On Nov. 13, a small team of advocates for people with disabilities stepped through White House security and into the narrow, bustling corridors of the West Wing, unsure what to expect. They’d managed to get a short meeting with James Blair, who is one of President Donald Trump’s deputy chiefs of staff, in the hopes of preventing a planned policy change. In recent weeks, ProPublica and The Washington Post had reported that officials at the Social Security Administration were working on a proposed regulation that could result in at least 830,000 mostly older blue-collar workers being denied disability benefits.
The advocates, led by Jason Turkish, co-founder of the Social Security disability rights group Alliance for America’s Promise, had sent the White House team ProPublica’s Oct. 31 article and other materials. The reporting showed that if the Trump administration enacted this regulation, the harm would disproportionately fall on some of the president’s most loyal supporters: 50- to 60-year-old coal miners, factory workers and other manual laborers, especially in West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama. The administration’s logic for cutting these workers’ eligibility was that even if they have a severe physical disability, they should be able, in the modern economy, to find a more sedentary job at a computer or perhaps driving for Uber or DoorDash. Disability advocates countered that people who’ve worked in grueling fields for decades, some of whom don’t have a high school education — and who grew up before the digital age — would face severe obstacles to such a career change, including age discrimination in the hiring process, the lack of desk jobs in rural areas and the difficulty of mastering unfamiliar skills at this point in their lives.
A few doors down from the Oval Office, Turkish and his colleagues turned a corner into Blair’s office. Sitting across from him was a second person, one the advocates hadn’t expected to encounter: Russell Vought, the powerful White House budget director. He looked displeased.
After several minutes of dialogue about the disability regulation, according to Turkish and another person present, Vought said, “I know that this is being written about.” But, he added, the rule change “isn’t going to be happening.”
It was a startling announcement from an often uncompromising senior official in an administration with little history of changing its mind in response to journalistic scrutiny and pressure from advocates for the vulnerable. But that’s what Turkish and three other sources say has happened: The Trump administration has decided not to pursue the disability cuts that it has been working on all year — and in fact since at least 2019, when officials during Trump’s first term were close to finalizing a similar regulation.
Turkish, who is also president and managing partner of one of the nation’s largest law firms that represents disability claimants and beneficiaries, said in an interview that Vought and Blair seemed to have absorbed the recent reporting on the issue. He said they acknowledged the anxiety that disabled workers were experiencing — people like Christopher Tincher,