The budget deal hammered out by President Obama and the Republican-led Congress likely has ruled out major changes to the Social Security Disability Insurance program until 2021 or later.
The deal averted the expected 2016 exhaustion of the trust fund for the disability program, and a corresponding 19 percent benefit cut for disabled workers, by redirecting payroll taxes from the larger retirement program to the disability program.
The result is that the disability trust fund is extended through 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
To some Republicans and outside experts, 2021 is now the soonest that Congress can attempt a broader reform of the disability program to address its long-term funding programs. Many had hoped that such an effort would be tied to a vote to reallocate funds between the two Social Security programs.
Instead, the deal included small-scale money-savers, such as cracking down on fraud, requiring medical information for all disability applications and closing a loophole that allowed married retirees to boost their benefits. It also would reauthorize the Social Security Administration’s ability to conduct demonstration projects that allow beneficiaries to return to work without losing benefits.
Outside experts who favored broad overhauls to the disability program ahead of the 2016 deadline were left disappointed.
The deal “does some good things, but frankly what it does is extremely modest overall, and a far cry from what I think is needed,” said Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
With the deal in place, Goldwein said, “my fear is that lawmakers are not going to start talking about this until 2020-2021.” By that time, he argued, the challenges facing long-term funding of the program would be worse, and many more disabled people would have lost out on the opportunities provided by reforms that would improve the program.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is one of the outside groups that has been pushing for reforming the disability program, which now has 11 million beneficiaries.
The group set up a SSDI Solutions Initiative, headed by former Congressmen Earl Pomeroy and Jim McCrery, a Republican and Democrat, to advocate large-scale changes to the program to incentivize work and address its funding issues.
“There’s just been a lot of good research over the past several years by really good think tanks, economists, so on, providing some laudable solutions to SSDI,” said Pamela Villarreal, an expert at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank. “But the political will, it’s still just not there.”
Villarreal called the budget deal a “Band-Aid” approach to a problem that lawmakers could have seen coming for the past 20 years.
Yet to analysts who feared that Congress might respond to the trust fund exhaustion by cutting benefits, the outcome of the deal was a favorable one.
“They’ve let go of people with disabilities as hostages. They don’t have to worry any more” about benefit cuts, Eric Kingson said.
Kingson, a professor at Syracuse University who is running as a Democratic candidate for Congress in New York, has long been an advocate against Social Security cuts and is the co-author of the book Social Security Works!: Why Social Security Isn’t Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All.
Kingson said the deal was “protective” of Social Security from changes over the medium term, and cited it as evidence that the politics of Social Security have changed. While members of Congress and the Obama administration were discussing possible spending reductions in Social Security several years ago, he said, few politicians are talking about that now. He noted that Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump have run against Social Security cuts, and that Democrats Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have called to expand the program.
For some conservatives, however, entitlement reform is a top goal, and the deal isn’t sitting well with them.
Mike Lee, the conservative senator from Utah, announced Monday that a post on the deal on his Facebook page had reached 53 million viewers.
In the post, he decried the deal as a “vote to raid Social Security in the middle of the night to perpetuate an unsustainable spending addiction.”
