Latest / We Can Do Better / How One Law Change Can Dramatically Reduce Poverty

Transcript

How One Law Change Can Dramatically Reduce Poverty · We Can Do Better

• Fran Quigley: Hello and welcome to We Can Do Better, a podcast about ending poverty in our time. My name is Freyan Quigley. I'm your law professor. I go with my students every week to eviction court where we represent some of the millions of people in the United States who are facing the loss of their homes, who are skipping filling prescriptions, and even going hungry despite living in the richest nation in the world. We can do better. Other countries already do far better, and the United States has often done better in the past. So, what this podcast does is we lift up the many people and organizations who are working to make housing, healthcare, and a decent life enforceable human rights for all. So this week we're going to talk about a potential change in the law to the SSI program, supplemental security income. This change could dramatically reduce poverty in the United States. So before we introduce our guests, I'd like to share a few words about why I care about today's topic and why I think you will too. So recently we had a client in eviction court, and I'll call her Dorothy, not her real name. Dorothy is in her mid-70s. She uses a wheelchair, she has some cognitive challenges, she has multiple other chronic debilitating conditions, and Dorothy hasn't been able to work for many years, including and when she was younger. But those conditions do allow her to qualify for a government program called SSI, Supplemental Security Income. Here's the thing: Dorothy's monthly SSI check is the maximum program amount of $994. That is less than her monthly rent, not to mention the other costs of living. And some people who are eligible for SSI, like Dorothy, are still waiting to get it. And there's restrictive rules on top of that, which our guest will talk more about today. So we see a lot of people like Dorothy in eviction court, and so do our colleagues who work with chronically homeless people. In fact, many of the seven million plus people in the United States who are living with disabilities and limited to an SSI check are homeless because of the obvious math problem that Dorothy faces. Their income just does not come close to covering the costs of housing, food, transportation, clothing, and other necessities. So that's why we're excited today to welcome Steven Nunez into the show. Stephen is the director of stratification economics at the Roosevelt Institute. The Roosevelt Institute is a think tank, a student network, and the nonprofit partner to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. So Stephen is an economic sociologist who leads research on systemic inequalities in the economy and the many ways that public policy has perpetuated them. What we're going to talk about today is that along with his colleague Jack Landry, Stephen wrote a really important March 2026 analysis of a proposed federal law change, which is called the SSI Restoration Act. this has been introduced a few different times, and a version was reintroduced this year by multiple members of Congress, a bipartisan group, which includes, I think, the name most folks would recognize is Senator Elizabeth Warren, but several other folks as well. And Steven's going to give us the details, but spoiler alert, this legislation in could do a lot to help Dorothy. It could do a lot to help so many others, more deserving. people who don't get SSI could get it and a lot less people on SSI would be in poverty. And Steven will discuss his research, but we're gonna put a copy of his paper in the show notes for folks who wanna dive deep. So Steven, welcome to We Can Do Better. Stephen Nuñez: Thank you so much. And I do agree, we could do a lot better. Fran Quigley: Yeah, that's and that's the theme. This is a wonderful step in that mission statement of what we can do better. So I I mentioned what we see in court, which is obviously just anecdotal, but your report does an a a terrific job of starting off by here's what SSI is, here's the what the program is, here's the scope of it today, who's enrolled, what the benefit levels are, what the restrictions are, et cetera. So could you could walk us through a little bit about what SSI looks like today? Stephen Nuñez: Sure. So supplemental security income helps disabled and impoverished children, adults, and seniors. it is a program that has somewhere around seven point two to seven point four million people, depending on the particular year and the particular estimate. about a million of those are children. about two to two point two, two point three million of those are people sixty-five and over, many of whom are also receiving. OASI, which is what we call Social Security. and this is a program that was created as part of essentially the last time that the Social Security Act of 1935 was had a major amendment in 1972. it was signed. by Nixon and it went into effect in nineteen seventy-four. And what it the idea was to take this patchwork of different disability benefits that existed at the state level since 1935 and to make it into a federal program and standardize it across the states. at the same time extending it not just to adults but to children. and at the time it was a huge, huge improvement over the status quo anti. it set