The Social Security Administration has abandoned plans to block thousands of older Americans from qualifying for disability benefits after an uproar that reached senior officials in the Trump White House, according to people familiar with the decision.
The agency is also halting a plan to use modern labor market data to help judge whether disability claimants can work, a project that has cost the federal government more than $350 million so far. The new data would have replaced a long-outdated jobs database that until recently included obsolete occupations such as nut sorters and telephone quotation clerks.
The policy affecting older people would have fundamentally altered who qualifies for the two federal disability programs by eliminating or limiting a person’s age as a factor to consider. It fulfilled a long-held goal of Trump officials to tighten the federal safety net and had been on track to be announced in the Federal Register as soon as December.
But widespread opposition mounted following an article in The Washington Post in October that reported the new policy could result in a loss of future benefits for hundreds of thousands of people.
Jason Turkish — an attorney representing disabled people and co-founder of the advocacy group Alliance for America’s Promise — said Social Security commissioner Frank Bisignano and other administration officials assured him in meetings over the past week that the proposal would not move forward. A former Social Security executive familiar with the disability program confirmed that Bisignano has scrapped the proposed rule.
“The commissioner took a decisive, unambiguous role in concretely ruling out that this mega-regulation would move forward,” Turkish said.
Social Security and White House officials did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Social Security evaluates disability claims by considering age, work experience and education to determine if someone can adjust to other types of work. Applicants over 50 have a better chance of qualifying because age is treated as a limitation in adapting to many jobs.
But with prodding from Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought earlier this year, the agency began to consider eliminating age as a factor entirely or raising the threshold to age 60, according to people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions. Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner at the time, instructed officials to begin drafting the new rule shortly after he took office.
Advocates for the disabled and elderly applauded the decision to back off.
“Social Security disability insurance is a critical lifeline for people who find themselves no longer able to work,” Jenn Jones, Vice President of Financial Security for AARP, said in a statement. “We appreciate Commissioner Bisignano’s commitment to a careful and transparent process, because any changes to [disability insurance] can impact older Americans across the country who rely on Social Security for their independence and livelihoods.”
A cut in disability benefits could have significant political consequences, advocates and lawmakers have warned, pointing to Trump’s campaign promise to not touch Social Security.
“I’m incredibly pleased to see Commissioner Bisignano and the administration decided not to pursue proposed cuts to Social Security’s disability programs — cuts which would have been out of step not only with what the American people want, but also with President Trump’s repeated promises not to cut Social Security,” Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the National Academy of Social Insurance, said in a statement.
Conservatives have long argued that since Americans are living longer and fewer have jobs that require manual labor, many physically disabled workers could adapt to desk work, with the result that fewer people would qualify for disability benefits. Social Security had prepared a similar rule at the end of the first Trump administration but ran out of time to formally propose it.
To determine the jobs a disability applicant might be able to do, Social Security has long relied on a database compiled by the Labor Department, which abandoned the list more than 30 years ago as the economy shifted away from blue-collar work to information and services. Martin O’Malley, who served as Social Security commissioner during the Biden administration, removed many of those jobs from consideration after scrutiny from lawmakers following a Post investigation in 2022.
But the agency did not replace them with a sophisticated database of jobs in the modern U.S. economy compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the government has collected for years. Among the Trump administration’s concerns with using the new data is that younger disabled people with cognitive and mental impairments would likely qualify for fewer jobs, potentially leading more of them to be awarded benefits, the former Social Security executive said.
According to two former officials, starting next year the agency planned to develop a database using the BLS data to help determine which jobs, if any, someone seeking benefits could perform. Disability advocates say they worry that such a database would be programmed to come up with a vast array of jobs — particularly if advancing age was no longer a limiting factor — and would end up denying benefits to tens of thousands of claimants every year.
Michelle Spadafore, a New York-based disability attorney, said that advocates were most concerned about the proposal that could have made more older Americans ineligible for disability and are willing to wait until the agency moves forward with a modern jobs database.
“I don’t know if there’s a way to not throw out the baby with the bathwater,” she said. “The threat of taking age out of the equation is so great that even though we want to see modernization of job data, we’re willing to wait on that.”
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