Numerous reports suggest President Donald Trump is gearing up to reduce entitlements by $800 billion over a 10-year period as proposed in next year’s fiscal budget. The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program is an entitlement and it provides benefits to seniors and the disabled who meet certain financial rules. Social Security also provides SSI benefits to disabled children and a recent paper issued by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggest SSI children’s benefits may be targeted for elimination by Trump and the Republican Congress.
The SSI program for children provides income to families who are caring for a child with disabilities and these families rely greatly on this program to maintain a basic lifestyle for these children. Benefits from this program go to families who have children that are diagnosed with Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism, intellectual disabilities and blindness. Taking these benefits away from disabled children would be extremely cruel.
If these benefits were taken away, many of these families would fall below the poverty line. It is estimated that about half of the families that receive SSI benefits would fall into poverty if these benefits were taken away.
The parents of children who receive SSI benefits are not getting rich. The maximum monthly SSI benefit for 2017 is $735 and the average monthly benefit for the 1.2 million children with disabilities who receive SSI is about $650. Qualifying for SSI benefits is not an easy proposition. After an application is filed Social Security determines if a child meets the medical rules of proving the child is disabled. This results in many children with severe impairments who are turned away by Social Security. There is no way a proposal to eliminate SSI benefits for a child will be well received, so it is pretty clear that any such legislation would be met by extreme opposition.