benefits a little bit lower than kind of the median benefit at the time across the various states. which meant that for a lot of people it was actually almost doubling the amount of money that they were receiving. and it said that this is a benefit that's going to be inflation adjusted over time. And anybody who's currently receiving more because their state is providing more than than this sort of baseline benefit are is going to continue. to receive that higher benefit. States are on the hook for topping that off. and again at the time it just did a huge, huge amount of work increasing living standards for households where somebody was one or more people were disabled. and it represented a really important I think platform and a good foundation for us to to build a better disability policy going forward. And part of my paper is about why that didn't happen. what's what went wrong since then. Fran Quigley: Well, and and part of what you wrote about is not that much has changed since then. We've we've that's more than fifty years, a an awful lot of things have have not been updated the way they should. so go ahead. Stephen Nuñez: Yeah. so if you wanted me to get into that, I think. certainly, as I said, the benefit itself is indexed for inflation and it goes up every yeah. but the program also has other parts of of it that are have not been updated really ever. there the before any kind of means testing for the program kicks in, there is an income disregard. Fran Quigley: Yeah. Stephen Nuñez: the first bit each month of your unearned income, so something like a social security check gets sort of subtracted, and the first little bit of your earned income gets subtracted. and that has been fixed since 1974. $20 per month for unearned and $65 for earned. So that means that The real value of this disregard declined by 84% since 1974. so to get put that in kind of terms that maybe somebody could understand. Would say today recipient an SSI recipient who is working can work more than no more than two hours a week at federal minimum wage before their benefits start to be reduced at 50 cents on the dollar. When the program was first put into place, someone could work for about 10 hours a week at the federal minimum wage before their SSI benefits start to be reduced. so those have never been updated, and that's a very strong and difficult barrier to deal with. It means basically any money that comes into the household is immediately gonna start eating away at a benefit that's already quite low. Fran Quigley: Right. If if somebody does like a a gig job or or or a and or if they get a little gift or help from a family member, that that starts counting in there too and they get penalized there, right? Stephen Nuñez: Right? Yep. And at the same time, it's a program that has an asset test. that asset test has been updated since nineteen seventy-four, but not since nineteen eighty-nine. And it's two thousand dollars for individuals and three thousand dollars for couples. So this makes it basically impossible to save for retirement, or really otherwise. The main impact of that is people having to, you know, watch their bank accounts like a hawk and and move things around and deal with an enormous amount of paperwork and burden. But on the margin, something like seventy thousand people lose their benefits, at least temporarily every year because something goes over, you know, briefly for for Fran Quigley: Well, seventy thousand people lose their benefits at per year, at least temporarily. Wow. Stephen Nuñez: About seventy thousand people lose their benefit have their benefits suspended and of that about forty thousand of them actually have their benefits fully terminated. So there's also does create churn on the margin and it creates a lot of anxiety and a lot of paperwork to prove that you are in fact below Fran Quigley: Okay. Wow. Stephen Nuñez: Blow this. At the same time, that federal benefit, you know, which is going up in terms of inflation, it's indexed in inflation every year, it was never really meant to be on its own sufficient to support people. It was supposed to be attached to these state supplements. And those have basically vanished over the over since 1974. So the the short of it now is that today more than 50% of SSI households live under the federal poverty line as a result of this. It's about 51, 52 percent. if you use the supplemental poverty measure, which a lot of us in the kind of the Wonko sphere use, that number is somewhat more like 30 to 35 percent. but it's still kind of a shockingly high number for folks who are essentially. disabled, unable to support themselves fully through work, penalized when they attempt to work, and dealing with, you know, a lot of of severe challenges. Fran Quigley: Right, right. And I can say by representing these folks over the years is they they they feel just as trapped as how you describe it. Is that okay, this is not enough money for me to live on, but if I try to make more money to live on, I'm gonna get kicked off the program altogether. If somebody helps me out, I'm gonna get kicked off the program altogether. And just they're they're caught in this box where and and again, that's assuming that they can they have any other kind of support. But if they don't have any other kind of support, and maybe they're not at the risk of getting kicked off, but that money