Of all the warnings aimed at Texas independence, one lands hardest with the people who have worked the longest. It showed up this week in a North Texas Facebook thread that drew 500 comments: if Texas leaves, “WIC, social security, Medicaid, food stamps, etc would immediately cease,” one commenter wrote. “All the money you paid in taxes off your check? Gone.”
It is the most frightening claim in the debate, and it is built on a picture of how these programs work that does not match the rules Washington itself publishes.
Start with where Social Security checks already go. The Social Security Administration pays benefits to Americans living all over the world. Its own guidance is plain: “If you are a U.S. citizen, you may receive your Social Security payments outside the U.S. as long as you are eligible for them.” The six-month cutoff critics like to quote is a rule for people who are not U.S. citizens, and even then the agency lists dozens of countries where noncitizens keep being paid. A retiree in Mexico, France or the Philippines gets the same check as a retiree in Midland.
That matters because a vote for independence does not strip anyone of United States citizenship. The Supreme Court settled that in 1967. In Afroyim v. Rusk, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment protects “every citizen of this Nation against a congressional forcible destruction of his citizenship.” In 1980, in Vance v. Terrazas, it went further: “expatriation depends on the will of the citizen rather than on the will of Congress.” A Texan who votes yes, or becomes a citizen of an independent Texas, remains a U.S. citizen unless that Texan chooses to renounce it. And an U.S. citizen’s Social Security follows the individual.
Nor would anything change the morning after a vote. A referendum starts a negotiation; it does not flip a switch. The transition that follows is where earned benefits get settled, and the tools already exist. The United States keeps totalization agreements, the treaties that coordinate retirement systems across borders, with about 30 countries. The Texas Nationalist Movement’s position going into any such negotiation is the one it has held for years: “Any Texan who has paid into the Social Security system and is currently receiving benefits should continue to receive them. This is non-negotiable.”
Veterans hear the same scare, and the Department of Veterans Affairs answers it on its own website: “Most VA benefits are payable regardless of your place of residence or nationality.” Disability compensation, pension and education benefits are paid to veterans living overseas today. Health care abroad is narrower, covering service-connected conditions through the VA’s Foreign Medical Program, which is exactly the kind of detail a transition agreement exists to settle. Military retirement pay is not a favor, and the men and women who earned it will not be the ones asked to give it up.
The programs Texans rely on most for help at home do not run out of Washington at all. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission already administers Medicaid, SNAP and WIC in Texas. WIC alone serves more than 800,000 Texas women, infants and children every month through a state agency and local clinics. Those offices do not close because a vote was held. The question independence raises is who pays for them, and Texas already runs them.
Medicare deserves a straight answer rather than a slogan. It pays for care delivered inside the United States, so the real assurance is not that a Medicare card travels. It is that the doctors, hospitals and clinics Texans use are in Texas, and they stay in Texas. How the coverage Texans paid for is honored is a central item for the negotiating table, not something that vanishes the day after a referendum.
The warning also leaves something out. The threat to Social Security is not a vote in Texas. It is the program’s own math, under the government that runs it now. The Social Security Trustees reported in June that the retirement trust fund will be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032. At that point, under current law, incoming revenue covers 78 percent of scheduled benefits. The combined trust funds run dry in 2034. No independence vote is required for that cut. It is already on Washington’s schedule.
So the fear has the risk backwards. The money Texans paid in is not gone if Texas leaves. It is a claim Texas brings to the table on behalf of every Texan who earned it. The cut Texans should worry about is the one Washington has already written into its own projections.
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