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PartialSocial Security, Medicare & Retirement

I will not cut one penny from Social Security or Medicare, and I will not raise the retirement age by one day.

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PartialFact-checker reviewConfidence: 70%

Adversarial re-check: all three sources in the prior rating are REAL, live, and quoted accurately. (1) Primary text of Public Law 119-21 on govinfo confirms verbatim 'SEC. 71201. LIMITING MEDICARE COVERAGE OF CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS.', placed under 'Chapter 2--Medicare, subchapter a--strengthening eligibility requirements.' (2) The Center for Medicare Advocacy page confirms verbatim that the provision 'eliminates Medicare eligibility for all other lawfully present immigrants, regardless of how long they have worked and paid into the system, including: Refugees and people granted asylum, People with Temporary Protected Status...' and that 'By July 2026 the Social Security Administration must identify current Medicare beneficiaries who do not meet the above immigration criteria and notify them that their coverage will end in January 2027.' (3) The AMA advocacy update confirms verbatim that 'Section 8001 of H.R. 5371 directs OMB to clear the scorecards and eliminates any potential associated sequester cuts, including in Medicare,' averting a statutory-PAYGO Medicare sequester the AMA puts at roughly $530B that P.L. 119-21 itself had triggered. I additionally verified the promise is authentic, not paraphrased: the 2024 Republican Platform states 'President Trump has made absolutely clear that he will not cut one penny from Medicare or Social Security' and lists Promise 14 as 'FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE.' On the merits: two of the three components held fully — no statute or executive action cut Social Security benefits, and the retirement age was not changed by one day through mid-2026. One component was breached in a real but bounded way — an enacted law he signed reduces Medicare outlays by terminating coverage for a class of lawfully present beneficiaries who paid Medicare payroll taxes, and that same law mechanically triggered an automatic Medicare sequester that required separate 2025 legislation to cancel. Fairness/party-neutrality test applied both ways. Toward leniency: the platform frames the pledge around 'American Citizens' who 'contribut[e] to Social Security and Medicare,' the affected class is small relative to ~68M Medicare enrollees, the PAYGO sequester never took effect, and no seniors' benefits were reduced — an argument for FULL. Toward harshness: 'not one penny' is absolute, and he signed a law with CBO-scored Medicare savings — an argument for MISALIGNED. MISALIGNED overstates it because the net direction of the record is predominantly compliant; FULL overstates it because 'essentially 100%' cannot absorb an enacted Medicare coverage termination under an absolute pledge. A promise from the opposite party with this record — core intact, narrow enacted carve-out contradicting an absolute 'not one penny' — would draw the same label. PARTIAL ('kept some but not all') is the correct outcome. Confidence held at 0.7 rather than raised, because the citizen-framing reading is a genuine interpretive alternative and because this session's web-search budget was exhausted, limiting a sweep for any 2026-specific developments beyond the verified record.

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