Social Security: If Texas Secession Occurred, Would Retiree Benefits Suffer?

No matter the day or year, chances are somebody in Texas is calling for the Lone Star State to secede from the union. It’s been happening since the 1800s, and it’s happening again amid a showdown between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the U.S. government over control of the Texas-Mexico border. Before secession advocates start drawing up a new constitution, however, they might want to have a chat with the state’s Social Security recipients.

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As Newsweek reported, even Texans who favor forming an independent nation wonder what’s going to happen to their Social Security benefits. It’s a valid question, considering that benefits are managed and distributed by a federal agency of the very country they want to secede from.

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“If a state were to secede, its residents would no longer be under the jurisdiction of U.S. federal law, which includes the Social Security Act and its subsequent amendments,” True Tamplin, the founder of Finance Strategists, told Newsweek.

The likely scenario is that residents in the seceding state would lose eligibility for monthly Social Security payments since they would no longer be contributing their taxes to the program, Tamplin added. It also means residents’ former contributions to Social Security would remain within the U.S. system and be unavailable to citizens of an independent Texas.

“The program does not operate like a personal savings account but rather as a social insurance system,” Tamplin said.

With Social Security benefits no longer available, Texas would need to establish its own system to support retirees and those with disabilities, which have historically been covered by the Social Security Administration, Newsweek reported.

Secession also means millions of Texas seniors would probably lose their Medicare benefits as well.

“If Texas were to become an independent nation, it would no longer be part of the U.S. Medicare system, as Medicare is a federal program operated by the U.S. government,” Tamplin said in a separate report.

The reason this is even a topic of discussion is that some Texans, including Abbott, have expressed their unhappiness with the Biden administration and other federal government bodies over what’s happening at the border, The Sacramento Bee reported.

In a statement issued last week, Abbott said the U.S. government “has broken the compact between the United States and the states” and announced that he would deploy the Texas National Guard and other security forces to secure the state’s border.

Tellingly, the word “compact” was also used by seven of the 11 seceding states, including Texas, that led to the Civil War, The Sacramento Bee noted.

A recent column in The Hill also made light of the term, calling the compact theory “a rejected idea of state supremacy used to justify the secession of Confederate states during the Civil War.”

Texas isn’t the only state where residents and some leaders have threatened secession. Other states, including California, have done the same. But the idea seems to pop up in Texas on a regular basis without ever getting past the idea stage. That’s been the case ever since the Lone Star State enjoyed a brief period of independence from 1836 through 1845 after it was rejected by the U.S because it supported slavery, The Texas Tribune reported.

Walter Buenger, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and chief historian at the Texas State Historical Association, told The Texas Tribune that Texas’ first experience with independence didn’t turn out so well.

“It was a disaster,” Buenger said. “They couldn’t get their taxes right. They couldn’t defend themselves. They couldn’t get a rational foreign policy. It was a disaster, and I think it would again be a total disaster.”

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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Social Security: If Texas Secession Occurred, Would Retiree Benefits Suffer?