The Trump Administration is preparing to propose a rule to cut Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits and strip eligibility for hundreds of thousands of low-income older people and severely disabled adults and children.[1]
Under the rule, nearly 400,000 SSI beneficiaries living with family or friends experiencing their own financial struggles likely would have their benefits cut — typically by hundreds of dollars per month — or lose eligibility altogether.[2] And yet the average annual savings from these benefit cuts would barely pay for a single day of the massive tax cuts for the wealthy that are part of the Republican megabill enacted in July.[3] At the same time, the rule would make it harder for eligible people to get and keep SSI, creating new red tape for beneficiaries and more work for the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) already depleted and overburdened staff.
Currently, very low-income disabled or older people who receive SSI can have their benefits reduced by up to one-third (about $300 a month) if they receive “in-kind support and maintenance,” including a place to stay. Similarly, SSI recipients can have their benefits reduced based on the income of their parents (if they are under 18) or spouse, under the assumption that they will contribute to an SSI beneficiary’s living expenses. However, these reductions don’t apply to beneficiaries who live in a household that receives “public assistance,” including food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). That’s because households financially precarious enough to qualify for those benefits can’t afford to financially support SSI recipients. These rules help families support their elderly or disabled relatives, including by allowing them to live in their homes, reducing the likelihood that they experience homelessness or need institutional care.
SSI’s public assistance household rule has been updated to reflect the ways struggling families make ends meet — but the Trump Administration proposal would return the program to the outdated criteria first established in 1980. Forty-five years ago, the two main programs SSI now uses to identify low-income families — the programs now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and SNAP — played dramatically different roles. Then, TANF’s predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was a reasonable proxy for families who needed “all of their income” to meet their basic needs, the intent of the rule. But far fewer households now receive TANF cash assistance than received AFDC over four decades ago.[4]
By contrast, many more low-income households use SNAP today than received the then-recently created Food Stamps program in 1980. Now, SNAP is the best proxy for families who need all of their income to meet their basic needs. To reflect that, SSA finalized a long-overdue update to the rule last year, adding SNAP to the list of qualifying programs that indicate a family is struggling to meet basic expenses. This common-sense update is consistent with many other programs that use SNAP participation to identify low-income families who need additional supports. For example, children who live in SNAP-participating households are automatically eligible for free school meals, and individuals receiving SNAP are often automatically eligible to receive low-income home energy assistance.
Under the anticipated Trump Administration proposal, it’s expected that receiving food assistance from SNAP would no longer be enough to qualify a family as a “public assistance household.” This change would ignore the reality that families who receive SNAP have very low incomes — the typical multi-person SNAP household with at least one member who receives SSI has an annual income of around $17,000, well below the poverty line.[5] The resulting SSI benefit cuts would be felt in low-income households with disabled family members or older relatives across the country.
The Trump Administration’s proposal to change the rule would harm hundreds of thousands of the nation’s lowest-income people. While more details will become available when the details of the proposed rule are made public, removing SNAP as a qualifying form of public assistance would likely result in benefit cuts for over 275,000 people and loss of eligibility for over 100,000 more, based on a 2024 SSA analysis.[6] To see how these cuts could affect people in each state, see Table 1.
To understand how the Trump Administration’s SSI benefit cut would hurt struggling families, consider an adult with Down Syndrome requiring daily support from her parents, who themselves have low incomes and receive SNAP. Today, her monthly SSI benefit is $967, the full federal benefit rate — which is only about three-quarters of the poverty line for a single person.[7] But because she lives with her parents, the expected Trump rule would subject her to the in-kind support and maintenance (ISM) penalty, which would count the cash value of her bedroom and reduce her SSI benefit. She could see her benefits slashed by one-third, leaving her with less than $700 a month to get by. She would also need to make a detailed report to SSA each time her family’s circumstances change — and the depleted SSA staff would have to analyze the report and determine whether her benefits need to change.
The Trump rule would have harmful consequences beyond the loss of benefits and eligibility, creating heartbreaking dilemmas for SSI recipients and their families. It could discourage families from offering help to their loved ones, for fear of jeopardizing their meager benefits. It could force more people to turn to institutional care because they could no longer afford to live in the community. This risk would be compounded by the steep cuts to Medicaid in the megabill, which will put pressure on states to cut back the home- and community-based services that allow many older and disabled people to live independently.[8]
Imposing SSI’s burdensome ISM and related rules on beneficiaries who live in SNAP households would also increase complexity, administrative costs, and improper payments. SSI beneficiaries would have to meet burdensome and invasive paperwork requirements, requiring them to report their living arrangements and family members’ income, as well as detailed breakdowns of shelter expenses and who pays them — and to repeat the process as circumstances change. Keeping up with this paperwork is costly and time-consuming for SSA staff. And because the rules are so complex, ISM is a leading source of both overpayments, which require disruptive clawbacks of funds, and underpayments, which shortchange beneficiaries.[9]
On the heels of steep cuts to SNAP and Medicaid in the Republican megabill, the Trump Administration’s proposed rule would again target low-income families for more benefits cuts.[10] The Trump Administration should reconsider. Rather than returning the public assistance household rule to an out-of-date standard that does not reflect changes over the past four and a half decades, they should continue to protect financially precarious older and disabled people and the families who care for them.
