The Cost of a Single Trump Tax Break Would Bring 3.2 Million Individuals Out of Poverty. SSI Reform Could Change Lives.
In Democracy Journal, Roosevelt Institute president Elizabeth Wilkins outlines a vision for a people-oriented, participatory politics that can deliver both economic security and renewed faith in democracy. She invokes President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call to shield Americans from “the vicissitudes of life” and asks what today’s unavoidable risks look like.
Elizabeth points to the crisis in care, including childcare, as well the failures of our nation’s pension systems. I would add another: The shocking inadequacy of our safety net for disabled Americans, found in Social Security’s least discussed program.
American politicians have long divided the poor into “deserving” and “undeserving” camps. The category of “able-bodied adults without dependents” exemplifies the latter: People expected to prove their work ethic before receiving meager, temporary aid.
Politicians then contrast these so-called able-bodied adults with other groups, like children, the elderly, and the disabled: Individuals deemed poor through no fault of their own. During the debate on the 2025 GOP reconciliation bill, Republican lawmakers argued that cutting aid for able-bodied adults would free resources for “those that truly need it.”
Yet, that money has never reached disabled people, whose safety net remains deeply frayed.
A Promising Program Left to Crumble
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a program supporting more than 7.4 million people and often called “the safety net America forgot.” Created in 1972 as part of the Social Security Act, SSI replaced a patchwork of state programs for disabled children, disabled adults, and impoverished seniors.
At its launch, it marked a major step forward: Benefits were pegged to about 75 percent of the federal poverty line, and states with more generous programs were required to maintain supplemental benefits for existing beneficiaries. SSI thus established a new national floor and, at the time, helped to lift millions of people with disabilities out of deep poverty.
Today, SSI supports children with severe disabilities, adults unable to work due to illness or injury, and older Americans living on incomes too low to survive. For many, these monthly checks are the only thing keeping food on the table or the lights on.
Yet, the creation of SSI also marked the end of a broader era of safety net expansion that produced Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security Disability Insurance. Instead of building on SSI, policymakers let it languish.
States gradually cut their supplements, since they were only required to provide them to existing, not new, beneficiaries. While monthly benefits rose with inflation each year (and remained inadequate), the program’s asset limits and monthly income disregards (the portion of income that doesn’t count toward determining benefits) stayed frozen.
Combined with steep earnings phaseouts—and even penalties for meals cooked by friends, which are counted as “in-kind support and maintenance” and actually lower benefits—this led to a world where more than 50 percent of SSI recipients (more than 4 million people) now live in households below the federal poverty line.
Advocates mounted a big push around SSI’s 50th anniversary, but little changed.
For instance, the Biden administration eased some eligibility and means testing rules, but the Trump administration is actively dismantling even these modest improvements, making it harder for people to qualify.
For its part, Congress has not passed major SSI legislation since 1989, despite repeated attempts. The SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act—bipartisan, popular, and costing less than a billion dollars a year—would finally fix the program’s broken asset limits. I once called it “the closest thing to a no-brainer in federal policy.” But this bill went nowhere.
Solutions Are Straightforward
In an upcoming paper, Jack Landry of the Jain Family Institute and I use microsimulations from Census data to analyze another piece of legislation that is currently before Congress—the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act of 2024 (SSIRA). The SSIRA builds on the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, but goes further. It raises income disregards, eliminates punitive “in-kind support” rules, and sets the maximum monthly benefit at the federal poverty line for a single adult—double that for married couples both on SSI.
In short, our analysis shows how the SSIRA would modernize benefit levels while removing outdated penalties that keep recipients in poverty. Our preliminary findings show that the SSIRA would lift about 3.2 million individuals out of poverty, including direct beneficiaries and their families. Using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, the poverty rate for SSI households would fall from about 26 percent to 13 percent, nearly the national rate of 12.6 percent.
While the plan might seem costly at about $50 billion a year, it’s less than the cost of a single provision in Trump’s budget bill: Making the business income deduction permanent will alone cost over $73 billion a year. The same politicians who claim we “can’t afford” to lift disabled Americans out of poverty had no trouble spending more to lower business tax rates.
Bringing millions of disabled folks and their families above the poverty line matters, but we shouldn’t settle for barely keeping them afloat. SSI still imposes punishing phaseouts, and the Social Security Administration’s backlog of disability determinations leaves 30,000 people to die each year while waiting for aid.
As Elizabeth reminds us in her essay, if we want government to shield Americans from life’s vicissitudes, we must begin with those whose dignity has been ignored for far too long. Disabled people must be at the core of any people-powered future we create together.
Correction: The original title of this piece misstated the number of disabled SSI recipients that would be raised out of poverty under proposed legislation. The correct figure is 3.2 million individuals, which includes beneficiaries and their families.
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