What Happens to Social Security If Texas Becomes Independent

In December 2025, 4,996,895 Texans received Social Security, according to the Social Security Administration, and their benefits that month came to about $9.38 billion. Most of them, 3,710,457, were retired workers. For those Texans the question about independence is concrete: whether a check they spent a working life paying for keeps arriving.

The Texas Nationalist Movement's answer has not changed since Daniel Miller's 2018 book TEXIT, and the movement's published plan says: "Any Texan who has paid into the Social Security system and is currently receiving benefits should continue to receive them. This is non-negotiable." The same plan says Texans who have paid in should keep the benefits they have accrued, and calls the payments an obligation Washington owes to the people who funded them.

The check follows the citizen

TNM's position rests on rules Washington already follows. The Social Security Administration pays U.S. citizens who live outside the United States. Its own guidance says: "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." Treasury rules bar payments to Cuba and North Korea, and the agency restricts payments to a handful of former Soviet republics. Everywhere else, a retired U.S. citizen is paid.

Independence would not by itself take that citizenship away. In Afroyim v. Rusk in 1967, the Supreme Court held that a U.S. citizen has "a constitutional right to remain a citizen in a free country unless he voluntarily relinquishes that citizenship." Federal law lists the acts that can cost a person citizenship, and each one must be done "with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality." Living in a Texas that has restored its independence is not on the list.

The six-month cutoff critics cite applies to noncitizens living abroad, and even there the agency's handbook exempts any worker who "Had at least 40 quarters of coverage," or who lived in the United States for 10 years or more. Forty quarters is the ten years of work that qualifies a person for a retirement benefit in the first place. Spouses and survivors who draw on another person's record face a tighter residence test, one of the details a transition agreement would cover.

The movement's plan for workers

For Texans still working, TNM's plan offers a choice during the transition: keep paying into the federal system, which many near retirement may prefer, or leave it. Over time it proposes a voluntary Texas retirement system modeled on the ones the state already runs for its employees and teachers, or opening those systems to any Texan who wants to join. Three Texas counties, Galveston, Brazoria and Matagorda, have run their own retirement plans for county workers outside Social Security since the early 1980s, and TNM points to them as a working model.

Workers who split a career between the United States and another country are covered by totalization agreements, which prevent double payroll taxation and let a worker combine years in both systems to qualify. The United States has such agreements with 31 countries, the latest with Romania in September 2026, and TNM's plan calls for one between Texas and the United States.

Medicare and veterans

Medicare works differently. It pays for care delivered inside the United States, and Medicare.gov says it "usually doesn't cover health care while you're traveling outside the U.S." TNM's position is that the doctors and hospitals Texans rely on are in Texas and stay there, that honoring the coverage Texans paid for is an item for the negotiating table, and that a Texas government would set up its own program during the transition for Texans already on Medicare or close to it.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says that "Most VA benefits are payable regardless of your place of residence or nationality," so disability compensation and pensions follow the veteran. VA care abroad is limited to service-connected conditions, and the VA hospitals and clinics in Texas would be settled with the rest of the federal property in the state.

A claim and a fallback

TNM's plan starts from the view that the federal program is less secure than it looks. TNM's 2026 report Can Texas Make It? cites Flemming v. Nestor, the 1960 decision in which the Supreme Court held that a covered worker does not have "such a right in benefit payments as would make every defeasance of 'accrued' interests violative of the Due Process Clause." Congress can rewrite the program whenever it chooses. The 2026 Trustees Report projects that the retirement trust fund will run out in the fourth quarter of 2032, after which incoming taxes would cover only part of scheduled benefits.

The same report treats Texans' benefits as a strength in any negotiation. It estimates that because the Texas workforce is younger than the union's, Texans pay $12 billion to $13 billion a year more into Social Security than Texas beneficiaries draw out. If Washington refused to honor what Texans earned, TNM's published answers say, that money would stay in Texas, and Texas would pay its own retirees.