SSA funding cuts force retirement research centers to close

Research on aging, retirement and Social Security is vanishing as more Social Security Administration-funded research centers shut down following recent funding cuts.

Last week, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that its Retirement and Disability Research Center would be closing due to cuts to research funding provided by the SSA. The center was part of a six-member consortium that received funding from the administration to support research on retirement, disability and Social Security.

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In February, the SSA announced plans to terminate roughly $15 million in funding for the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium.

“Terminating our RDRC cooperative agreements aligns with President Trump’s priorities to end fraudulent and wasteful initiatives and contracts,” said Lee Dudek, who was serving as Social Security’s acting commissioner at the time. “We will continue to root out waste and abuse to earn back America’s trust and confidence in our agency.”

The RDRC was established by the agency in 2018, with current funding agreements planned to last until the 2028 fiscal year.

Along with the National Bureau of Economic Research, retirement research centers at the City University of New York (CUNY) Baruch College and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County have also closed in recent months due to the elimination of federal funding.

The Retirement and Disability Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is also in the process of shutting down, with plans to officially close around Aug. 1, according to J. Michael Collins, faculty director at the UW-Madison Retirement and Disability Research Center.

The University of Michigan’s Retirement and Disability Research Center also appears to have shut down, with no new research posted to its website and its social media accounts either deleted or dormant. The university did not respond to a request for confirmation.

Out of the six consortium members, only the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College remains open. Private funding has allowed the center to continue its core research efforts, but training and grants have been eliminated due to the termination of federal funding, according to Andrew Eschtruth, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

An information-scarce future

Researchers say these closures are likely to have long-term consequences for public policy decision-making.

Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist at The New School and a former co-director of the New York Retirement & Disability Research Center, said that the SSA’s funding cuts mark a shift away from the evidence-based policy making that has defined the government’s approach for more than 100 years.

“That’s the way retirement and Social Security programs have really operated, like the congressional leaders that move Social Security forward, and even presidents, really, rely on the facts on the ground to figure out the trade-offs they’re making,” Ghilarducci said.

Eschtruth shared a similar perspective.

“It’s part of a broader change in direction by the federal government to reduce public support of research, which could reduce the information available to help public policy decision-making in a variety of areas,” he said.

No return on spent money

Across all six research centers, faculty say that the abrupt elimination of federal funding led to dozens of training programs and research efforts being cut short with nothing to show for the money already spent.

At Boston College, training and education programs were pulled back, and research grants to junior faculty and Ph.D. candidates were eliminated due to funding cuts. Ten ongoing research projects funded through these grants were left incomplete, Eschtruth said.

One project explored a potential cost-saving strategy for the Social Security Administration: using local volunteers to assist beneficiaries — a model that has shown success in Medicare. Another project was researching the impact of Social Security caregiver credits, particularly for people who stay home to take care of young children, on labor force participation.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two large training programs and 19 research projects were eliminated due to the funding cuts. Several projects focused on ABLE accounts, which are tax-advantaged savings and investment accounts for individuals with disabilities. These accounts allow eligible users to save money without affecting their access to public benefits such as Medicaid, SSI or SSDI.

“We understand that funding priorities change, but there’s a way to do this that would allow us to at least complete the projects that were started,” Collins said. “And it actually wouldn’t have cost any more money because we still had startup costs that were already charged, right? So we could have actually produced 19 different research papers this year.”

Prior to the funding termination in February, Ghilarducci said that she and other researchers were told to stop all DEI-related research grants. For the New York Retirement & Disability Research Center, that meant stopping one LGBTQ-focused research project. 

“And then we actually looked at all of our websites and the language that we use to describe the grant, and we changed that language to meet the new administration’s [requirements],” Ghilarducci said. “And it wasn’t hard. I mean, we did cut out all the DEI research, but all the other research just had to do with long-term care, insurance, disabled workers, disability benefits, kind of quotidian things that you know, that affect everybody.”

Researchers say the Social Security Administration’s outright termination of research funding in February went beyond efforts to eliminate DEI research.

“We just felt like that wasn’t a fair assessment of what the work was, and certainly they could look project by project and say, ‘This project’s not a priority, that project’s not a priority,’ but to just terminate everything across all six centers all at once and not allow any researchers to move forward, I think it was a wasted opportunity,” Collins said.