isn't enough for them to pay their rent. and and you mentioned the state pro when I was reading about this the first time, I was reading about all these state supplement programs. It's like, what state supplement programs? When it was to when when it was created, I guess they existed, but there's no such thing in in our state in Indiana and I guess many others to to supplement that $994 a month. Stephen Nuñez: So the typical person, if we're talking about the typical state, the median state, spends an amount of money on SSI in terms of benefit supplements, that's roughly two percentage, two percent of of total federal spending. in in aggregate, all the states are spending about nine percent of the total total federal budget on this. for SSI. And you know, back in 1974, it was more like 46, 47%. So it really has gone away. Most people are not receiving any kind of you know additional federal sub state supplements. And when they are, when they are available, they're often limited to to a subset of cases. the typical person is really getting by only on this federal benefit, which the maximum is set at roughly 74, 75%. five percent of the federal poverty line. because again Fran Quigley: So by def by definition, you are not gonna be able to afford to live by being an SSI recipient. Stephen Nuñez: If this is what's the only thing that's coming in, you're not gonna be able to to to survive. as a you're not gonna be able to survive and thrive. Fran Quigley: And can you talk a little bit about the the I the idea of a marriage penalty? And we do see some folks who both their their their spouse and and they are both living with disabilities. Stephen Nuñez: Well that's there are about I think five hundred thousand people, four or five hundred thousand people on SSI who are married couples. So about two hundred and fifty thousand married couples, people b who are receiving SSI. And as you can see in the way that the asset test is set up, it's two thousand dollars for individuals, three thousand dollars for couples. It doesn't actually double, right? So if you have two people, you don't you only get you know a 50% more increase on your asset test. and your benefits certainly don't you know increase. they don't your benefits don't double either. So it it it essentially puts you in a situation where if you have become married and you are now a couple, then you're actually going to get less money than if you were two individuals living, you know, separately in the same household. is which is of course something that even people on the political right have noted as being you know something that needs to be addressed. Fran Quigley: Yeah. And and anecdotally, again, we see it all the time. People who are longtime partners would love to be married, but they can't they can't take this financial hit by by doing so. Yeah, which is yeah, yeah. And and and Steven, we're talking about the people who are actually on the program, but and again, we see these folks too who are actually living with a disability pretty profound and can't work. Stephen Nuñez: Because the because the program will punish you for it. All right. So that's yeah. Fran Quigley: And they're not on the program and they have applied to be on the program. So can you talk a little bit about how difficult it is to get on the program, the the timeline, that type of thing? Stephen Nuñez: Well, we do talk about this bit in the paper because you know, there are a lot of people who identify in the current population survey, the American Community Survey, etc., as having a disability, but not receiving SSI or receiving SSDI. and part of that is that there are really long waits. to get onto the program. So to get to get a disability assessment that will determine whether or not you can receive either SSI or SSDI. So the the typical first assessment, so we're not talking about appealing the case or whatever, or to usually take somewhere in the at least prior to the doge cuts, which we can get into later, took somewhere in the realm of eight or nine months. and then of course if you add in appeals, this could go on for years. Martin O'Malley, who is the previous Social Security Commissioner, had a statistic that in 2023 that and earlier that typically something like 30,000 people died every year while waiting for their initial assessment. So there are people who are sitting there in the queue dying because the the because the Social Security Administration has had longstanding trouble in terms of and to some extent neglect. Fran Quigley: Wow. Wow. Stephen Nuñez: in in terms of its administrative capacity. And that's only gotten worse over the last few years since Doge came in and cut 14% of the workforce. Fran Quigley: Right. Right. Yeah. And as you say, I appreciate you being willing to talk about that a little bit today too, that this is in some ways the eight or nine month delay is the good old days, or maybe thirty thousand people dying each year while waiting f for the government to respond. Just in case we didn't define that already, when folks to correct me if I'm wrong, when folks apply for a supplemental security income, they're applying to the Social Security Agency, is the agency that's reviewing it. And you mentioned SSDI, which is social security disability insurance. Which has the same standard if you are living with a disability and and it prevents you from from