But for some programs, the overpayment recovery process can be brutal, as the government tries to claw back money that people in poverty credibly thought they were owed.
In 2022, the Social Security Administration, or SSA, was mired in a scandal after Lisa Rein of The Washington Post exposed that, under Trump, it had begun to impose massive fines on poor people with disabilities. Trump’s SSA Inspector General Gail Ennis—whose background was in giving legal advice to big banks and hedge funds—ramped up a program that penalized people on Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, and Social Security Disability Insurance, or SSDI, who had received overpayments from the agency.
The SSA doled out five-figure fines to innocent people in poverty under the guise of recovering improper payments and punishing fraud. In one case, a woman with cerebral palsy and an intellectual disability was served a $60,000 bill for overpayments she received, presumably because she had picked up a few extra hours at her job at a nursing home (the SSA itself did not provide a clear reason). In other cases, SSI’s complex and punitive $2,000 asset limit triggered clawbacks after individuals received Covid stimulus payments, despite the fact that the checks were supposed to be exempt from the limit.
