A 2011 photo shows an exhibit at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act in August 2010. (FDR Presidential Library & Museum/via Flickr)

The Social Security Administration has summarily closed a federally funded consortium of research centers, including one at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that studied demographic trends and the impacts of policy on the federal retirement system.

Terminating the program has sharply limited the program’s research sources at a time when the Social Security Administration is poised to cut 7,000 workers, close field offices across the country and cancel the ability for people to file for benefits by telephone.

“It’s very, very frightening,” said Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works. “I’ve been working on this issue for 50 years and I think this is the most destabilized I’ve ever seen the administration of Social Security.”

The UW center was one of six members of the Social Security Administration Retirement and Disability Research Consortium. The consortium was established in its current form in 2019, a successor to retirement research centers established in 1998.

The Trump administration announced Feb. 21 that the consortium was being dissolved in keeping with an executive order President Donald Trump signed Jan. 22 gutting diversity activities across the federal government.

Shutting down the consortium canceled 19 research projects that were underway at the UW’s Social Security research center, said its director, J. Michael Collins. Collins, a specialist in family economics at UW-Madison. Collins holds positions at the university’s School of Human Ecology, The La Follette School of Public Affairs and several other university offices.

Research by the center and its consortium partners in collaboration with Social Security represented an important collaboration that has helped shape policy for the 90-year-old Social Security program, Collins said. Studies on the income and expenses of older Americans, for example, have helped guide the formulas that the Social Administration uses to develop its annual cost of living adjustments.

“It really is a collaboration, and that is hard to build,” Collins said — and may be difficult to recreate.

Along with canceling the consortium agreements, the Social Security Administration has relocated its own research operations while also cutting staff.

“They’ve greatly reduced their ability to conduct research internally,” Collins said. “Why would they want to eliminate their research capacity to that degree?”

Established during the Great Depression to lift seniors out of poverty, the Social Security program is primarily funded by payroll taxes. As each generation retires, its members’ benefits are paid by the generation of workers behind them.

Social Security provides retirement benefits as well as income for people with disabilities. About 73 million people in the U.S. receive benefits from the system, according to the Social Security Administration. Three out of four are 65 or older. Another 15% are people with disabilities under the age of 65.

One project underway at the UW center when the research consortium was canceled was looking at the impact of state mandates requiring employers to provide sick leave for employees — a law on the books in about a half-dozen states. (Wisconsin is not one of them.)

That study could have provided evidence whether or not mandated sick leave policies reduce the need for future permanent disability claims. “Either way, that’s an important question for Social Security” to understand, Collins said.

Another project cut off was a study of Long Covid — the lingering collection of health-hampering symptoms reported by millions of COVID-19 patients. Understanding how the condition affects trends in work, health and disability could inform the projections Social Security actuaries must make as they look at the program’s prospects 75 years into the future, Collins said.

The UW center was also contributing research to help structure Wisconsin’s ABLE account — a savings account for people with disabilities that the state is in the process of establishing.

The UW center was launched with a five-year grant for $12 million. The grant was renewed in 2024 with another five-year grant that was supposed to be for $15 million. About $2.3 million of that has been spent, but with the termination there will be no reports or final studies, Collins said.

Altman of Social Security Works said research has been integral to the Social Security system from when it was established in the Great Depression, spearheaded in part by people with ties to UW-Madison.

“They’ve always done research to determine how the program should be structured, what the needs of the American people are, how economic security can be improved and what other countries are doing,” Altman said. “You have to be informed to have legislation that will work and have administration that will work.”

The Feb. 21 Social Security Administration press release announcing the termination of the research consortium said the research center agreements “included a focus on research addressing DEI in Social Security, retirement, and disability policy” and that ending them was in line with ending “fraudulent and wasteful” initiatives.

“The reality is that Social Security is gender neutral, racially neutral,” Altman said. Nevertheless, she said, various social differences are important in understanding how disparate impacts might affect the long-term operation of the program. For example, an accurate projection for the program’s resources and ability to pay benefits in the future requires considering the differing labor force participation rates of men and women.

Altman said contrary to the claims of the Trump administration, its actions with the Social Security Administration are “the opposite of rooting out waste, because it’s creating it.”