Further, the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) that passed last year will sharply cut Medicaid and SNAP over the next decade by well over $1 trillion combined.

The combination of these trends—low-road employers paying insufficient wages and big upcoming cuts to Medicaid and SNAP—has led to a flurry of policy proposals at the state level to address them. One proposal—employer assessment fees (EAFs)—appears at first glance to address both problems by imposing a tax on firms that employ workers who receive Medicaid or SNAP, with the tax often calculated as the number of workers receiving these benefits multiplied by the average cost of those benefits. But EAFs are not the optimal solution to either problem and might cause undesirable collateral damage.

Here’s why:

• Medicaid and SNAP do not make it easier for employers to offer lower wages. In fact, they likely raise the wages needed to attract workers—and that’s a good thing.
  • This is not universal across all safety net and income support programs. Some of these, like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), do see some of their benefits likely bypass workers and captured by low-wage employers.
• If you make Medicaid-receiving workers more expensive to employ, then employers will try to employ fewer of them and/or lower their market wages. And if the tax is proportional to the average cost of benefits like Medicaid, this incentive is large.
• Employer assessments fees are generally a large tax imposed on a small base. But revenue is maximized when tax bases are broad.
• The targets of EAFs can be more effectively reached with other policies.
  • Raising minimum wages and passing legislation to strengthen workers’ rights to unionize and bargain collectively are alternative policies for forcing employers to pay more.
  • Broad-based taxes are alternative polices for raising revenue.
    • Higher corporate income taxes or employer-side payroll taxes would be more progressive alternatives for taxing employers.
    • Another alternative would be to penalize firms that don’t offer employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) to workers. This is not a huge base, but it is by definition wider than those who receive Medicaid (which is just a subset of all workers not receiving ESI through the firm.)

Below, we expand on these points.

Medicaid and SNAP do not make it easier for employers to offer lower wages

A concern is often expressed that Medicaid and SNAP “subsidize” low-wage employers by making it easier for them to offer lower wages. Intuitively, thinking that Medicaid and SNAP subsidize low-wage employers actually gives these employers far too much credit for caring about the living standards of their workers. Higher pay is not given out of the goodness of employers’ hearts—it happens when policy or market conditions change. Medicaid and SNAP do not change labor market conditions in any way that lowers workers’ pay, and when these programs are cut in coming years, low-wage employers are not going to think “we need to raise our wages to help these employees who are seeing cuts to other income sources.” They will instead raise wages only if policy mandates they do or if market conditions change.

In reality, Medicaid and SNAP actually boost lower-wage workers’ meager leverage to demand higher pay by making periods of non-work less miserable. This slightly improved fallback position for low-wage workers keeps them from being forced as quickly by material deprivation into accepting any possible wage offer from employers. Policy changes that reduce how many workers receive Medicaid or SNAP will put further downward pressure on wages. We should support policies that expand the number of workers who have their wages supplemented by safety net programs, not policies that penalize and stigmatize using benefits.

This wage-boosting effect is not universal among all public income support programs. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), for example, pays more as workers supply more hours to the paid labor market. This boost to labor supply puts some downward pressure on market wages and can lead to some of the EITC benefits bypassing workers and being captured by employers (unless it is complemented by strong minimum wages.)

Making workers who receive safety net benefits more expensive will reduce demand for them

If you make workers who receive safety net benefits more expensive for employers to keep on payroll, then you increase the incentive for these employers to hire fewer of them or offer them lower wages.

Supporters of EAFs could argue this logic could be employed against any effort that made workers more expensive, like minimum wages. But minimum wages apply to all workers, and employers by definition cannot lower wages to absorb the higher costs minimum wages impose. Fully substituting away from workers whose pay has been lifted by minimum wages and toward other inputs essentially means employers would have to make costly investments in plant, capital, equipment, and processes.

Conversely, only a small fraction of workers receives safety net benefits. Absent binding minimum wages, employers can lower their market-based pay to recoup the EAFs (at least until they run into the relevant minimum wage in the labor market.) Trying to substitute away from workers who receive safety net benefits toward workers who are less likely to receive these benefits is more doable for employers than substituting away from all lower-wage labor.

