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“Work or Die” The Great Disability Benefits War

A Partial History of the First Use of

Project 2025 by an American President

by TENNISE BROECK MORSE

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POSTSCRIPT 2026

I know I should write “and they all lived happily ever after,” and “the end.”  The 1980’s were a long time ago, and I’ve become a different person since then. Besides, after reading this book, you want some good news.

Well, in three weeks I’ll be 80.  That’s good news, as I’ve lived much longer than I ever thought I would.  My part in the great disability benefits war, which is a part of the larger war against social services that is constantly being waged, seemingly ended when I turned 66 and my disability benefits converted to regular old-age benefits.  I was free of the disability system, and as free as any of us is to choose how to live out the rest of my life.

I chose to keep writing this book.  If I’ve told the truth about my MS deficits, you may wonder how I managed to do it.  My answer is – and this is not a joke – very slowly.  As of today, I estimate I have been writing this book for 50 years.

How did I get those years, when I was supposed to die in my 50’s?  Well first, my MS converted from the type with continual attacks to the gradually progressive kind, and second, the Social Security Administration was right.  My health improved as a result of medical progress, in the sense that it stopped gradually getting worse.  Social Security simply didn’t take into account the fact that changes which happened “quickly” in medical time happened slowly in the real world.

I took my first anti-fatigue – one only marginally effective – when I was almost 50.  It would be several more years before one came along that truly made a difference.  Into my 50’s, I still sometimes walked with one cane, and sometimes two, falling frequently.  I took my first disease-modifying medication in my late 50’s.  It went badly, but when the second one came out a few years later, I tried it – and it was a miracle.  For the first time I actually entered into an MS “remission,” which most people think means that I became perfectly ok.  What it really meant was that I became more able to manage my MS deficits.  My body had stopped the gradual wearing away of my myelin, and I was finally able to develop effective strategies to “adjust.”

My body came to an uneasy truce with itself, but medical science didn’t – and still doesn’t – know how to repair the damage that was done.  I lived more than 25 years with untreated and untreatable MS.  My brain lesions light up on MRI’s.  When you add in the aging process, I was able to function, but never well enough to hold a job.  As if to underscore this point, I had a third MS flareup sometime in my early 60’s.

I can’t complain.  I am not in a wheelchair, and I live independently, although my ability to cope with my cognitive deficits has declined as I age.  I walk without a cane, only occasionally slur my words, and people don’t notice my cognitive deficits unless they know me really well.  If you see me out and about, I look pretty fit for a woman my age.  But of course, there are many days when you won’t see me, because I still struggle with fatigue.

You may wonder why I chose to spend the little energy I had left writing this book.  My focus was still narrow.  I didn’t research all the other things that happened under the plan Reagan was following.  I wasn’t considering that a new and improved version could come back to haunt us.  By now, I was simply writing a history, so what was the point?  For me, the point was, I was writing about a historical wrong that was never corrected – so yesterday’s history remained the present-day reality for the Social Security disability program.

I had this book, in several earlier versions, out for free on the internet, and I continued to get heartbreaking e-mails for years.  Sometime in my 60’s, when I stopped following Social Security Disability news, I’d been forced to admit that if you’re a blue-collar worker who becomes disabled today and applies for Social Security disability benefits, you probably won’t get them.  Reagan broke the system, funding continued to be cut, and now the government’s disability insurance program has become a kind of con.  You have to pay into it, it has the money, but if you need to collect, you’re toast.

I followed the saga of a friend’s daughter who – after being unable to work for four years – finally admitted she was disabled and applied for Social Security Disability benefits.  She received her first rejection – the one that was supposed to take three to six months – two years later.  Her second “reconsideration” rejection took the normal three to six months, but then she was informed that it could take up to a year and a half to have a hearing.  Her hearing finally came, and three months later she was rejected, despite a mountain of medical evidence.  Then, quickly, her final appeal was denied.  The process took almost four years, and her rejections came in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 – not 1981.  And no, she lacked the stamina to continue to Federal Court.

At some point, I accepted that it is what it is.  So, early in 2024, I declared this book finished, and made it available on Amazon, hoping to reach more readers.  Then, just months later, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, and bragged that it gave Reagan the first draft in 1981, and he used it.  Now, Trump was poised to use it again.

Let me be clear.  Everything I’m going to say now stems from this.  When Trump’s base called for America to be “great again,” or America first,” they meant they wanted an America for US.  The problem is, all Americans think we’re US.  When I was a white middle-class woman in my early 30’s, I thought I was US.  I was married, religious, college-educated, and employed.  I was even a Mayflower Descendant twice over, once from William Brewster, and again from Stephen Hopkins.  I put it to you that if I wasn’t US, no one is.  That’s what Reagan taught ME.  To the backers of Project 2025 and the people who wrote it, every single one of US is expendable.

