano made “the right choice.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include comment from the White House.