As section III explains, an individual must meet certain requirements related to his or her income and resources, taking into account the individual’s living arrangements and family structure, in order to be eligible for SSI payments. The individual must also meet certain citizenship status and residency requirements. In addition, all persons under age 65, and certain noncitizen legal residents age 65 or older, must be blind or disabled. Consequently, future SSI program expenditures will depend on a variety of difficult-to-project factors, including the performance of national and local economies, growth and distribution of personal income and financial assets, household and family compositions, the prevalence of disability in the general population, and the determination of disability according to the definition in the Act. Nonetheless, for planning purposes and to meet the legislative requirement for this report, it is important to develop our best possible projections of future SSI program recipients and expenditures.
This section presents projections of program recipients and expenditures under the SSI program for a period of 25 years. The projections reflect the current law governing the operation of the SSI program. Projections are developed consistent with the intermediate demographic and economic assumptions developed for the 2020 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds.
1 SSI payments may be partially or completely offset under current law for recipients with income, including earnings from employment and monthly Social Security benefits. For the purpose of projections in this report, the level of SSI payments net of offsets for receipt of Social Security benefits are estimated on the basis of scheduled Social Security benefit levels intended by Congress under current law. However, it should be noted that under the intermediate assumptions in the 2020 Trustees Report, assuming no change in current Social Security law, the OASI Trust Fund reserves would become depleted before the end of the projection period in this SSI report. If this were to happen, the level of Social Security benefits could be reduced from scheduled levels for some SSI recipients resulting in somewhat higher levels in net SSI payments.
This section presents the most relevant demographic and economic projections from the 2020 Trustees Report that are used for the SSI projections in this SSI Annual Report. Sections V.A and
V.B of the Trustees Report present a detailed discussion of these demographic and economic projections. The following two tables summarize two key parameters underlying the estimates in this report. Table
IV.A1 presents Social Security area population projections by age subgroups that provide the basis for the projected numbers of SSI recipients by age group presented in the next section.
Table IV.A2 presents a history of the Social Security and Federal SSI benefit rate increases and Federal benefit rates since the inception of the program, along with the projections of such amounts consistent with the Trustees economic projections used also for the SSI expenditure estimates in section
IV.C. An adjustment is made to the monthly Federal benefit rate in January of each year for which there is a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA).
3 The Social Security benefit rate increase is the
COLA applied to Social Security benefits under the OASDI program after initial benefit eligibility. In previous years, the Federal SSI benefit rate was subject to occasional ad hoc increases, either in place of or in addition to the automatic adjustments. Table
V.A1 presents a history of legislation affecting the Federal benefit rate.
