We commonly understand disability benefits as part of our social safety net, perhaps an exception to the broader rule of neoliberal austerity. Yet benefits are also a labor market institution, shaping people’s decisions about whether and when to seek work and what jobs to accept. In the United States, this labor regulation function of disability benefits is growing more prominent. Over recent decades, benefit rolls have expanded to regulate a growing proportion of the population while simultaneously becoming more difficult to survive on. Today, disability benefits function as a neoliberal institution pushing poor people into precarious, low-wage jobs. I’ve spent the past six years conducting research on employment precarity among people with disabilities in the United States, interviewing 62 stakeholders, reviewing thousands of pages of archival materials, and conducting nineteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among people with disabilities seeking work. This essay summarizes research previously published in Critical Sociology and Work and Occupations to analyze federal disability benefits as a neoliberal institution, producing and disciplining precarious workers.

In the United States, the two major benefits programs are Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which supports people who previously worked in the formal economy and paid into the program, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which supports people with little-to-no work history. Generally, the population receiving SSI is poorer and more likely to report lifelong disabilities, including mental disabilities. Both SSDI and SSI are means-tested, so if recipients report earnings or savings exceeding government caps, they may lose their benefits.

This medicalization of poverty legitimizes new forms of state intrusion in the lives of the poor, such as through state evaluation of diagnostic paperwork.

SSI and SSDI have expanded over the past four decades. While approximately 3 million workers received SSDI benefits in 1980 (SSA 2006), nearly 13 million received SSDI in 2020. SSI rolls quadrupled from 2 million recipients in 1980 (SSA 2006) to 8 million recipients in 2020 (SSA 2020a). Social scientists analyze this expansion as the medicalization of poverty, a process through which the indigent poor are shuffled away from other social programs and onto disability benefits (Hansen, Bourgois, and Drucker 2014; Wong 2016). For example, many recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children were moved to disability benefits when the program was terminated in the 1990s (Hansen et al. 2014). However, this medicalization of poverty legitimizes new forms of state intrusion in the lives of the poor, such as through state evaluation of diagnostic paperwork. Additionally, it serves to discipline the poor through restrictions attached to disability benefits. 

Despite the overall expansion of disability benefits rolls, in recent decades benefits have become more restrictive due to their eroding value and earnings and savings caps, and less subjectively reliable due to the cyclical expansion and contraction of benefits rolls. During the 1980s, an emergent public consensus against federal spending on “entitlements” led the Social Security Administration to cut off disability benefits for many recipients. However, following a series of highly-publicized suicides of people with disabilities, many commentators condemned this conservative backlash. Therefore, in the late 1980s, the SSA expanded access to benefits beyond its previous levels. A second, smaller cycle of backlash and contraction, then backlash to the backlash and expansion, followed in the 1990s (Berkowitz and DeWitt 2013; Erkulwater 2006). This cyclical expansion and contraction has driven a subjective sense of the unreliability of benefits. Today, disability benefits are widely distributed, yet experienced as unstable – a broad yet thin social safety net.

During my fieldwork, workers traded horror stories about benefit cuts. Courtney, a worker with a history of substance addiction who earned $900 per month as a janitor, had her entire benefits check cut out of the blue and was told she owed the Social Security Administration an additional $1300. Savanna, a woman with schizophrenia who earned irregular wages for warehouse work but rarely over a few hundred dollars a month, lost her benefits check for one month and was told she owed an additional $40. When episodes like these occurred, neither client-workers nor the staff they spoke with were able to explain what change in their earnings had triggered benefit cuts, illustrating the felt arbitrariness of these cuts. Workers were terrified of losing the scant income that their benefits provided, especially after many had battled for years to access benefits in the first place.

