Children’s Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Now Outstrips Welfare

A controversial federal benefits program provided about $20 billion to low-income families with disabled children over the last two years, quietly eclipsing traditional welfare programs to become the biggest source of monthly cash for the nation’s poorest families, new data shows.

The dramatic growth of the children’s Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program has led some researchers to suggest it has simply replaced welfare as a primary source of cash for many families who lost benefits due to the much-touted welfare reforms of the mid-1990s.

The expansion also comes amid a growing recognition among lawmakers and policy analysts that children’s disabilities, especially harder-to-assess ones like ADHD, have become a gateway to receive the best government cash benefits available today, and this trend deserves closer study.

“SSI is becoming a much bigger part of the safety net that serves low-income families,” said David Wittenburg, a senior researcher who studies disability programs at the independent research firm Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, N.J. “It means we have to start thinking about that as a part of the whole system of supports that address poverty.”

In 2012, the SSI program for children paid out $9.7 billion, roughly $700 million more than the nation’s welfare programs, which have long given out the most cash for indigent children. Last year, the SSI program distributed even more, paying out about $10 billion, $1.3 billion more than the welfare programs.

The children’s SSI program now serves roughly 1.3 million youngsters, most of whom have behavioral, mental and learning disorders, and is passionately defended by its supporters as one of the last remaining programs for poor families that hasn’t yet faced draconian cutbacks on Capitol Hill.

It started in 1974 as a little-known program that served largely indigent children with severe physical disabilities and cash aid was meant to help parents who were prevented from working because of their disabled child’s needs.

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