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. The aim was to help the agency at a time when it is failing to serve the public. SSA, however, is still failing to answer the phones promptly and accurately and is struggling to process changes in beneficiary status and condition. Furthermore, the agency has a massive backlog of claims for disability benefits.
These changes abandoned the prudent stewardship of taxpayer dollars. By the faulty logic of the Biden administration, SSA could pay out on every disability claim made or forgive every overpayment, solving its backlog and service problems. That approach is easier than addressing the underlying sources of SSA’s failures – manual processes, antiquated technologies, and programming languages that were once cutting edge in the 1960s but now are costly to maintain and difficult to integrate into more efficient technology. Indeed, there are still only a few services that the public can get from SSA entirely online, without needing to call or visit a field office.
In addition to modernizing customer-facing IT, SSA needs to simplify and modernize its complex and costly disability program rules. The agency needs to use the new statistical data on occupational requirements in its program rules to adjudicate disability claims and continuing benefits. It cannot continue to rely on information last updated almost 50 years ago. Moreover, the new data must be integrated with a modern view of the labor market, less focused on physical work. In the 21st century, more and more people are employed at older ages, and new types of careers are available to more people of various educational backgrounds.
Implementing these new rules through an automated tool would simplify and speed up the program administration and improve the consistency of adjudication. Compared to current vocational rules, some disability claimants would get benefits paid while others would not. The net effect would likely be a significant reduction in government spending, from a more accurate and current read of labor market realities.
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Other recommended changes include a simplification of the return-to-work rules for when disability benefits are cut off and making greater use of claimant attorneys to provide complete information to the agency when filing a claim for a client instead of relying on the agency to collect the required medical and vocational records. Finally, the agency should consider and publish a full analysis of whether all the many layers of appeals are needed and cost-effective for speed and fairness to claimants and to protect the taxpayer.
The Trump administration has the opportunity to make policy changes and to use the DOGE in a productive and positive manner to make long overdue technology changes in how the federal government functions. Efficiency and fiscal responsibility are imperative goals – especially for SSA to protect taxpayers and best serve its beneficiaries.
Mark J. Warshawsky is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who served as the Deputy Commissioner for Retirement and Disability Policy at the Social Security Administration.