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Budget Cuts Series: SOCIAL SECURITY PROGRAMS
For over two years, Smart Dissent's Budget Cuts Series has exposed Trump's proposed budget cuts, finding savage proposals hidden beneath the surface. The Trump White House proposed their third budget in mid-March 2019 and we're wrapping up our Series by posting exclusively about it this week.
In today's Budget Cut Series we're talking about Social Security. These sorts of cuts make us wonder why ANYONE votes for Republicans.
“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Donald Trump declared in 2015. “Every other Republican’s going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do. I do.”
Four years later, the president is, in fact, proposing deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. As the New York Times reported, Trump’s newly proposed budget completes the trifecta by targeting Social Security, too.
Trump’s new budget proposal would cut Social Security payouts by $84 billion over the next decade while providing fewer resources to explain the changes to recipients.... proposes spending billions less on Social Security programs, including a $10 billion cut to the Social Security Disability Insurance program.
What exactly is the Social Security Disability Insurance program?
The Social Security disability insurance program pays benefits to you and certain family members if you worked long enough and paid Social Security taxes. Your adult child also may qualify for benefits on your earnings record if he or she has a disability that started before age 22.
Separately, this Trump budget includes specific cuts to the administrative aspect of Social Security to specifically make it harder for elderly to get help and answers.
The budget also chips away at Social Security’s relationship with its enrollees in smaller ways. It proposes a $400 million year-over-year cut to Social Security Administration funding, for instance.
Callers to the agency’s toll-free help line now spend almost 20 minutes on hold before getting the human assistance they need, up from a three-minute average wait in 2010. The incidence of callers getting a busy signal has more than doubled as well.
In-person customer service is also harder to obtain now than it was before lawmakers started hacking away at SSA’s funding. The agency laid off 3,500 field office workers from 2010 to 2018 in response to the cuts. It closed 64 of its 1,200-plus permanent field offices and shuttered another 500-plus part-time “contact stations” that also provided face-to-face answers for people who run into an issue with their benefits.
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