This topic of disability in Appalachia is particularly relevant within the current political climate. Trump has made plans in his 2020 budget to cut SSDI and SSI benefits by a whopping $72 billion over the next decade. Not only is Trump breaking one of his biggest campaign promises to citizens [that he would not reduce these benefits], he is slashing the SSDI amounts by a drastic amount and further targeting people with disabilities – especially for people with severe disabilities or families with multiple disabled-individuals.

A majority of the budget cuts stem from a vague proposal to increase labor force participation among the disabled. Assuming that the Social Security Administration is able to come up with methods for this, Trump believes the budget cut is attainable through this mechanism. In reality, this assumption is largely unrealistic and would be more costly to put in action. Things such as job training and transportation funding in order to push disabled towards work would be needed, and this would offset the amount of money saved from budget cuts. The SSA has also presented multiple demonstration projects in which they have tried putting disabled individuals into the labor force, and they have all had very limited results — proving that Trump’s vision is highly unlikely and expensive.

Even more recently, a 2019 policy proposal by the Trump administration calls for the “surveillance of disabled people’s social media profiles to determine the necessity of their disability benefits” (Barbarin 2019) in hopes of diminishing the number of fraudulent disability claims. Many disagree with this idea, explaining that social media can be misleading and not representative of a disabled individual’s current condition. Because Trump’s conclusion that many individuals are “cheating the system” and wrongfully claiming disability benefits is based on little to no evidence, critics point that, “Trying to adjudicate disability by monitoring social media will be, at best, an exercise in bias confirmation and, at worst, will represent a major expansion of the surveillance state, focused on some of America’s most vulnerable citizens” (Perry 2019).