After Donald Trump came back as the American President for the second time, he has been keeping up with his promise of bringing reforms to the way social security works in America. Whether it has proven to be beneficial for the general public or not is a question for another time but Trump, along with the Elon Musk led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has made some significant changes, which directly affects the way citizens receive the social security benefits.
For starters, DOGE started with bringing changes to the workforce in the Social Security department as the Social Security Administration announced that they were targeting to bring down their workforce to 50,000 employees from around 57,000 employees. The main reason behind this decision was cited to be saving money as the slashing of a certain number of employees would apparently save around $800 million annually.
However, the economical benefit of this move remains up for debate as critics feel that a reduced workforce would need more processing time, which would eventually lead to a delay in the workflow.
Another key point that the Trump administration has taken hold of regarding the Social Security system is addressing the overpayment issues. The American Government has decided to take a rather tough approach to deal with the overpayments that have happened through Social Security and this means that people who have received overpayments will stop receiving benefits till they clear their debt.
Critics however, have been skeptical about this move as well because not all Social Security related overpayments are related to fraud and a lot happen because of SSA errors. In cases of mistakes of the administration, it seems unfair to punish the recipients who have been overpaid.
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As promised by Trump during his campaign days, his administration has been prioritizing to eliminate the frauds within the Social Security system. There have already been changes made to the identity verification system and besides that implementation of additional digital safeguards payment systems have also been incorporated.
Another major change that the Trump administration promised to bring was end benefit taxation. Presently, “up to 85% of Social Security benefits can be taxable for recipients with incomes above certain thresholds, creating what some describe as double taxation on retirement funds.”
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This has been confirmed by The White House as well as Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tagged this as “the largest tax cut in history.” While the move can be a welcome change for retirees, economic analysts have said that this move might deplete the “Social Security trust fund by approximately two years, potentially bringing benefit cuts closer unless other funding solutions are implemented.”
These are some of the major changes that have been proposed and implemented by the Donald Trump administration. Most of these changes have been criticized by economic analysts and the practical results of these results are yet to be seen.