work, then you're eligible. So it just depends. We won't need to go with that down that rabbit hole, but whether folks have worked enough to pay into the program to get social security, et cetera. But but there are folks living with a disability either either way, right? Stephen Nuñez: It does there is one important thing, which we will come up, I guess, later in this conversation, which is that unlike OASI, old age and survivors insurance, which is what we typically refer to as as Social Security, and unlike SSDI, SSI is not funded through a trust fund. Fran Quigley: Hm. Stephen Nuñez: It is funded through general tax revenue and as a result of that it actually doesn't have the same restrictions the Sort of legislative restrictions that are attached to what we call the bird rule in recon in terms of reconciliation acts. The reconciliation process in in Congress allow it creates a system where you can pass certain types of reforms with a bare with a straight majority rather than through a Phil Grosbuster-proof majority. But it very specifically says, but you can't reform, you know. Social Security programs through this. but when you actually dig into it, it it they mean OASI and SSDI. SSI is actually reformable through a simple majority in a reconciliation bill, and that does, I think, at least for some advocates, suggest that there may be a path forward for reform. Fran Quigley: Yeah, yeah. So that's a let's let's go to that, right? We've we've we've done the doom and gloom and and the theme of the podcast is we can do better and maybe we can do better by passing a piece of legislation that you've analyzed. So can you talk a little bit about the SSI Restoration Act? Stephen Nuñez: Mm-hmm. Sure. So there are two, I guess, major initiatives that are out there right now and that are periodically reintroduced. There is something called the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which is it just focuses in on the asset limits, essentially taking that $2,000 for singles and $3,000 for couples. And turning it into ten thousand dollars for singles, twenty thousand dollars for couples, so they're getting rid of the marriage penalty, and then indexing that for inflation going forward so that the asset limits look more like what they were meant to be in in 1974. And that one bipartisan. Fairly inexpensive, probably would cost about a billion dollars a year to actually impl like in terms of costs. and has an enormous number of, I guess, you know, businesses and and and bipartisan groups sort of endorsing it. the SSI Restoration Act is something that was introduced in 2021 and in 2024. Which is the version that my colleague Jack Landry and I investigated, and then just recently in 2026 by by again by Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, and then Representative Grihalova in the in the House. and that includes, as part of its text, the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. it also does goes further in a variety of ways. it excludes the retirement account retirement accounts entirely from the asset test and says you know 401ks and IRAs and so forth are separate and they're no longer part of this. it takes that the income disregard that's $20 a month for unearned income and turns it to $150. turns the $65 for earn it earned income to f $487. Again, indexing both by inflation and trying to sort of mimic what it would look like if it had been advancing over the last 40 years. It gets rid of what's called the in-kind support and maintenance provision from income calculations, where essentially If your family is giving you things like you know rides and babysitter services and food and so forth, that can actually be counted against your benefits in certain in instances. and then it takes The maximum benefit for a single recipient from where it currently is at, the 990, and it turns it and it sets it to the federal poverty line for a household of one, and then sets the maximum benefit for a married couple both receiving SSI benefits to double that. And again, indexes all that for inflation. so that is a huge change to the program in terms of its generosity. Fran Quigley: And I will say, just in terms of what you know, my ears perked up when you talked about the the the significant increase in the maximum benefit level, because we were talking before we hit record and that what we see in in an eviction court, it's always amazing to me how many people are making 994 just work. They're s you know, somehow again, they're paying more on their rent each month, which kind of mathematically doesn't make sense and and makes you wonder about where Maybe they have to bend the rules to just to to to survive. But they're making that work, but they're so much on the edge. The reason we see them in eviction court is because something happened, right? Somebody, a family member needed help, a car broke down, had to be repaired. Some something happened. And but boy, increasing that 994, it's amazing how well people can budget and and poor people can budget. And so just increasing that maximum amount a little bit of our our experience observation would be that's just gonna really be a huge difference in terms of people staying housed among all the other aspects of poverty. And you, though that's just our anecdotal observation, you've done you've crunched the numbers. You and Jack Landry crunched