These employer efforts to figure out who on their payroll is likely to trigger an EAF could lead to collateral damage. Workers from groups that are more likely to receive safety net benefits might be discriminated against across-the-board, regardless of whether or not they are actually enrolled in Medicaid or SNAP. Basically, EAFs mean that populations who are more likely to use benefits—like low-income single moms—would face even greater barriers in the labor market. Workers of color are also overrepresented among the families who use SNAP and Medicaid.

Further, the direct benefits of broad-based minimum wages to workers are large—all low-wage workers get a raise if their pay was lower than the new minimum. The direct benefits to any worker from an EAF is nonexistent—their pay does not rise, and they are not more likely to receive employer benefits.

The indirect benefits of EAFs are simply the revenue they raise, and if this revenue can be raised in less costly ways, then EAFs are not optimal.

EAFs are a large tax on a small base

Workers who receive Medicaid benefits constitute roughly 10% of the overall workforce (and their share of total hours is significantly less than this). This is a relatively small base for a tax. But the size of proposed EAFs is often quite large, sometimes as large as the average Medicaid benefit. This benefit can reach more than $9,000 annually in many states. For a full-time, year-round worker making $15 an hour, this constitutes a tax on employers equivalent to 30% of that worker’s entire earnings.

Large taxes on small bases often lead to behavioral responses that erode the revenue gained from the tax. The large value of the tax incentivizes this avoidance behavior, and the small base allows substitution away from workers who trigger the tax. This means that EAFs would raise—at best—a highly uncertain amount of revenue and could well end up raising small amounts.

Sometimes, behavioral responses to taxes that reduce the revenue they raise are socially useful. For example, when cigarette taxes lead to reduced smoking or even when workers facing higher taxes are able to voluntarily substitute more leisure for work. But the behavioral response to EAFs that lowers the revenue gained from them also directly inflicts harm on low-wage workers.

There are better alternatives for the policy goals of EAFs

The recent pushes to use EAFs come from very good impulses: the desire to force employers to pay more and stop defecting on the social contract, and the desire to raise revenue so that states can buffer their residents from the terrible coming effects of the OBBB.

But there are better alternatives to achieve these goals. To raise wages, higher minimum wages are an obvious first step. A second step is policy changes that better enable willing workers to form unions and bargain collectively, even in the face of steep employer resistance. Policymaker inaction has largely destroyed the fundamental right of association in much of the U.S. labor market. Reversing this would, in the long run, solve many of the problems of employer behavior that EAFs are trying to target.

There are also better sources to raise reliable revenue to buffer residents from the OBBB’s steep cuts. If the desired target for these revenue increases is employers, higher corporate income taxes or higher employer-side payroll taxes (for all workers) could be used. Another revenue source specifically targeted at low-road employers could be increasing penalties for firms based on the number of their employees who are not covered by employer-sponsored health insurance through the workplace. This is not a huge tax base, but it is by definition larger than just employers with workers receiving Medicaid, as it would also include workers with no coverage at all. Further, this tax would incentivize the provision of ESI to more workers, a good thing in itself.

While acknowledging that these legislative achievements led to “some very wonderful things,” President Trump recently mischaracterized this historic period as one in which white people “were very badly treated” amid “reverse discrimination.” The president’s unfounded remarks explain why this administration has directly attacked more than half a century of progress toward racial and economic justice. 

Here are six ways the Trump-Vance administration worked to undermine Dr. King’s legacy and curtail economic justice for people of color in 2025:

1. Making it easier for employers to discriminate by undermining the effectiveness of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for historically marginalized workers, and by gutting the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). 
2. Hindering equal access to education by dismantling the Department of Education and pushing policies that could limit diversity in higher education, a critical pathway to economic mobility.
3. Effectively eliminating the Minority Business Development Agency, the only economic development agency created to help minority-owned businesses overcome social, economic, and legal discrimination.
4. Cutting spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) amid persistently high rates of poverty for children of color and rising food insecurity.
5. Slashing funding for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), programs that disproportionately help families and children of color access health care.
6. Undermining health equity through massive cuts to the country’s public health infrastructure, setting the stage for the next health crisis.

The emboldened assertion of white supremacy in our political economy demands a renewed commitment to Dr. King’s legacy of racial and economic justice. In a 1966 essay, Dr. King described economic justice and security as rightful aims in the transition from equality to opportunity. Contrary to Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of pervasive discrimination against white people, both equality and opportunity continue to elude people of color at far greater rates as evidenced by disparate and suboptimal outcomes in employment, earnings, wealth, and even health. Moreover, none of those indicators suggest that white people have been disadvantaged by civil rights enforcement. The immortal words of Coretta Scott King capture the true spirit and impact of the civil rights era and expose Trump’s error and hypocrisy: “Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.”