So, I forced myself to review Project 2025, and what grabbed my attention was what it didn’t say when it bragged about Reagan’s accomplishments.  Not a word about the Social Security Disability “reviews.”  In fact, in searching the entire document, I found there was barely a word about Social Security anywhere, and that was very odd.  Because conservatives had been railing against Social Security ever since Social Security existed.  Now, in the primary conservative manifesto, Social Security had suddenly disappeared?

I began to think the targeted downsizing of Social Security Disability – along with other Reagan policies – was a test case.  A successful test case.  While I was writing my book, the Heritage Foundation was also analyzing the data, to find out what finally halted the Reagan Revolution (and eventually the reviews).  The answer would be the courts, Congress, and the media.  Now, after 50 years of lobbying, conservatives controlled the Supreme Court, the media was being bought up by conservative billionaires, and if Trump won again, he’d bring the Congress with him.

The election was upon us, and this book suddenly became current events.  Project 2025 had a history in real time, and that history could be reviewed.  And looking back at Project 2025’s history, I became convinced that all of Social Security would be a primary target if Trump was elected.  I thought if older people and blue-collar workers got this information, it could have an impact on their vote.

And so, I tried to get this message out to the public: It isn’t what Project 2025 says it wants to do, but what it doesn’t say, and it isn’t what Project 2025 says it wants to do but how it plans to do it.  The strategies.  The playbook.

I was blocked at every turn.  Facebook took my page down and banned me.  Google ads deleted my ad for a free short article detailing the Project 2025 playbook, calling it “election related advertising.”  Every “liberal” media in the country ignored my e-mails, as did every congressional representative dealing with Social Security or Project 2025.  I wrote MSNBC three times, and didn’t even get a “Thanks for contacting us.”  The New York Times didn’t respond to my asking them to let me write an “opinion” piece, although I made it clear they could edit it as they liked, and pointed out that the majority of my bibliography came straight from the New York Times.  I was an unknown.  Worse, I was a woman.  And finally, I was old.

I pushed myself too hard.  I got sicker and sicker, but the months passed and Trump was elected.  Today, I’m homebound more than I’m “out there.”  But although my body has weakened, my mind still has most of its marbles.

 I’m subjecting you to this Postscript, and continuing to tell people about this book, because of a question.  Why do sports coaches watch old games of the teams they will be playing against?  Answer: to gather information, and to analyze their enemy’s strategy.  To look for weaknesses they can exploit.

The same goes here.  Project 2025 is following the same basic playbook it used in 1981, because it worked so well then, and the authors aren’t actually smart or creative.  They’re crafty.  I’ll bet, if you look deeply enough, Trump is dismantling the Department of Education because, in the Reagan days, it refused to back defining ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches.  That would be a weakness, showing that Project 2025’ers are not so much goal oriented as driven by outrage for perceived past insults.

As Trump and Project 2025 continue to dismantle our government, I’ve found myself asking, what is a community?  On the surface, it’s simple.  People in communities take care of their neighbors.  Some years ago, I came upon the story of one of my ancestors, Richard Hildreth, who lost his right hand in an accident circa 1663.  His neighbors awarded him a special land grant of 150 acres.  No one told him he could still work with his left hand, and no one called the land grant an “entitlement.”  Of course, all his neighbors knew him.

That’s the advantage of living in a small community.  All your neighbors know you.  If you’re well liked, they will help you.  Often, even if you’re tolerated, they will help you.  On the other hand, if for some reason they see you as an outsider, they may conclude you’re not “deserving” of help.

Given its size, if the United States of America can exist, it has to exist as a community – or fracture into small European-like states.  But today, instead of dealing with a person we know – we all too often deal with groups.  The poor.  The homeless.  People of other colors.  People of other beliefs.  As we cluster together in our neighborhoods, all we know of the others is what we’re told.

Internationally, we find ourselves living in a revised version of a Mr. Roger’s song:  Everything goes together, because it’s all one piece.  Some Americans are uncomfortable about the money we spend, and wonder why we help out other countries.  It’s been easy – with enough propaganda – to convince us to say “no!”  “No!  You’re not one of us.  You don’t deserve our help!”  And even when Trump abruptly ended USAID, and at least 30,000 people (many of them children) starved to death because we let the food that had already been shipped to them rot in warehouses – they weren’t us.

