WASHINGTON (7News) -- As federal lawmakers face mounting public pressure to preserve retirement benefits for millions of Americans by a 2033 funding deadline, an effort is also underway to reform another key function of the Social Security Administration - the way it provides support to the 8.7 million Americans out of work due to medical conditions or disabilities.
Some of that effort involves reevaluating the way a 23-year-old back-to-work program called Ticket to Work has worked.
To hear economist David Stapleton describe it -- not terribly well.
"If there was an impact it was very tiny compared to what expectations were," Stapleton told 7News in a recent interview from his home in Waterbury, Vermont.
Stapleton, 74, is semi-retired. For nearly 35 years he conducted policy research on the employment of people with disabilities and was the founding director of the Washington DC-based Center for Study of Disability Policy at Mathematica.
He remembers the promise of the Ticket to Work program when it was first passed into law by Congress in 1999 and when it went into effect in 2002.
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The idea was simple -- to offer people collecting monthly Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, who were able to work, job training, employment services and the ability to keep their disability benefits for up to twelve months while still working, a period considered long enough to help them get back on their feet and off government assistance.
As of June 2025, more than 282,000 disabled individuals participated in the Ticket to Work Program, according to the Social Security Administration.
A spokesman for the agency told 7News that in a January 2025 survey, 18.2% of disability recipients responded that they see themselves making enough to return to work within the next 5-years.
"It does look like about 20% of beneficiaries would really like to work to the point where they would give up their benefits," Stapleton said.
But to date, Stapleton said, only "0.8% of beneficiaries give up their benefits because of work. I think the question is, 'How do you get from where we are, at the 0.8% to the 20%?'"
That's a question Jim Allsup has been struggling to answer for decades.
Allsup, 72, worked for the Social Security Administration in his early 20s. Since 1984, he's run Allsup Employment Services, a Belleville, Illinois, company that contracts with the government to sign people up for disability benefits and informs beneficiaries of option to use the Ticket to Work program. In the mid-90s, Allsup testified at the Congressional hearings that eventually led to the Ticket to Work legislation.
"When you talk about social security reform, included in that needs to be disability reform," Allsup told 7News in a recent interview from his home in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Allsup agreed with Stapleton's assessment that for far too many people Social Security Disability Insurance becomes a "poverty trap."
"If the focus is not on helping people go back to work, that can go back to work, yeah it becomes a trap," Allsup said. "We've been able to get about 700 or 800 people off the rolls, which has saved the program over two billion dollars. Unfortunately, we've got to spend the money and go out and find our own customers because they don't know about it from the agency."
Allsup says each person who moves off the disability rolls saves the government, on average, $309,000 over the course of a lifetime.
If the 20 percent of individuals on disability, who see themselves returning to work within five years did rejoin the workforce, it could save the Social Security Disability Insurance trust fund more than $400 billion, according to Allsup.
Tarnisha Averette, 43, is one of the people Allsup's company helped get back to work and also someone who represents the promise and problems associated with the Ticket to Work program.
In 2015, Averette was living in North Carolina, in and out of the hospital battling Lupus, an autoimmune disease. Her medical condition left her so weak she had little choice but to go on disability, which initially paid her $425 a month
"The check that I was getting, I could barely pay for food," Averette told 7News. "My credit cards were maxed out. I was in financial debt. I was mentally unstable in so many ways. I didn't want to be around people because I didn't have the means or financial funds to do anything. It was hurtful."
Last year, feeling physically stronger, Averette wanted to get back to work, but she said she felt stuck. She'd received pamphlets from the Social Security Administration with information about the Ticket to Work program but said she ignored them.
"I always thought that if I started working, I wouldn't have no insurance, you know, my checks would stop," Averette said.
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Through Allsup's employment company, Averette said, she finally realized what the Ticket to Work program could offer her. Last October, she took a job with Amazon in Manassas as a driver and dispatch associate.
She told 7News her Amazon job pays her $20 per hour, but because she's also in the Ticket to Work program she still collects her monthly disability check, now $877 per month, and will have the added benefit of two income streams up until October 2025.
"If it wasn't for this program, I don't know what I would have done," Averette said. "I was able to pay off all my debt and I live comfortably now. I've been saving my money. You never know what's gonna' happen. I don't want to be in the situation I was in before."
Averette's success story is the exception, according to Allsup, who said that nearly 70% of Social Security Disability Insurance recipients either don't know about or don't understand the Ticket to Work program. Those numbers are based on a 2019 Mathematica survey of SSDI beneficiaries.
"We can't help the Tarnisha's of the world unless they know about the damn program," Allsup said. "The agency's not telling people about the program. If they tell 'em about the program, you're going to have many more Tarnishas."
A spokesperson for the Social Security Administration told 7News the agency does conduct outreach to people on disability when they first are awarded benefits and on their first- and second-year anniversaries on the program, in addition to offering free counseling and work incentive seminars.
As of June 2025, more than 282,000 disabled individuals were participating in the Ticket to Work Program, the spokesperson said.
Given the difficulty in moving people off benefits once they receive them, Stapleton said the key may be reaching people who are eligible to go on disability before they are awarded benefits in the first place.
The RETAIN program (Retaining Employment and Talent After Injury/Illness Network) run by the Department of Labor, is currently conducting pilot studies in five states - Vermont, Kentucky, Kansas, Minnesota and Ohio.
The idea behind RETAIN is to identify people who've left work for a medical reason and to get them to enroll in an evidence-based return-to-work program, getting them back to work quickly, without ever having to go on disability, Stapleton said.
Investing $10,000 to $15,000 in job training and short-term benefits to get someone back to work is far less costly than a lifetime spent on disability, said Stapleton, who worked as consultant on the RETAIN program in Kentucky.
The results of the RETAIN report are scheduled to be released in December, Stapleton said.
"Until we have the results we won't know if it actually worked."