the numbers and said, here's what the impact's gonna be. So what did you find that the impact would be if this pass this legislation passes? Stephen Nuñez: Okay, so just to give you a sense of what we're doing, we're we're looking at the current population survey. Every year they have a report called the Annual Survey of Economic Conditions, what we call the Mark supplement. and this is a huge sort of nationally representative survey with hundreds of thousands of respondents. And in that specific you know, the ASEC, what we call it, they actually do ask about SSI receipt and all sorts of other benefits receipt, finances, savings, et cetera. So it allows us to actually get a good sense of where people are at, people who are and who are not receiving. Social Security. So we can take that and you know, using some statistical magic, we can sort of project it out to what the whole population looks like currently. and then we can introduce changes. We can say they're receiving, you know, X number of dollars every month, they according to what they are saying. And we can look at the calculation and say, based off of that, you know, that's correct because we know that the from the income that they're reporting, and we know from the means testing and so forth, that that's about what they would receive. So we could say, now imagine that we've changed the rules of the program and we give people additional money or we We change the rules of the program in such a way as to change their economic conditions in some way. As a first approximation, what's that gonna do? So when we look at that data, we found that there are roughly 6.1 million SSI households. And we're using something called the supplemental poverty measure, which is an additional way to look at poverty in the United States that that takes into account other benefits and so other costs that are really not part of the federal poverty line. And we find that about a little more than nine 29% of the households are living in poverty as defined by SPM. And that's versus about 13.3% for households in general. So that's 13.3% is about the overall poverty rate for the average household, if you're just looking at households overall in the United States. and we find that if you introduced the SSI Restoration Act, or at least the provisions of the SSI Restoration Act that we were looking at, because we didn't have the data to look at the the asset provisions, just the changes to the benefits. the number of SSI households would increase to about 8.7 million, meaning that there are a whole bunch of people who are now going to be eligible for the program that weren't previously eligible because they they had too much income essentially and they kind of topped out and and went to a zero dollar benefit. so there's about you know 2.6 million additional households that are going to be able to receive this benefit. And the poverty level for SSI households would drop down to 11.8% versus the overall poverty level in this scenario of 12.4%. So we would bring it you know slightly below, but essentially roughly in line with poverty overall. Now obviously you can look at the poverty rate in the United States of of thirteen point three percent or twelve point four percent and say that's still too high. But the the the point is that people on SSI would no longer be outliers, like gross outliers in terms of their poverty. They would have poverty rates roughly comparable to the typical household under this sort of scenario. Fran Quigley: Yeah. Yeah, and that's just huge. As we as we said, to to qualify for SSI really condemns you to a poverty lifestyle life now. And it unfortunately condemns you some so many times to homelessness or to being evicted. And this would change according to your data. That's that's amazing. Stephen Nuñez: Mm-hmm. Sure, yeah. And I mean, we also tried to quantify to the extent possible, you know, what's doing the most work here. What if we just took different pieces out of the the the bill and only passed those? What would those do in isolation? Fran Quigley: Yeah, which does happen in the legislative process, right? The sausage gets made. Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Nuñez: All the time, right? And I think the the less costly and less I guess radical reforms, not surprisingly, don't do as much, right? So what if we were just gonna change the the earned and and unearned income exclusions? so that that disregard goes up. Well, that does something, but it takes, you know, the 29.2% poverty and it just brings it down to 26.6. Or what if we just get rid of the in-kind support and maintenance provision? Well, if you actually look at the data in our data, we kind of verified it, but if you go and look at the administrative data, only about nine percent of of SSI households Are typically impacted by that for a variety of reasons. So it's not gonna have a huge impact. And again, when you look at it, 29.2% goes down to 28.9%. It really doesn't do very much. The benefit increase, if you just increase the benefit in the way that they mention the poverty line and then double the poverty line for couples. That just by itself would bring the poverty rate among SSI households down to 16.9%. Which is still high, still higher than the overall, but it's essentially 70% of the the benefit could be just from doing that. so it really shows you, you know, this