The relentless attack of the Trump-Vance administration on basic needs programs, access to data, and economic equity will harm the well-being of Native families and children even more. This is evident when we examine the impact of the administration’s cuts to vital programs like Medicaid and SNAP. The ongoing government shutdown threatens to further exacerbate the gaps in the provision of quality services that Native communities rely on for their health and nutritional needs.

Poverty continues to disadvantage AIAN children and their families

More than 1 in 6 (16.6%) AIAN children continued to live under the poverty line last year. This figure has remained statistically unchanged since 2022 (see Figure A) and is much higher than it was in 2021 when fewer than 1 in 10 AIAN children wrestled with poverty. The big difference in the numbers from 2021 and 2022 was due to pandemic relief efforts like the enhanced Child Tax Credit (CTC), which helped thousands of AIAN families with children meet their basic needs and avoid material shortcomings. But these gains for AIAN families and children were short lived. By 2022, AIAN child poverty rates climbed again, more than doubling after the expiration of the expanded social safety programs.

The situation of these economically vulnerable families and children has not changed since then and is only likely to deteriorate further with the historic cuts to basic needs programs (like Medicaid and SNAP) that the Trump-Vance administration passed this year. These cuts will disproportionately harm economically vulnerable families of color, such as AIAN families who are more likely than their peers to have a parent or child with a disability and who are still recovering from the impact of the last two recessions.

Figure A

Native families are more likely to suffer food insecurity than their peers

Early this year, we wrote about the rising threat of food insecurity for families of color. The persistent experience of AIAN families with poverty leaves them disproportionately affected by these concerns surrounding their ability to meet the nutritional needs of their household. Between 2016 and 2021, for example, AIAN households recorded a much higher prevalence of food insecurity relative to other groups (see Figure B). During this period, nearly 1 in 4 (23.3%) AIAN families struggled with food insecurity, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 (8%) white households.

Figure B

The situation of AIAN parents is even worse. During the six-year period referenced, more than 1 in 4 AIAN households with children under 18 (27.8%) and families with children under 6 (27.4%) did not feel secure in their ability to provide their families with an adequate and balanced diet. Irrespective of the characteristics of the household, AIAN families are significantly more likely than all families to struggle with food insecurity.

This disadvantage will likely compound in the years ahead as the Trump-Vance administration cuts funding for the Department of Agriculture (USDA), further restricts eligibility for programs like SNAP, and limits public access to crucial data about hunger. This year, for example, Trump’s USDA canceled the country’s leading survey that helps us understand the magnitude and severity of hunger and food insecurity in the U.S., on the grounds that it was “redundant” and “politicized.”

Lack of access to health insurance leaves Native communities disproportionately vulnerable to an early death

The well-being of Native communities is also threatened by lack of access to health insurance. Relative to peers, AIAN individuals suffer the highest uninsured rate in the U.S. Nearly 1 in 5 (18.9%) AIAN individuals (amounting to more than half a million people) lacked access to health insurance last year (see Figure C). While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) helped reduce the uninsured rate for AIAN individuals (nearly 3 in 10 AIAN individuals lacked health insurance in 2010), disparities in access have persisted over the years. Compared with their non-Hispanic white peers, AIAN people have been more than twice as likely to lack access to health insurance in just the last decade. These inequities also translate into disparities in life expectancy. AIAN men and women, for example, record a lower life expectancy at birth than their peers. Trump’s attacks on public health agencies, their personnel, research infrastructure, and programs for the needy threaten to exacerbate these disparities for years to come. 

Figure C

The Trump-Vance administration has weakened the agencies and programs that help the U.S. meet its obligations to Native communities

In less than a year, the Trump-Vance administration has weakened every aspect of the U.S. social safety net that helps AIAN families and children escape poverty, hunger, and disease. Trump began his second term by cutting staffing and funding for public health agencies and programs. By April 2025, the administration had reduced the Department of Health and Humans Service by more than 20%. Trump’s attack on equity also targeted workplace safety regulations and the broader research infrastructure for public health that works to identify and address the structural barriers that yield and widen racial and ethnic disparities in health. 

