Just over a year ago, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney was being raked over the coals for his budget blueprint. In addition to supposed cuts to the Meals on Wheels program (which weren’t really cuts), the document projected savings of $72.5 billion within Social Security’s two main programs for the disabled.
Liberal journalists injected outrage into their reports and columns. Some denounced this modest frugality as President Trump’s “deceitful attack on the disabled” and called the justifications for the reforms “false claims.” Others snarkily but accurately noted that the cuts “will hurt Trump counties,” which perhaps should have signaled that they were not cynical, as suggested.
What few of them noticed or discussed was that Mulvaney’s document was banking on $45 billion in savings from a set of reasonable bipartisan reforms to the federal Social Security Disability Insurance program that had been discussed during the Obama era and, in some cases, were already being implemented.
Good information was hard to find in the rush to attack Trump in the early days of his administration. But the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which has not been shy about criticizing Trump since his election, was awake to what was actually going on. “While the estimated savings are likely far too high,” the organization’s report stated at the time, “the approach put forward by the administration is a sensible one and consistent with many of the ideas presented in” its own document on reform proposals, developed by former Reps. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., and Jim McCrery, R-La.
In this context, people should look at what happened to the Social Security Disability Insurance program last year. The New York Times reported this week that new disability claims fell to a 15-year low in 2017, a drop so dramatic that the projected solvency of Social Security’s long-depleted Disability Insurance trust fund has just been extended to 2032, nine years later than where the projection was just two years ago. This is a huge gain. Meanwhile, the total number of people on the program’s rolls has fallen by more than 350,000 from its peak four years ago.
How is this happening without any of the wailing and gnashing of teeth that was predicted? Most important is the rapidly improving economy. But that also highlights a moral problem: A strong economy shouldn’t have a big effect on how many people are too disabled to work. It does so only because the system is rife with abuse by people who can work but would rather defraud the system than get off the sofa.
Applications for disability benefits jumped nearly one-third in the first two years after the financial crisis even though disability did not suddenly afflict that many more people at that moment.
Among Trump’s changes was to prevent people from double-dipping on unemployment, which is for those seeking work, and disability, which is for those who can’t work.
The Times notes other changes, such as that magistrates responsible for awarding disability claims have been retrained to be more appropriately skeptical of new claims and to show less deference to a single physician’s medical opinion. This change came years after a bipartisan congressional investigation found flagrant corruption and abuses within the program in West Virginia that resulted in thousands of illegitimate benefit awards.
As NPR reported in 2013, the share of disability claimants with hard-to-prove conditions such as mental illness and back pain more than doubled between 1961 and 2011. The share of those disabled by clear-cut conditions such as cancer, heart disease, and neurological disorders either declined or stayed about the same. As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., put it, “Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts.”
A modern society should have a safety net for people incapable of supporting themselves, but when able people claim benefits, they endanger the support structure for those who can’t live without help. Whatever the government program, a good rule of thumb is that people capable of supporting themselves should do so, so they don’t drain funds from those who cannot. A leaner disability program with fewer beneficiaries is a stronger program with a safer trust fund.
