State Will Continue Requiring Low-Income People to Pay Back Disability Benefits Through 2025
A repeal of the requirement, intended to help some of the state's poorest residents, was pushed back to "reduce fiscal impact to the budget."
By Andrew Engelson
In 2023, the Washington legislature passed a bill ending the requirement that recipients of the state’s Aged, Blind, and Disabled (ABD) cash assistance program pay back their benefits once they qualify for federal disability payments. ABD benefits go to some of the state’s poorest residents, and the new law attempted to remedy the payback requirement.
But a PubliCola reader recently let us know that the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) is still requiring recipients to pay back ABD benefits. Sen. Claire Wilson (D-30, Auburn), chair of the senate Human Services committee, amended the bill near the end of the legislative session to change its effective date from October 2023 to October 2025.
ABD recipients are some of the most vulnerable people in the state. According to the latest data, nearly 30 percent of the 31,000 people currently receiving ABD are homeless, and 55 percent have a mental health-related disability.
According to Aaron Wasser, a spokesman for the Senate Democrats, Wilson and the Democratic caucus agreed to the change, in part, “to reduce fiscal impact to the budget without compromising the underlying policy.”
ABD is aimed at two groups: People who are temporarily disabled and those who need a “bridge” while they’re waiting to be approved for federal SSI disability payments—a process that takes, on average, seven months.
Sarah Payne, who lives in Everett and reached out to PubliCola, was helping a friend apply for ABD and noticed the payback requirement in a letter her friend received from DSHS, called an “interim assistance reimbursement authorization form.”
“It’s just the most complicated Kafkaesque bureaucracy-worded letter you could possibly read,” Payne said. “I had to read it three times to get what it was saying.”
Payne’s friend, who declined to be interviewed because of privacy concerns, has heart disease. Payne says he has been waiting more than a year and a half to get federal benefits. Payne herself recently became disabled—she also has heart disease—but is rethinking applying for ABD because of the repayment requirement.
Brice Montgomery, interim director of the Community Services Division of DSHS, which manages ABD benefits, said his office welcomes the new legislation but the agency doesn’t have the funds toeliminate repayment requirements until October 2025. “We think that the law as written will be a help and is a commitment to reducing poverty in meaningful ways,” Montgomery said.
The reason DSHS historically required people to pay back their ABD benefits is that the federal government reimburses SSI recipients for the time they spent waiting to qualify for benefits. But people who receive these lump-sum payments often need the money to pay off debts or unpaid rent from when they were receiving ABD benefits, which are typically much lower than SSI.
The maximum monthly benefit for a single person in the ABD program is $450 per month, less than half of the maximum SSI benefit of $943 per individual (and a fraction of the $1,900 it costs to rent an average apartment in the Puget Sound region).
The ABD program has been historically underfunded, with benefits slashed to $197 per month in 2011. DSHS bumped up the benefit to its current level in 2022. “It was a very meager benefit for quite some time, and was remedied a bit,” Montgomery said, “but it's still not as high as the typical SSI grant.”
Payne said she’s disappointed that the legislature kept the payback requirement in place for an additional two years. “It’s a small program, but it matters a lot to the people who are on it,” she said. “It feels like they're picking at your carcass. That lump sum is what some people are counting on. After you wait so long, you're in debt to a lot of people.”
The state estimated that eliminating the payback requirement will cost $51 million between 2025 and 2027 and $61 million between 2027 and 2029. “Pushing this out to the next biennium gave the state time to plan and budget for that fiscal impact and it also gives DSHS time to plan a successful implementation,” Wasser, from the state Democrats, said.
Payne said that requirement is placing a burden on people like her and her friend, whose finances are already precarious because of their disabilities.
“I just don't understand this mindset of taking from the neediest,” she said.