NLG Disability Justice Committee Statement on Proposed Changes to SSI and Attacks on Collective Care

The National Lawyers Guild Disability Justice Committee condemns proposed changes to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) that threaten to punish disabled people for surviving through family and community support. These policy shifts represent a continuation of the long-standing use of the law as a tool to discipline poverty, undermine collective care, and isolate disabled people from the very networks that sustain life.

As reflected in the federal regulatory agenda under Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (RIN 0960-AI94), proposed revisions to SSI rules would reduce or eliminate benefits for disabled people who live with family members, including parents and adult children. These changes would disproportionately impact disabled adults with high support needs, as well as older people forced by economic conditions to rely on shared housing arrangements.

SSI is a program of last resort, providing minimal income to people who are poor and disabled, many of whom have never been able to access wage labor or have been systematically excluded from it. Yet instead of strengthening this lifeline, policymakers continue to impose punitive rules that treat mutual aid, caregiving, and shared survival as grounds for punishment. By counting family support as "income," the state effectively forces disabled people to choose between basic subsistence and connection to their communities.

This is not administrative reform. It is austerity enforced through bureaucratic violence.

These proposed changes reflect a broader legal and political framework that criminalizes dependency while erasing the reality that all people rely on interdependence to survive. Disability justice teaches that care networks are not fraud or abuse; they are essential responses to systemic abandonment. Efforts to reduce SSI benefits based on living arrangements function to dismantle these networks and push disabled people further into poverty, institutionalization, or homelessness.

The National Lawyers Guild has long recognized that the law is not neutral. It is a site of struggle. In the context of disability benefits, the law is being mobilized to redraw the boundaries of who is considered worthy of survival. These policies echo other attacks on the social safety net that disproportionately harm poor, disabled, Black, and Brown communities, reinforcing a system where economic precarity is weaponized to control and exclude.

As movement professionals, advocates, organizers, and lawyers, we reject frameworks that individualize survival and penalize collective care. We affirm that:

Disabled people have the right to live in community without losing access to essential benefits.
Caregiving and mutual aid must not be treated as disqualifying income.
Public benefits programs must be expanded and strengthened, not restricted through punitive eligibility rules.
We call on movement professionals, advocates, organizers, and lawyers to engage in collective defense of disabled communities facing these changes.

We further recognize that legal strategies alone are insufficient. True disability justice requires building power outside of traditional legal systems, centering those most impacted, and advancing transformative approaches that prioritize dignity, autonomy, and collective survival.

The Disability Justice Committee stands in solidarity with all those resisting these attacks. We commit to using the law where it is useful, challenging it where it is harmful, and organizing beyond it to build a world where disabled people are not punished for living, loving, and surviving together.

Signed,

Disability Justice Committee and Executive Council