To top this off, Trump’s most significant legislative achievement this year delivered historic cuts to health programs (like Medicaid and CHIP) that are estimated to strip 10 million people of their health insurance coverage by 2034. More than 1 million AIAN individuals rely on Medicaid and CHIP. While AIAN individuals will be exempt from the new Medicaid work requirements, public health experts have warned that cuts to the program can widen gaps in tribal health services and disparities that already exist due to chronic federal underfunding of AIAN communities.

Trump’s major legislative achievement this year also weakened SNAP, the country’s most important nutritional assistance program. In FY 2023, more than 500,000 AIAN households relied on SNAP to meet their nutritional needs and avoid deeper economic insecurity. Trump’s reconciliation legislation from this summer is estimated to impact the benefits of millions of SNAP recipients. While pre-existing work requirements exemptions partially mitigate the harmful impact of Trump’s law on AIAN individuals, the phasing out of culturally relevant initiatives (such as SNAP-Ed) and cuts to the broader program weaken an important vehicle through which the U.S. delivers its obligations to Native communities.

In addition, beginning on November 1 of this year, the Trump-Vance administration has been denying access to SNAP benefits to millions of people due to the administration’s unwillingness to use SNAP’s contingency reserve funds during the government shutdown. In doing so, the administration is removing a critical safety net for Native American tribes and for over 1 in 5 Native American households more broadly.

States with some of the largest Native American populations are also states with higher overall population shares participating in SNAP. Oklahoma and New Mexico have some of the highest Native populations and more than 16% of their population receive SNAP benefits. Native Americans living in Oklahoma, on reservations, and other designated areas may be able to continue to receive food assistance through the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). However, that program may face constraints due to additional demand and is not accessible for many Native people who do not live near federally recognized tribes that participate in FDPIR.

With every step this year, the administration has weakened the capacity of the federal government to meet the needs of Native communities. And families and children are being hurt in the process because they are disproportionately vulnerable to costly disparities in poverty, food insecurity, and health care access.

These draconian cuts, along with the troubling momentum to add even more stringent work requirements to benefits like SNAP and Medicaid, will leave economically vulnerable families who depend on these support systems exposed to even more hardship during a time of unprecedented economic mismanagement, chaos, and uncertainty.

SNAP supplements low-income families’ grocery budget to help them access essential and healthy foods. In December 2024, SNAP had more than 42 million participants, with an average monthly benefit per person of approximately $189. Nearly eight in 10 (79%) households participating in SNAP include at least one member who is a child, an elderly adult, or a person with a disability. SNAP benefits help these families avoid hunger and falling deeper into economic insecurity and poverty.  

Cuts to SNAP will disproportionately harm families of color

More than 22 million households participated in SNAP by the end of last year. In between 2019 and 2023, more than one in 10 (11.8%) households participated in the program. While many of these families (43.1%) are non-Hispanic white,1 families of color are more likely to rely on SNAP benefits to supplement their food budget (see Figure A). More than one in five Black, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN), and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (NHPI) households relied on SNAP to meet their nutritional needs in the 2019–2023 period. These families, along with Hispanic households, are more than twice as likely to participate in SNAP than their non-Hispanic white peers, leaving them particularly vulnerable to SNAP benefits cuts or unhelpful work requirements that make it harder to receive or keep this important source of support.  

Figure A

SNAP benefits keep millions of children and people of color out of poverty each year

The country’s largest nutritional assistance program does more than help families put food on the table. SNAP is one of the country’s most effective poverty alleviation programs. In 2023 alone, SNAP kept more than three million people out of poverty, among which nearly two in five (39.3%) were children.

The poverty reduction success of SNAP also helps bridge racial and ethnic disparities. More than two-thirds of the individuals that SNAP helped lift out of poverty in 2023 were people of color (see Figure B below). More than two million people of color, including over 800,000 Black and over 900,000 Hispanic people, avoided poverty thanks to the support provided by SNAP.  

Figure B

In addition to helping low-income families cover their grocery bills, SNAP helps connect families with other sources of support. For example, SNAP helps families and children in need qualify for additional support via the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). While WIC supports pregnant women, infants, and children under the age of five who face nutritional risks, NSLP provides reduced-cost or free lunches to low-income children in public and non-profit private schools.

As in the case of SNAP, the support of both WIC and NSLP extends beyond nutritional assistance. Both programs combined helped lift more than one million people out of poverty in 2023, with people of color accounting for more than three-quarters (77.3%) of these individuals. Republican attacks on the USDA budget will restrict access to these life-saving resources at home and in school.