isn't a free lunch thing, right? If you really want to help folks, you can't tinker at the margins. You really do have to increase the benefit. That is where you're going to get the most impact on people's lives. And I think that sort of is intuitive and it fits with what you're seeing on the ground as well. Yeah. Fran Quigley: Yeah. And so that it the so the US poverty line, just for context for folks, for one person monthly, we talked about the maximum benefit for SSI now being nine ninety-four. Would that be thirteen hundred something a month? Is that am I right about that? which again, that extra three hundred and some dollars, anecdotally what we see folks that just would keep Dorothy housed. It would keep all kinds of folks housed that are not to mention fed, not to mention able to to afford medications and things that aren't covered by by Medicaid or Medicare. that's that's amazing. And I as you said the the numbers bear that out, right? That the doubt just that's that's the that's the big piece of the legislation, just increasing the benefit level. Okay. Stephen Nuñez: is in fact the biggest piece. if you look at the cost of this program, this sort of this sort of package of reforms, this would be the you know adding about 60 billion dollars to the federal budget each year. the federal budget is literally in the order of well around two trillion dollars. So this isn't a lot, this is not a lot of money. It represents a very large increase in the amount of money that we spend every year on SSI, which is only more like, you know, 30, 30 or 40 billion dollars. But it is it but it would, you know, again, it would cut poverty by 60% for the, you know, the seven and a half or almost seven and a half million Sort of recipients and their family members who are currently sort of struggling with this very, you know, inadequate program. The benefit. Fran Quigley: Yeah. And I appreciate that context of two trillion dollar budget. We actually have had on the show a defense industry expert talking about the, you know, huge military budget. I think sixty billion dollars was the first six weeks of the war in Iran. you know, there there are other ways and then we're gonna have folks who are tax experts talking about different ways to adjust the tax code, enforce different parts that aren't being enforced now, taxing the rich and The money's there, as you say, if if we decide this is a big enough priority. Stephen Nuñez: Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm at, you know, I I I'm a FDR style social democrat. So I would love to see a very expansive safety net. But the you know, and but this is well within not only just well within our means, but well within you know, the sort of status quo kind of business as usual way of doing things, I think. Like sixty billion dollars is a very small amount of money, considering. sort of impact that we're we're talking about. I do want to say though that, you know, and we talk about this in the paper, it is very expensive to be disabled in a way that these surveys and these measures like the supplemental poverty measure just really can't capture. Right? They are they're looking at, you know, what is the typical housing cost in this zone or You know, what is the typical out of pocket medical expense for people? and there are folks doing good work. I'm I'm trul drawing a blank on the the the principal investigator, but the name of the the project is the disability squeeze. It's being run out of SUNY Stony Brook in Long Island in New York. Disability squeeze. And the idea is that Fran Quigley: Disability squeeze Okay. Stephen Nuñez: It costs a whole lot to be disabled, even to get to get, you know, to for transportation, for food, people pay end up, you know, for all these sorts of small medical expenses that are not typically captured in surveys or that covered by insurance. you know, on the order of thirty percent more to do a lot of the things that people you know. Take for granted. You know, the poor pay more, the disabled pay even more. So when you think about that, and then you say, hey, well, this is gonna take the poverty rate down to you know 12.8%, and dichotomous, you it's gonna take a bunch of people below that level and move it above that level. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be thriving as a result of this. It's gonna it's it's very important aid, very obviously to to to br to lift people up above the poverty line. But as I think we say in the in our report, like our goal when when building policy for Fran Quigley: Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Nuñez: Folks with disabilities, for the elderly, for children, should not be just to sort of game a particular number and say, we got them just above the poverty line, so everything's okay now. You really do want to think about the kind of material hardship they are still facing in their in their daily lives and whether or not they can thrive given this sort of support. So so we look at this sort of thing like the SSI Restoration Act and say, you know. These sorts of pol these sorts of provisions, you know, getting rid of all this crazy paperwork, the administrative burden associated with the the in-kind support or maintenance provision, the the the crazy asset test churn, this the the the limited benefits. We we sh we should definitely think about doing all those