Meanwhile, the livability of disability benefits has eroded over time. It often takes several years, hundreds of pages of paperwork, and several successive appeals to qualify for disability benefits, so this government scrutiny discourages many people who might badly need SSI or SSDI from pursuing them. And once someone does qualify, disability benefits offer limited resources. In 2020, SSI benefits were capped nationwide at $783 per month (SSA 2020c). SSDI benefits tend to be higher as they support a population deemed more deserving due to their previous work histories, averaging $1258.67 per month, though the exact amount depends on individual earnings history (SSA 2020b). These levels place SSI recipients at about 75% of the poverty line and SSDI recipients around the poverty line. In summary, today more Americans than ever receive disability benefits, but these benefits are harder to live on than ever before. 

SSI recipients are also prohibited from holding more than $2000 in savings at any given time.

Today, SSI and SSDI are supposedly designed to support people with disabilities that prevent them from working, but the difficulty of accessing benefits and the diminishing real value of benefits push people with disabilities into the labor market. Many of the workers I met during my ethnographic fieldwork sought work because they couldn’t survive on their benefits. Yet wages must be reported to the Social Security Administration, and if earnings exceed established caps, benefits can be reduced or withdrawn altogether. SSI recipients are also prohibited from holding more than $2000 in savings at any given time. Earnings and savings caps have received only limited upward adjustments since the 1980s, a major concern for the disability activists interviewed for this study. During the 2021 battle over Biden’s proposed Build Back Better bill, disability advocates proposed increases to earnings and savings caps, but their proposals failed. Harsh means-testing produces disabled workers as a precarious labor force.

The earnings and savings caps attached to disability benefits channel recipients into precarious jobs. During my ethnographic fieldwork at “Disability Works,” a state-funded nonprofit helping poor people with mental illnesses find work, disability benefits were repeatedly identified as the primary obstacle in job searches. The program director identified benefits earnings caps as designed to keep people in poverty, fretting, “It’s rewarding to help people get jobs, but it’s also frustrating, because they can’t get out of poverty.” 

To evade benefits cuts, workers seek and accept marginal jobs to keep their earnings below a level which might affect their benefits. As one worker with bipolar disorder, Josephine, explained to me in a conversation,

“If I were to get a regular job, full-time, minimum-wage job, my life would be shit because I wouldn’t be able to pay for insurance, I wouldn’t be able to pay for my drugs… [To qualify for benefits] you have to be so impoverished but people are not in a position to be able to be that impoverished…People are just sort of caught between not poor enough, but you can’t earn enough to support yourself. I think it’s just a nightmare for most people, actually.”

In order to keep her earnings below government caps, Josephine had accepted a temporary, part-time job in a call center, but her contract would be up in a few months, and working a few hours a week at minimum wage could not support her long-term. And the structure of disability benefits excludes Josephine and others like her from progressive initiatives to reduce poverty. When the minimum wage went up in Disability Works’ home city, many workers requested cuts to their hours to keep their earnings below a level which would affect their benefits. Prior research supports my finding that benefits recipients manage earnings and savings caps by working part-time, for low wages, and often in the informal economy (Savin 2019).

Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to welfare spending will worsen the situation of people with disabilities. The Social Security Administration has announced a 12% reduction in staffing and the closure of over half of their regional offices under Trump (Williamson 2025). Prior research shows that when regional offices close, fewer and fewer people with disabilities are able to access benefits, and those who apply for benefits must wait years for decisions (Williamson 2025). The Trump administration has also reinstated the harsh “clawbacks” reformed under Biden (Hilzenrath and Fleischer 2025), where people may be required to repay tens of thousands of dollars if the Social Security Administration believes that they have been overpaid, as happened to Courtney and Savanna. These cuts will disincentivize employment in living-wage jobs, as they increase the danger associated with working, and thus produce even greater precarity among people with disabilities.