Families and children of color need expanded SNAP benefits—not cuts—to avoid rising food insecurity

Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration are looking to slash spending on nutritional assistance and to restrict access to benefits despite rising food insecurity since 2021. In 2023, the latest year for which estimates are available, 18 million households (13.5%) were unable to afford enough food to meet the needs of all their members at some point that year. This latest figure is higher than the 10.0% of families that experienced similar hardship in 2021. Hidden in these overall statistics is the disproportionate impact of food insecurity borne by families of color.

In 2023, more than one in five Black (23.3%) and Hispanic (21.9%) households experienced food insecurity (see Figure C). These families were twice as likely as their non-Hispanic white peers (9.9%) to experience food insecurity that year. Food insecurity reached a low point for Black and Hispanic households in 2019, but these families have struggled to hold on to the periods of progress since 2001, given the impact of the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rising food prices caused by the pandemic.

Figure C

We see similar outcomes for the subset of households with children. While households of color with children have experienced a significant reduction in food insecurity since the height of the Great Recession, much of this progress has eroded. For Hispanic households with children, the prevalence of food insecurity has nearly doubled, rising from the low of 7.8% in 2019 to 14.0% in 2023 (see Figure D). While the rise in food insecurity has been a little more muted for Black households with children since 2015, both Black and Hispanic households with children remained more than twice as likely to experience food insecurity as their non-Hispanic peers in 2023.

Figure D

Even more families will need SNAP because of Trump’s economic mismanagement

It is clear that SNAP and other nutritional assistance programs under the USDA help families and children avoid poverty and food insecurity. SNAP benefits, for example, reduce the likelihood of being food insecure by about 30%. The positive link between improved food security and SNAP applies across different types of households, including those with children. SNAP is also particularly responsive to changing economic conditions. Because SNAP benefits are means-tested, the program supports even more individuals and households in need during economic downturns; an increase in the unemployment rate of 1 percentage point, for example, is associated with an additional two to three million additional participants in the program.

Because SNAP spending rises as private activity slows during recessions, the program is a particularly effective “automatic stabilizer,” keeping recessions shorter and less severe than they would otherwise be. Each additional dollar in SNAP benefits disbursed during periods of overall economic slack, for example, increases overall spending in the economy by $1.54. During an economic contraction, every $1 billion spent on SNAP generates more than 10,000 jobs.

If Republicans in Congress and President Trump were serious about lifting millions of people out of poverty, helping people address the cost of living and reduce food insecurity, and helping our economy rebound from crises, they would strengthen SNAP and other social safety net programs—not gut them. Cutting SNAP benefits or tightening the rules to discourage more people from accessing them will only expose more families to food insecurity. These concerns are especially relevant as the prospects of slower economic growth and higher food prices rise in the face of chaotic and harmful policies ushered by the Trump administration. The social safety net offered by programs like SNAP is essential to mitigating the economic pain that looms ahead.

1. White households account for 43.1% of SNAP participating households. The share of white families participating in SNAP relative to the population of white families in the United States is 7.9%, as shown in Figure A.

Set at an adequate level, the minimum wage is one of the strongest policy tools for improving the economic security of low-wage workers, and an effective tool at lowering poverty. Yet instead of addressing this massive hole in our economy’s social safety net by working to raise the minimum wage, congressional Republicans are pushing policies like imposing work requirements on safety net programs and cutting Medicaid. Supporters of these proposals characterize them as tools to incentivize work and protect the dignity of work, but these policies fail to account for the nature of low-wage work in our economy. Instead, they stand to deepen hardship for low-income workers with no economic upside for working people or the larger economy.

The minimum wage and the federal poverty line

When the minimum wage was created as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the policy was intended to protect the nation from “the evils and dangers resulting from wages too low to buy the bare necessities of life.”1 The federal wage floor is clearly not fulfilling this objective anymore because of a historically long period of inaction by Congress. The last time Congress increased the federal minimum wage was in July 2009, meaning that as prices have risen over the last 15 years, the value of the minimum wage has fallen by 30%. Figure A shows how annual earnings for a full-time minimum wage worker fall short of the poverty line for a household of any size.

