The Trump administration wants to make it harder for older Americans to get Social Security disability payments – and if you’re over 50 with a busted back or bum knee, you might want to pay attention.
Right now, if you’re north of 50 and you get injured or sick enough that you can’t work, Social Security actually considers your age when deciding if you qualify for disability benefits. Makes sense, right? A 57-year-old coal miner with degenerative disc disease isn’t exactly going to pivot into a thriving career as a software developer. But Team Trump – led by Russell Vought, one of the brains behind Project 2025 – wants to either eliminate age as a factor completely or bump the threshold up to 60.
Their logic goes something like this: people are living longer and fewer jobs require manual labor, so disabled older workers should just adapt to desk work. Sure, because every 55-year-old construction worker with arthritis can just retrain as a data analyst.
Here’s what the numbers actually show. About 42 percent of people who currently get disability benefits qualified because of their age. If this rule change reduces eligibility by just 10 percent – and that’s a conservative estimate – roughly 750,000 people would lose benefits over the next decade. Add another 80,000 widows and kids who’d lose benefits tied to a disabled spouse or parent.
Research shows that most older Americans who apply for disability don’t find another job. So what happens when you take away their disability benefits? They’re forced to claim Social Security retirement early – at 62 instead of their full retirement age. That means they’re locked into receiving 30 percent less money every single month for the rest of their lives.
Let’s do some quick math. If you were supposed to get $2,000 a month at full retirement age but you’re forced to start at 62, you now get $1,400. Over a decade, that’s a loss of around $72,000. Maybe more. Some estimates put it between $46,000 and $99,000 depending on your wage history.
This isn’t some new idea either. They tried to push a similar rule during Trump’s first term but ran out of time. The timing now is particularly interesting since it comes right after another proposed cut that would strip Supplemental Security Income benefits from nearly 400,000 low-income disabled and elderly people. The average savings from these SSI cuts would barely cover one day of the massive tax cuts for the wealthy that Republicans pushed through in July.
The Social Security Administration claims they’re just “modernizing” the system and returning to “longstanding criteria.” They even point out that their current jobs database includes obsolete occupations like “nut sorters” and “telephone quotation clerks” – which is true, and genuinely ridiculous. But updating an outdated database is different from gutting protections for older workers who’ve paid into the system their entire lives.
Conservatives have been trying to slice and dice Social Security for decades under the guise of “reform” and “sustainability.” They love to talk about how people are living longer, as if that means a 58-year-old roofer should be able to work until 70. The real irony is that they are literally pushing for more people to take up blue collar jobs, which tend to be more labor intensive and much harder on the body – in the long and short term. Manual laborers don’t get to gracefully transition into their golden years – they limp into them, often with chronic pain and limited mobility.
Remember when Trump repeatedly promised not to touch Social Security? Yet, here we are watching his administration systematically dismantle it piece by piece. First they went after SSI. Now they’re coming for disability. And the new Social Security Commissioner already floated raising the retirement age to 69 before quickly walking it back after public backlash.
The people who will be hit hardest are exactly who you’d expect – low and middle-income workers who rely on Social Security because they don’t have fat investment portfolios to fall back on. These are people who worked their entire lives in jobs that broke them down, paid their payroll taxes like they were supposed to, and are now being told tough luck when they need help.
The proposal is still in development and will supposedly go through a public comment period before being finalized. But given this administration’s track record of ramming through unpopular policies while ignoring public input, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them to actually listen to anyone who disagrees with them.