Mark Warshawsky explains how President Trump’s government efficiency initiative could help improve Social Security.
As President Donald Trump and his administration look to reduce wasteful government spending and improve federal government productivity, they can find low-hanging fruit at the Social Security Administration. In particular, the administration should undo Biden-era regulations that unnecessarily bloated spending on welfare and disability benefits.
The president, working with the technology experts at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, should also push for modernized information technology, including new digital features, to enhance accuracy and speed and help solve the agency’s service crisis.
Finally, to reduce administrative costs and better target spending to those most in need, Trump must simplify and modernize the basic regulatory rules for disability programs. The Trump administration and DOGE need to act positively and methodically within the law to serve and protect taxpayers and SSA beneficiaries.
To begin with, the Trump administration should roll back the unnecessary expansion of eligibility for, and the level of, welfare disability benefits. The SSA issued these regulations, costing about $20 billion over 10 years, with no analysis of how they would help the most disadvantaged people. Another set of regulations, costing about $30 billion, says that disability claimants need to be evaluated based on only five years of work history – down from the requirement in recent rules of fifteen years.
This change ignores clear research evidence showing that workers’ skills from past jobs continue for at least ten years and often longer. Another set of administrative actions, costing about $10 billion, essentially forgives the collection of old overpayments made by SSA to beneficiaries. This gloss-over ignores the root cause of the problem – deficiencies in processing information on earnings, assets, and other items.
The Biden administration stated that a major motivation for these changes was to reduce agency costs investigate the ability of disability claimants to work, or to see if they had other available resources of support.