Figure A

This comparison severely understates the economic vulnerability of these workers and their families. This is because the federal poverty guidelines—which are used at the federal, state, and local level to determine eligibility for public programs like Medicaid and SNAP—are informed by the Census Bureau’s official poverty measure (OPM), a reductionist measure of poverty. The OPM relies solely on a multiple of the current cost of the minimum food diet from 1963 to calculate the poverty line and identify the poor. The Census also publishes a more expansive measure of poverty known as the supplemental poverty measure (SPM), which accounts for the cost of a broader basket of items including food, clothing, shelter, utilities, internet and telephone, but this latter measure does not inform the poverty line used to determine eligibility for public programs.

As Figure B demonstrates, the share of workers in poverty is significantly higher when we rely on the SPM instead. By this measure, more than 10 million workers (7.0%) between the ages of 18 and 64 failed to earn enough to avoid economic deprivation in 2023, the latest year for which these statistics are available, whereas the OPM captured only 4.5% of all workers.

Figure B

The discrepancy between the federal minimum wage and the real experience of workers throughout the country has led 30 states and Washington, D.C., to increase their minimum wage above the federal level. In the 20 states still using the federal minimum, 11.8 million workers earn less than $17 per hour, more than 1 in 5 workers in those states. Those states are disproportionately located in the South. The stagnation of the federal minimum wage allows Southern policymakers to maintain low wages in their economies. Southern workers have lower earnings even when adjusting for cost-of-living differences between regions. In part due to wage-suppressing policies like a low-minimum wage, Southern workers experience greater poverty than those in other regions.

Increasing the minimum wage boosts earnings and reduces poverty

The federal minimum wage is a powerful tool in fighting poverty in the U.S. The best economic research has consistently shown that increasing the minimum wage lifts earnings for low-wage workers, with little to no impact on employment. Research shows that increasing the minimum wage decreases poverty by increasing the incomes of low-income families, even accounting for decreases in public benefits as families earn more from higher wages. In analysis of legislation introduced in 2021 to gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, EPI concluded that the policy would lift between 1.8 to 3.7 million individuals out of poverty, including up to 1.3 million children. 

Despite persistent opposition from the business lobby and obstruction from conservative policymakers, raising the minimum wage remains popular among the public, and some legislators keep raising the call for federal action on this issue. Recently, members of Congress led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) once again reintroduced the Raise the Wage Act, which would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour. This would raise wages for more than 22.2 million workers, 4.2 million of whom live in households below the poverty line.

By contrast, Republican policies will make it harder for workers to escape poverty

While the minimum wage has been left to wither, Republican budget proposals in 2025 will either erode other elements of the social safety net or make them much harder to access. Republicans seek to cut Medicaid and ratchet up work requirements on both Medicaid and SNAP.2 This will harm low-income workers and their families, as these social programs help improve the living standards of millions of workers who don’t earn enough to avoid economic hardship. In 2023 alone, social programs that rely on the poverty guidelines kept more than 7 million individuals out of poverty.3 

Republicans have framed cutting benefits and expanding work requirements as a way to encourage people to work. The justification for these proposals is that generous Medicaid and SNAP benefits should be pared back because they encourage recipients to depend on government assistance instead of working. This seems to overlook the fact that two-thirds of non-elderly Medicaid enrollees and more than 85% of working-age adults who receive SNAP do work.

This conservative philosophy is an old idea that is deeply wedded to racist stereotypes about Black families being users of welfare programs. However, evaluating these proposals on their economic merits shows that they will increase hardship for low-wage Americans without creating economic benefit. Medicaid cuts at the levels proposed by Republicans would reduce incomes of low-wage families significantly, including a 7.4% reduction in income for families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution. Medicaid is also a vital investment in low-income children, who grow up healthier and with better education and income outcomes because of the Medicaid support they receive. Research suggests that Medicaid pays for itself through this investment in poor children. Cutting Medicaid will likely reduce these children’s educational achievement and wages earned over their lifetimes.

Similarly, research shows that adding work requirements to benefit programs is a punitive choice with no upside. Studies of work requirements on Medicaid and SNAP find little to no increase in employment outcomes in places where the policies have been implemented. What these policies do achieve is to make it harder for individuals to access the benefits they are eligible for.