things, but we shouldn't I guess, you know, take our le limit our imagination to that sort of stuff, because I think the program could potentially need a you know a a a broader review for how it's structured and how it could be you know made more effective and and I think more dignified for for people, you know. Fran Quigley: Yeah. Yeah. And and just to to underscore these when in all this discussion, politically charged discussion of work requirements and and able bodied folks, these are folks who have been determined by a federal government a agency through a time tested analysis to be living with disabilities that are serious enough that they cannot work. So they're and and again they're prohibited from doing so or they're gonna get kicked off the program. And so by bringing that benefit up to poverty level seems like you say, that does not seem like it's a very controversial point. But so hopefully go ahead. Go ahead. Stephen Nuñez: I do want to point I so I just wanted to follow up on that very quickly, I apologize. which is that I am part of the disability economic research consortium that Roosevelt and the National Academy of Social Insurance have produced to do research and to some extent to the to the extent that we can support research. And researchers on this. And a huge part of the work that we've been doing and the conversations we've been having have been around those work reporting requirements. And you might say, hey, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense. Why would you be doing that? Because as you just noted, these folks have been determined to be exempt from that. But the problem is we know that work requirements, work reporting requirements on Medicaid and the extended work report of reporting. On SNAP are going to hit disabled folks quite hard because work they're not work requirements, they're work reporting requirements. And we have seen in past times when states have implemented stringent work requirements on additional populations, SNAP and Medicaid, that a very large percentage of the people who end up losing their benefits or getting caught in regular churn are people with disabilities and other and caregivers, people who are Fran Quigley: Mm-hmm. Stephen Nuñez: Are on paper exempt from this, but are having a heck of a time getting the paperwork done and done on time and without any mistakes to prove to this agency that in fact they are exempt. So we see a lot of people, a lot of panic, I guess, in the sort of the disability advocacy community because we know that that folks, you know. Fran Quigley: Yeah. Stephen Nuñez: Are going to be triggered as false positives and booted off this program. And if you think about how hard it is to be somebody dealing with a disability or to be a caregiver to somebody who's disabled, and to also have to be doing this paperwork on the side to prove that you are one of the deserving to continue receiving it. It's just, it's kind of nightmarish, to be quite honest. Fran Quigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we've we've had a conversation with folks on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities about requirements for SNAP, but as you say, for Medicaid, which in our state and many others is rolling out right now with a whole lot of pressure to reduce the roles both in SNAP and Medicaid, and as a result they're the agency is not very motivated to to make it easier for folks to prove that they can't work. so I wanna be respectful of your time, but if you did We're kind enough to offer to talk about one thing that's related, and that is as we talked about folks applying for SSI or having their SSI be reviewed once they're on it, go to the agency, the social security agency. Social Security Administration, excuse me. And that has been folks it's been a little bit of time, but folks remind remember that Doge, there was a big talk about the Trump administration and Elon Musk and Doge and Doge cuts. you mentioned that before the Trump administr this most current Trump administration, it was like about eight month delay of so folks applying for disability benefits before getting their decision, which again, by definition, these people can't work. So somehow during the eight months they're supposed to survive with no income coming in the door. what's that like now after these cuts, the doge cuts have happened? Stephen Nuñez: So we don't have updated stats on that, in part because the Social Security administrate administration is not releasing stats on a lot of this. but we we know they cut about 14% of their staff. At least 7,800 employees lost their job as a result of this. there are 1200 field offices. Fran Quigley: Yeah. Stephen Nuñez: and a lot of the staff that were working in the field offices have been reassigned to handle phone calls now, like the 800 number, meaning that there's now a whole lot less time for in-person appointments. people can end up waiting a month or more to to just talk to somebody. it's very common to be on the phone for hours to to or to, you know. Put the phone down because you you request a callback and wait for hours or days to actually receive something. This could be disability assessment. It could be, hey, where's my check? It could be you paid me too much. It could be me, you paid me too little. It could be, I don't understand this form because I'm not a native English