Democrats Want to Reform This Program That Helps Poor Elderly and Disabled Americans

​​President Joe Biden has invoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt several times as he has implemented sweeping anti-poverty measures to tackle record unemployment and economic turmoil. Hoping to model his legacy on the President who helped the nation climb out of the Great Depression, Biden has spent $1.9 trillion so far on stimulus checks, the expanded child tax credit, and enhanced unemployment insurance, among other relief measures.

But Democrats have another, less well-known plan to improve an element of the country’s social safety net that supports the neediest Americans: boosting Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits.
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“Disabled people and the poorest of the poor haven’t had really any help in years,” says Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. “They’ve just been forgotten and neglected. So it’s time we do something about it.”

SSI is administered by the Social Security Administration, along with retirement benefits and Social Security Disability Insurance, and it is meant to help people with disabilities and older Americans living in poverty. Brown and other powerful Democrats in Congress, along with disability and aging advocates, want to increase SSI benefits as part of their $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package, which they can pass along party lines over Republican opposition. If they are successful, this would be the biggest update to SSI benefits in decades. SSI currently has 7.8 million Americans enrolled. The SSI enhancements, when combined with Biden’s proposed Social Security reforms, would lift 1.4 million people out of poverty in 2021 alone, according to an Urban Institute analysis.

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Brown’s plan would cost $46 billion next year, according to an estimate from the Social Security Chief Actuary, but he believes the pandemic has changed the conversation about the role of government in Americans’ lives and opened the door to many long held Democratic priorities. “The pandemic has been the great revealer. It revealed wealth inequality, it revealed racial injustice, structural racism to people that weren’t paying attention,” Brown says. “It also showed that the wealthy were getting wealthier during the pandemic, while so many people are suffering. So the logical step that Congress should take is to think big about these issues, and we’re doing it.”

SSI’s strict rules

When Congress passed the program into law in 1972, it said SSI should ensure the nation’s “aged, blind, and disabled people would no longer have to subsist on below-poverty-level incomes.” But its benefits have not kept up with modern standards of living.

The maximum SSI benefit individuals receive in 2021 is $794 per month, or $9,530.12 per year. That’s less than 75% of the federal poverty line. It’s even more dire for couples. If you receive SSI and you’re married to another SSI beneficiary, you don’t each get the full benefit. Instead, you share a benefit of ​​$14,293.61, just 50% more than if you were single. That means a retired couple in their 80s, or a younger disabled couple, could be financially better off getting divorced than staying married.

SSI is meant to serve only the poorest Americans. But as the cost of living has grown dramatically since the 1970s, SSI’s rules have not kept pace with inflation, so people who meet the asset and income limits for the program have lost purchasing power over time.

People who receive SSI must have assets of less than $2,000 for an individual or $3,000 for a couple—numbers that have not been updated since 1989. This disqualifies anyone with rainy day savings or even a small retirement fund. Income is limited, too. SSI participants cannot make more than $65 in earned income and $20 in unearned income each month, which is the same amount the program allowed when it began nearly 50 years ago. After those cutoffs, their benefits go down for every dollar over those thresholds. Their checks can also be reduced if they receive “in-kind support,” such as getting a bag of groceries from a friend or staying in a family member’s home for free.

These rules are not only stringent for the recipients, but also burdensome for the Social Security Administration (SSA), which is already strained under its current workload, says Stacy Cloyd, director of policy and administrative advocacy at the National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives. If a SSI beneficiary wins $25 from a lottery ticket, for example, they have to report that to the SSA and see their benefits go down by $5. “SSA would have to process that report and have to change those benefits and change them back the following month. And that takes a lot of time,” Cloyd says.

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This stresses a system already struggling with long wait times for people applying for SSI benefits in the first place. The application process is notoriously complex, requires significant amounts of paperwork, and can often take multiple appeals before someone is awarded benefits. The SSA’s funding has gone down in recent years even as its workload has increased, and its offices have been closed for in-person assistance since the pandemic began, leaving applicants to seek help on the phone or online.

“​​Decades of Congressional neglect mean that SSI—a critical program that should be protecting people from poverty—now instead traps disabled people and seniors in deep and enduring poverty when it’s supposed to be giving them a lifeline out of it,” says Rebecca Vallas, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation who has worked with Congressional Democrats on their plan to overhaul the program. “A moment like this pandemic potentially presents as an opportunity for a paradigm shift.”

A chance for reform

In the spring of 2020, Biden vowed to expand SSI benefits as part of his presidential campaign’s disability policy platform. Democrats in Congress hope to hold the President to that promise. In April, Brown and freshman Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman led a letter with 18 Senators and 33 members of the House urging Biden to prioritize the issue.

Their plan would bring the SSI benefit up to the poverty line, increase the asset limits to $10,000 for an individual and $20,000 for a couple, update the income rules and eliminate the marriage penalty and rules that penalize people for “in-kind” support.

But SSI reforms are unlikely to be included in a bipartisan package because of cost concerns, and conservatives have criticized the Democrats’ plan to push many of their big changes through the budget reconciliation process without any Republican support. “I don’t think it’s appealing in the context of throwing it in a reconciliation package that’s completely partisan,” says Rachel Greszler, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Lawmakers might be able to come up with a bipartisan agreement to reform SSI, she says, but “not just something that’s going to provide a blanket increase in the level of benefits.” (Greszler and the Heritage Foundation argue there would be less need for SSI if Social Security retirement benefits were privatized and focused more on lower-income earners.)

Still, support for increasing monthly SSI benefits is growing. The proposed changes are enormously popular with the general public, even among Republicans, just as the stimulus checks and the Child Tax Credit are. Powerful outside groups have backed the idea, including AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers (UAW), AARP and the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities. And Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, is on board with Brown’s plan, in addition to Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Brown says he has been talking to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other negotiators about ways to make the SSI changes work and says he is “optimistic” that at least some can be included in the reconciliation bill. His optimism comes from experience. He worked on the expanded Child Tax Credit for years with Rep. Rosa DeLauro before the idea became a reality this year. “With the Child Tax Credit, I first moved on this in 2013 when only Rosa DeLauro and I were pushing for it. And then we got [former President Barack] Obama on board, we got the huge majority of Democrats, almost every Democrat on board,” Brown says. “Stuff takes some time sometimes, but this is our opportunity now to do it.”