Here at home, we understand that we may need help at some point, and so our government maintains a “safety net” of social services.  Still propaganda regularly convinces us to accept our social services being gutted because of alleged “fraud.”  Ever hear the joke about the man who asks a woman if she’ll sleep with him for a million dollars?  She says “Sure!”  Then he asks if she’ll sleep with him for 20 bucks.  She says “What do you think I am!”  And he says “We’ve already established what you are.  Now we’re just negotiating the price.”

The Project 2025’ers believe that if Americans accepted starving more than 30,000 people in Africa, we won’t balk much when the targets are poor Americans, especially if the first ones aren’t white.  They think they’ve already established what we are, and now they’re only negotiating how far we will go.

And it’s true that we’re vulnerable, because we rarely acknowledge the fact that our social systems are structured in such a way that their policies and procedures are open to interpretation by every new administration.  Just change the eligibility requirements for SNAP benefits, and lots of people aren’t “eligible” any more.  It’s scary to realize that the benefits these social services provide are not our “rights.”

There is no core group of honest eligible people these programs will continue to serve no matter what.  Benefits can be funded and defunded.  They can cease to exist.  Even our Social Security pensions.

 And so, the door is open for individuals and conservative think tanks to use ever more sophisticated propaganda to try to swing our votes for candidates who will pursue their agenda.  Their success, and what I call “sound bite” politics, has finally brought us here.

 In his first term, Trump followed the standard Republican agenda, although his “in your face” style revealed the true cruelty behind the usually carefully crafted rhetoric.  Eventually, faced with multiple legal problems in both his terms, Trump followed up on Reagan’s “non-acquiescence” claim that the executive branch’s “policies were lawful and the court lacked jurisdiction to decide” they were not.

 Trump asked the Supreme Court he had packed to rule that he had absolute immunity for anything he did, in his duties as president or for personal reasons, during his time in office, and essentially, the Supreme Court complied.  Even if it had said “No!,” the Supreme Court doesn’t have an army.  It still has to rely on the Justice Department to enforce its rulings.  Since Trump now “owns” the Justice Department, we’d still be where we are today.  But if the Supreme Court had said “No!” we’d probably be a lot more outraged about it.

 I don’t have another 50 years to write a book detailing the perfect storm that pushed Trump into office in 2024, so I’ll just hit the highlights.  Globally, we’re living in a time of fear, largely because of climate change.  Those of us who are hearing about it hear we’re all going to have to make major uncomfortable changes or face the consequences.

 Here in America, rich conservatives continued to fund Trump – after all, he was the Republican candidate – but when some of them balked at the end, Elon Musk bought the election with the huge donation he made to Trump’s faltering campaign.

 At the same time, the Heritage Foundation, which may once have believed itself to be a conservative think tank, had essentially been taken over by the agenda of radical right – theoretically Christian – extremists. 

I’m not the first to notice this.  Google “Christian Extremists,” or see Elected by No One by Rick Perlstein or None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen.  (Personal note:  I couldn’t find a similar published book written by a woman.)

Towards the beginning of Project 2025, it states that the Reagan Revolution ultimately failed.  Apparently, when Heritage Foundation backers asked “why?” the answer was that the American system was flawed.  In their lobbying efforts, it might seem that the Heritage Foundation was only trying to subtly “tweak” things, until you consider that some years back, influential people began calling for a new Constitutional Convention, with the aim of creating a new and “improved” constitution.  They’ve made headway.  And so, I have to say that for close to 50 years, we’ve had a group that’s essentially plotting to overthrow our government right under our noses, and accepted them as reputable “lobbyists.”

Continual efforts – during the Reagan years and beyond – to stop regulating capitalism and to open up as many for-profit opportunities as possible succeeded with health care, among other things, and health care and other costs began eating steadily into paychecks.  As the money available for working people continued to dwindle, a group of white people who saw themselves doing worse and worse united behind Trump.  They were joined by an odd coalition of people who distrusted the government and the news and were afraid and angry.

Trump promised a Christian America, and nobody asked what particular set of Christian beliefs this new America would follow.  This ignored the fact that there are dozens of competing groups that consider themselves Christian – there was just a schism in the Catholic church! –and if one particular Evangelical Christian offshoot suddenly became America’s official religion, we’d end up in a religious war to rival those of the past.

And finally, everyone with influence was co-opted by unregulated capitalism.  AARP’s power turned out to be dependent on member numbers and advertising support.  It couldn’t afford to take a stand, and calmly treated both candidates as equal, never warning its members that one party had taken on a Social Security program in the past.  AARP wouldn’t print my carefully moderated Letter to the Editor that pointed this out.

The mainstream media found itself in the same position.  Very rich conservatives held influential positions in even the most liberal TV and print news, and of course the bottom line remained crucial.  “All News All the Time” meant fierce competition for any interesting story, but also meant the media couldn’t afford to alienate potential subscribers.  So, the mainstream media downplayed the concerns about Project 2025 – after all, they might be sued – and even refused to endorse a candidate in the election.  But doing so didn’t save them from Trump’s pledge to destroy the free press.  If only reinforced his message that the mainstream media can’t be trusted.