The current organization of disability benefits produces disabled people as a precarious labor force, and it’s set to get worse. Disability benefits are designed to support people with impairments inhibiting work, but in practice these benefits must be supplemented with work. Yet strict earnings caps leave people with disabilities to populate the periphery of the labor market, as employment in stable, well-paying jobs may jeopardize benefits needed for survival. The organization of disability benefits thus undercuts the well-being of disabled people, but serves industries which rely upon a flexible, contingent labor force to increase their profits.

We should understand the expansion of disability benefits rolls, paired with benefits’ declining livability, as no exception to neoliberal austerity but part and parcel of neoliberalism.

Who is served by the current organization of disability benefits? Certainly not people with disabilities, who struggle to access benefits, cannot survive off the benefits that they do receive, and live in constant fear of the loss of benefits. Rather, disability benefits serve as a functional subsidy to capital, producing and disciplining disabled workers as a low-wage labor force. Since disabled people can’t survive off their benefits, they supplement these benefits with work as fast food and retail employees, in the gig economy, and under the table, and accept poor wages as they fear that they may lose their benefits if wages improve.  Benefits means-testing conditions disabled workers to accept the precarious, low-wage jobs which proliferate under neoliberalism. So we should understand the expansion of disability benefits rolls, paired with benefits’ declining livability, as no exception to neoliberal austerity but part and parcel of neoliberalism.

If we want to improve the living conditions of people with disabilities, we need to raise disability benefits levels and earnings and savings caps, giving recipients some room to breathe. Disability should not sentence anyone to a life of poverty. If we raise SSI and SSDI benefits to livable levels, disabled people could make their own decisions about whether to work and what sort of work to seek, rather than being forced into work by the threat of starvation. When people with disabilities do seek work, they could work in the fields that they choose rather than accepting part-time, low-wage, precarious jobs in order to maintain access to benefits. These changes would allow people with disabilities to move into and out of the labor market as they experience changes in health, as is common for people with disabilities, without going through the time-consuming, expensive, and emotionally fraught benefits determination process each time. Raising benefit levels and earnings and savings caps will increase the overall cost of the disability benefits rolls, but a large welfare state is a crucial part of a democratic society, and could be financed by tax increases that level the economic playing field.  

 

References

Berkowitz, Edward and Larry DeWitt. 2013. The Other Welfare: Supplemental Security Income and U.S. Social Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Erkulwater, Jennifer. 2006. Disability Rights and the American Social Safety Net. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hansen, Helena, Philippe Bourgois, and Ernest Drucker. 2014. “Pathologizing Poverty: New Forms of Diagnosis, Disability, and Structural Stigma under Welfare Reform.” Social Science & Medicine 103:76–83.

Hilzenrath, David and Jodie Fleischer. 2025. “Under Trump, Social Security Resumes what it Once Called ‘Clawback Cruelty.’” KFF Health News. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/social-security-resumes-full-benefit-withholding-overpayments/ 

Ruppel, Emily H. 2023. “Disability and the State Production of Precarity.” Work and Occupations 51(4):410-549.

Ruppel, Emily H. 2024. “The Making of a Reserve Army of Labor: Paradoxes of American Disability Policy.” Critical Sociology.

Savin, Katie. 2019. “‘Being on SSI is a Full-Time Job’: How SSI and SSDI Beneficiaries Work Around and Within Labor Incentive Programs.” Analyzing Relationships between Disability, Rehabilitation, and Work (ARDRAW) Small Grant Program. https://ardraw.policyresearchinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Savin_ARDRAW-Report.pdf. 

Social Security Administration. 2006. “Trends in the Social Security and Supplemental Security Income Disability Programs. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/disability_trends/sect01.html.” 

Social Security Administration. 2020a. “Monthly Statistical Snapshot, March 2020.” https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/2020-03.html. 

 

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Emily Ruppel is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley and incoming assistant professor of sociology at UC Davis (in fall 2026). She is broadly interested in connections between political economic transformations and embodied experiences, and her dissertation focuses on job training programs for disabled workers, using historical research to trace the growth of this industry since the 1970s and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate contemporary labor practices.