In 2024, the U.S. quietly hit a milestone: more people over 62 than under 18.
The country is getting older. Many of those older Americans still need to work.
That is the backdrop for the Trump team's latest budget move. It wants to kill the one federal program built to retrain low-income seniors and get them back to a paycheck.
The Senior Community Service Employment Program, or SCSEP, has been around since 1965.
It pays low-income Americans 55 and older the minimum wage to train for new jobs.
The work happens at nonprofits or government offices, and people put in about 20 hours a week.
To qualify, you must be out of work and earn no more than 125% of the federal poverty line.
SCSEP is a small program by Washington standards. Annual funding sits around $395 million.
For context, total federal spending will hit $7.4 trillion in 2026, per the Congressional Budget Office.
Still, the program served more than 42,000 people in 2023.
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The 2027 budget calls SCSEP "an earmark to leftist, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)-promoting organizations." It says the program is "ineffective and duplicative."
The argument: other federal programs already cover this ground, and state and local governments do better on raising wages.
A September report from the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee said SCSEP led to regular jobs for less than half of the program's job-ready people. The report did not name a source for that figure.
This is not Trump's first try. His first-term budgets pushed to cut SCSEP, and his 2026 budget did too.
Congress kept the funding both times.
Last year, the Department of Labor held up more than $300 million in SCSEP money for about four months. Tens of thousands of people got furloughed.
A class action lawsuit followed.
Legacy Link, a Georgia nonprofit that runs the program, went from nine offices to one. The group is now running at about 30% of its old size, per director Christine Osasu.
Some people ended up back on the street, while others lost their cars or skipped medicines. The eldest person now in Legacy Link's program is 86.
Goodwill in Zanesville, Ohio also took a hit during the pause. The program came back in November and has since reenrolled all 84 of its local people, per program manager Mike Carpenter.
The question on the floor now: will the funding hold next year?
Congress has the final say on the budget. Lawmakers already pushed back on the 2026 effort to zero out SCSEP.
They set aside $395 million instead - about $10 million less than the year before.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the top Democrat on the Senate panel that oversees labor, says she will fight to keep the program funded.
What is different this round is timing. New work rules for Medicaid and SNAP under last year's tax bill apply to people up to age 64 - the same group SCSEP exists to retrain.
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