Black Americans Face New Hardships Under Trump’s Social Security Overhaul

by Stacy M. Brown, Washington Informer

Major changes to Social Security set to take effect this fall and into 2026 could drastically reshape the nation’s retirement safety net — and experts warn that African Americans and other historically marginalized groups stand to suffer the most.

Some of the Trump administration’s changes affect the working-class, women, minorities and seniors. Reforms include raising the full retirement age to 67 for those born in 1960 or later, eliminating paper checks for benefit payments, tightening eligibility for disability coverage, and altering how benefits are taxed. 

Analysts and civil rights scholars say the changes compound decades of systemic inequities built into America’s “crown jewel” welfare program.

In “The Color of Social Security: Race and Unequal Protection in the Crown Jewel of the American Welfare State,” Rutgers Law School professor Jon C. Dubin traces how the 1935 Social Security Act excluded large swaths of Black Americans through occupational barriers. 

“The original Act’s complete exclusion of disproportionately Black agricultural and domestic workers from old age insurance programs was grounded in the badges and incidents of slavery and a desire to preserve the plantation-sharecropping economy,” he wrote.

Dubin noted that these exclusions had “lingering present-day consequences,” including diminished wealth, shorter life expectancy and smaller accrued benefits among African Americans. 

“Future proposals to raise the full retirement age to 70 will have a foreseeable racially disparate impact on Black workers due to shorter Black life expectancy and resulting shorter temporal benefit-receipt windows,” he warned.

Continue reading to learn more about the potential impact of Social Security cuts on Black Americans.

We are still living under the long shadow of discrimination, which began with slavery.

We’ve been covering how Donald Trump’s changes in our breaking news.