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WhiskeyGrinder

(27,134 posts)
Tue Apr 28, 2026, 10:18 AM Tuesday

The Trump Administration Aims to Penalize Disabled Adults Who Live With Their Families [View all]

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-social-security-ssi-disability-benefits-cuts-parents-children

Even a glance at Shy’tyra Burton’s life reveals her need for the sort of federal government assistance that helps disabled Americans stay in their homes. Born two months prematurely into a poor family in Philadelphia, unable to breathe or swallow without tubes and largely confined to medical facilities until age 4, Burton was diagnosed with a litany of developmental and intellectual disabilities that left her with an IQ below 70.

She persevered and graduated from a high school special education program, then attempted community college. But she struggled to grasp basic tasks and information. She couldn’t get hired, including at McDonald’s. After multiple medical and psychological evaluations and a hearing before a judge, the federal government approved her for the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides a basic income to those with severe disabilities and to indigent older people.

For Burton, now 22, the $994 monthly benefit is lifesaving but not enough to completely support herself on her own. So, like many SSI recipients, she has continued to live with her father, who makes around $2,000 a month as a Philadelphia sanitation worker.

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is poised to penalize people like Burton simply for living in the same home as their families, according to four federal officials, internal emails and a federal regulatory listing. The administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI allotment, even if the family members they live with are poor enough to qualify for food stamps. This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third — about $330 a month in Burton’s case — or ending their support altogether.

The effort to cut SSI for families who also rely on food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was initiated by top White House and Department of Government Efficiency officials last year, multiple Social Security officials said. It marks a second attempt by the Trump administration to quietly but dramatically downsize disability benefit programs overseen by the Social Security Administration, despite those programs’ strict eligibility standards and minimal instances of fraud. White House Budget Director Russell Vought and Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano abandoned a different proposed regulation involving disability payments last year after ProPublica and other news outlets reported on the harm that the plan would cause to hundreds of thousands of largely blue-collar workers in red states. (The disability programs are administered by the Social Security Administration but separate from the retirement program for which the agency is named. The Trump administration has promised not to cut Social Security retirement payments.)

The likely SSI cut will affect not just younger adults with disabilities such as Down syndrome and severe autism who are still living at home with their low-income parents, but also older people with health or financial problems who have had to move in with their adult children on tight budgets. All told, as many as 400,000 poor and disabled people and indigent older people across the United States could have their support cut or eliminated, according to a ProPublica analysis of actuarial figures from the Social Security Administration.
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