How Trump’s Disability Cuts Will Just Make the System More Cumbersome

Tom Bothwell is an attorney helping people secure Social Security Disability benefits in Washington State. He co-founded the firm Bothwell & Hamill with attorney Tim Hamill in 2006.

President Donald Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, has been attacking the Social Security Disability program this year, wrongly calling it wasteful and fast-growing.

This is part of his effort to turn people against the program as the Trump administration proposes massive cuts in its new budget, which includes:

· $60 million less for an effort to reduce a massive backlog of people waiting for disability hearings

· Creation of an “expert panel” to find ways of reducing the benefits Social Security pays to individual people by 5% over the next 10 years

· Cutting retroactive benefits — covering the time people spend waiting before they get approved — from 12 months to six months, which takes about $10 billion away from people with disabilities over several years

While all of this is proposed in the name of making government smaller and more efficient, here’s the problem: It’ll just end up making a complex program even more unwieldy.

And it will hurt regular people in the process, people who are vulnerable because of health problems and less able to fight back.

What Mulvaney Misses About Social Security Disability

Mulvaney seems to want to paint the Social Security Disability program as easy money and people receiving benefits as freeloaders.

The fact is that it’s incredibly hard to get Social Security Disability benefits.

· 70% — or more — of initial applications are denied.

· Then you have to appeal. But in recent years, the wait list for people seeking hearings for appeals has grown to 1 million.

· The national average hearing wait time is about 18 months.

· When people finally make it to hearings, they still get denied about 55% of the time.

Once you receive benefits, another reality Mulvaney ignores is that it’s not a cushy program.

The average monthly payment for people receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits because they cannot work and earn significant other income is $1,171 in 2017.

That’s $14,000 a year they have to try to live on.

Don’t get me wrong: Disability benefits can be a real lifesaver, covering essential costs of survival.

But they’re far from luxurious. Anyone would choose working and earning more if they possibly could.

Individuals who don’t have extensive work histories and receive disability benefits through the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program get even less — $735 a month.

And Mulvaney calls the program fast-growing. But that’s not true.

In recent years, the number of workers receiving benefits has been slipping downward, from 8.95 million in 2014 to 8.8 million in 2017.

How Do the Cuts Make the Program Harder to Manage?

If the cuts proposed by the Trump Administration go through, it’ll mean more people getting turned down for benefits and more people waiting for hearings.

Remember, one of the main cuts was for an effort to reduce the hearing backlog.

As it stands right now, “practically one claimant is dying every hour waiting for their due process rights,” said Lisa Ekman, director of government affairs for the National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives at a recent conference.

She reported that 60,000 completed decisions on disability cases are just waiting to be written. That’s because the Social Security Administration hasn’t hired enough support staff.

Failing to address this backlog because of budget cuts is only going to worsen an epic bureaucratic logjam.

And when you take steps like convening an expert panel to propose more changes in the program, you open the door for unintended consequences.

How does that work?

The main way the Trump budget aims to get ideas for further cutting is by running tests of different theoretical changes.

But according to an analysis by the finance news site The Motley Fool, the tests themselves would add $100 million in costs.

If the tests find that the program changes won’t work, The Motley Fool article said, “then the anticipated savings would turn out to be a mirage. Instead, the tests would have resulted in program changes that only added more layers of bureaucracy without benefitting either the disabled populations the program is intended to serve or the taxpayers who fund Social Security.”

In other words, this attempt to cut Social Security Disability would just make the program larger while helping fewer people.

Help for People With Disabilities

All the uncertainty the Trump administration is creating for the Social Security Disability program makes me even more driven in my work as a lawyer helping people apply and appeal for disability benefits.

With more denials and more appeals, people who cannot work because of health problems will need more help from experienced lawyers.

But disability lawyers aren’t the only ones who should be concerned with these changes.

Because people with disabilities often lack influence in politics, every American who cares about the well-being of people who are struggling through no fault of their own — possibly family, friends and neighbors — needs to tell their representatives in Washington, D.C., not to go through with these cuts.

If we need to cut, then cut an area where the needs aren’t so urgent. And make cuts that will work, not cuts that will backfire.

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