 On the home front, we were so complacent about the electoral process that some of us thought we could cast a “protest” vote, while others were so uninformed that they thought they could change their votes after they cast them, and many of us thought it didn’t matter if we didn’t vote at all.  Economically successful black people thought they were US, and economically disadvantaged black people said the hell with all of them, so there wasn’t an overwhelmingly strong black turnout to vote against Trump.  Now, they’ve lost just about every gain they made in the last 50 years.

 Homegrown Hispanics thought they were US.  Trump promised to get rid of abortion, and also to get rid of the criminals who were giving them a bad name.  Now they have family members and friends and neighbors sitting in subhuman conditions under detention, if ICE hasn’t shot them or the government hasn’t sent them to nowhere South America or Africa.

In the end, it was like the psychological phenomenon where a group of people won’t report someone being stabbed to death, because everyone expects someone else to do it.  Or, if you like conspiracy theories, Republicans somehow stole the election.  Either way, Trump was declared the president, and initially following Project 2025, he slashed the federal government’s programs right and left.

We know things aren’t going well, but even now, you may feel largely unaffected.  But even though Trump’s gone rogue, he and his people still generally follow the Project 2025 playbook, and like all plans, it will have successes and unintended consequences.  While they’re slashing away, our economy is like a giant game of Jenga. 

In the game of Jenga, you have wooden pieces stacked crosswise into a tower.  On your turn, you have to ease a piece out from somewhere in the middle and put it on top without making the tower fall.  As play continues, the Jenga tower becomes more and more unstable.  The game ends when the tower topples.

Our Jenga economy (like the world economy) is made up of millions of pieces, but like the beams in a house, some are weight-bearing and therefore crucial.  This is why we’re so slow to make changes that could really be good for us.  If we make degradable plastic, what will happen to the earlier plastic-making pieces of our economy?  Same with clean energy.  Same with the auto industry.  Everything goes together, because it’s all one piece.

But Trump’s people are recklessly pulling out pieces without concern for the consequences.  Right now, our economy is riding high on the AI boom, but most booms eventually go bust.  We can’t completely predict when the crucial pieces will fall, but we can confidently predict the fall is coming and the pieces will hit hard.  I guarantee you’ll be affected then.  We probably can’t stop it, but we might be able to influence its intensity.

Today, I live in the world the people in Trump’s base were afraid of, because Project 2025 deliberately used his base to create it.  I can’t trust the news, or any statistics the government puts out.  I know pretty much anything any governmental official says is a lie.  But the propaganda machine keeps telling me that I won’t be affected, because I’m US.

Today I certainly look like US.  I’m a “Senior,” – translation: old – a mother and grandmother, a church goer, a voter, a responsible citizen.  I live in a nice neighborhood. Like many of the people I know, I live on  Social Security.

But I still remember that I almost lost my children to foster care, almost ended up homeless and dying long before my 50’s. I was this close to being erased from existence, when the first draft of Project 2025 led our government to redefine its disability standards.  And thinking back to how I’d been systematically isolated during that time, I wonder if anyone would have noticed I was gone.

Thinking these thoughts, and remembering, I feel afraid and angry.  I want to reach out and grab Trump supporters and scream at them, “What will it take for you to understand you could be next?”  But then, of course, I’m too depressed to do anything because I feel powerless.  That’s how I’m supposed to feel: depressed, powerless, angry and afraid.

That’s the plan, but plans are made by people, and people make mistakes.  Trump and Project 2025 rely on our believing that the situation is hopeless, that there’s nothing to do but accept it.  But giving a nod to Star Trek, Trump and his cronies are not the Borg, and resistance is not futile.  And so, I once again decide to do whatever I can to make this book available until someone notices enough or cares enough to make it go away.

I try to take as my mantra a posting I saw on Facebook years ago, put up by “Insufferably Intolerant Science Nerd”: “When people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks that they can radically change the future by doing something small.”

Despite the terrors and the heartbreak of these last few years, and the years of chaos to come, that posting renews my hope for the future, America’s and mine.  Looking back, I did one small thing.  I wrote this book.  One word at a time, I’ve seen how one small thing adds up over 50 years. 

Every day, as I read about an America that has moved further away from my ideals than I would ever have thought possible, I try to focus on doing one small thing.  One small thing at a time, I hope to radically change the future.  Out of the thousands of books you could have read, you chose this one.  That was one small thing.  One small thing at a time, you can radically change the future too.