speaker. There's there's the the you know, Social Security Administration always calls folks on SSDI, SSI, OASI, they're their customers and there is a huge customer service problem brewing right now. And you know, you can't you can't cut thousands and thousands and thousands employees and then expect there not to be some kind of you know spillover on terms in terms of service. so the the truth of the matter is even before doge Fran Quigley: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Stephen Nuñez: Social Security was a neglected agency. I did like and that's not a this is not a partisan statement at all. I don't th there just wasn't a lot of of resources put into it by by anybody for a long time to the point where you know the cues grew and and the the problems sort of Fran Quigley: Mm-hmm. Stephen Nuñez: you know, it built up. So I think things are worse now. and it's it's bad because any paper on you know, any p policy looks great on paper, but if nobody gets gets it because they can't actually implement it, any they can't get their questions answered, they can't figure out how to get through the application process, they can't get a s straight answer, then, you know, what you see on paper versus what you see in practice, there's gonna be a huge disparity between those things. So a big part of I guess researcher focus right now is on the Social Security Administration and the impacts of the cuts on all of those programs, not just SSI. at the same time the Social Security Administration used to fund or host expert panels on disability. filled with intersectional scholars, people who both have disabilities, have maybe some of them had even been on SSI before, and are also sociologists, economists, statisticians. So they know it, you know, on an academic level, but they also know it on a personal level. And pretty much all of those have been, you know, canceled or or or Disregarded. So the kind of research that the Social Security Administration was doing or funding to better itself and to still understand the impacts of its own changes in terms of policies and in terms of staffing and administration is no longer happening at the level that it was. So organizations like the National Academy of Social Insurance, Roosevelt, and others are doing our best to try to fill in the gaps. But you know, when a big a big actor like the social security administration, you know, stops funding and and providing support, that, you know, it's very hard to to fill that gap. you know, because they were kind of the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room. Fran Quigley: Yeah. Yeah. Well it's that's a great reminder for those of us who may just think, my goodness, all this government fat, this government waste, you know, inefficiencies, et cetera, that there there's real human cost to to cutting so dramatically and thoughtlessly, to be honest. I could I my words, not yours. I won't put those in your word. Stephen Nuñez: I think I mean I do I I do think the last few months on a variety of different dimensions, not just in disability policy, but for example food safety among others gives you a sense of actually the government was doing important things, perhaps we shouldn't have removed those things. Fran Quigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. yeah, watch your lettuce, right? So well, don't wanna bury the lead of the of the of frankly the optimistic tenor of what your research has been and and we'll put a title on this, but one title we've thought about is that you know just one neat trick can actually reduce poverty. But this one piece of legislation is one law can actually dramatically reduce poverty. So we really wanna keep this in in mind. 'Cause this legislation could could have so much impact on our client Dorothy and all kinds of people like that. So Stephen Nunez, I really appreciate everything you're doing, the research you're doing and and what your colleagues at Roosevelt Institute. If folks are not already following Roosevelt Institute, I am a weekly newsletter. I think more often than weekly, I get the email newsletter and updates of of the terrific research on economic justice is my term. I don't think that's a term you all use at the butt the way that the laws and public policy can actually either help or exacerbate some of the struggles that our clients and millions of other people are going through. Stephen Nuñez: Thank you for drawing attention to this. I as I was telling you before we started recording that that in the large discussions around poverty, we talk a lot about elderly folks, we talk a lot about children, we talk a lot about you know displaced workers, and those are all important populations to support, but we We often seem to forget disabled folks and the disabled folks among those populations. this is an area you know, SSI is sort of often referred to as the the the safety net that America forgot. So I'm any kind of attention that we can we can draw to the the its inadequacies and the need for reform, I'm you know, I'm I'm happy to see that. So thank you also. Fran Quigley: Right. Right. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you to Steven. Thank you all for listening. And we'll look forward to more discussion and hopefully some updates on the progress of this legislation. Until then, thank you for joining us. And remember, we can do better.