A reason why work requirements are ineffective is that they do not account for the precarious nature of low-wage work. Unpredictable scheduling practices are pervasive in low-wage jobs, including cancelled shifts and short notice changes to shift schedules. Low-wage workers also frequently change jobs in an effort to find better-paying work. The scheduling unpredictability and level of turnover in many low-wage jobs can make it difficult for workers to fulfill the consistent work-hour requirements needed to satisfy work requirement policies. Work requirements effectively act as cuts to existing beneficiaries and limit new participants who have little control over the labor market conditions associated with low-wage work.

Conclusion

The minimum wage is a powerful tool for increasing the economic security of low-wage workers. Yet Republican lawmakers have repeatedly denied increases in the federal minimum wage and are now pursuing a tax and budget plan that would cut Medicaid and limit access to safety net programs to finance tax cuts for the richest Americans. If it goes into effect, the combination of tax cuts and Medicaid cuts would effectively lower incomes for workers in the bottom 40% of the income distribution while boosting incomes for the top 1%. These cuts are also likely to harm people and children of color, who are disproportionately more likely to rely on Medicaid. 

If lawmakers were serious about lifting families out of poverty and enabling them to fully participate in the labor force, they would be enacting policies to raise wages and expand access to good-paying jobs. By keeping wages low and making it more challenging to access benefits, lawmakers are seeking to deprive low-income households of the resources they need to thrive.

1. S. Rep. No. 884 (75th Cong., 1st Sess.), p. 4

2. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program) is a crucial safety net program providing benefits so that low-income people in the United States can purchase food. SNAP has work requirements for most beneficiaries ages 16–59 who are able to work. In addition, there are more stringent work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs).

3. These individuals lived in households that qualified for SNAP benefits, housing subsidies, free or reduced-priced school meals, or cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

In reality, work requirements have nothing to do with getting people into the workforce. While increasing labor force participation and helping people obtain the dignity of work are important goals, people don’t actually need encouragement to do this. The incentive to work is already there: It gives people sufficient income to not live in grinding poverty. People with income low enough to qualify for social safety net benefits need support from policymakers to access programs like Medicaid and SNAP, not new rounds of bureaucratic paper pushing, which is what work requirements mainly achieve.

In a new report, I reviewed the research on work requirements and found that almost none of the alleged employment benefits of ratcheting up work requirements are economically significant. Several studies (here, here, and here) have causally estimated the impact of work requirements on SNAP, the food stamp program for low-income adults, and found no increase in employment following more stringent work requirements policies. With respect to Medicaid, two phone surveys in Arkansas following the 2017 introduction of work requirements found no discernible change in employment. This was in part because an estimated 38%–48% of recipients newly subject to work requirements were already working at the 20 hours per week threshold.

If Mr. Vought was more serious about improving access to work, he would be clear-eyed about the core barriers to work that low-income workers have traditionally faced: weak macroeconomic conditions, the volatile nature of low-wage work, and other barriers to work like caregiving responsibilities.

With respect to macroeconomic conditions, while today’s labor market is extremely strong, this has not been the norm nor is it something we can assume will persist in the future. The United States has spent far too much time with excess unemployment rates in recent decades. This macroeconomic failure is the responsibility of policymakers—individual workers have little control over the macroeconomic situation, yet it determines whether they are able to find regular work at sustaining wages. Employment rates for low-income adults are highly cyclical, rising when the macroeconomic environment is more favorable and overall unemployment rates fall, and falling when overall unemployment rises due to slack job markets. This is a key signal that these workers mostly do not need “encouragement” or “incentives” to work—they need opportunities. When opportunities arise in the form of strong labor markets, these workers flock to them.

In my analysis, I explored the association between number of hours worked for low-income adults and the unemployment rate between 1979 and 2019 to see how excess unemployment was related to work time. Figure A shows that as unemployment increases, the number of available jobs in a given local labor market becomes scarce and workers work fewer hours, suggesting that the jobs low-income adults take are much more tied to aggregate labor market health than to work requirements.

Figure A

Further, jobs available to low-income adults often pay low wages and have scheduling practices (such as little advance notice or time-varying schedules), which decrease the regularity and predictability of work time and can make it hard for workers to maintain consistent work hours needed to satisfy the requirements (by either working 80 hours per month or 20 hours per week). A 2014 study showed that disproportionately large share of workers in low-wage jobs (66% of janitors and housekeepers, 90% of food service workers, 87% of retail workers, and 71% of home care workers) reported their hours varied within the last month, highlighting the pervasiveness of such practices.  

Finally, given that many low-income workers on programs like SNAP and Medicaid have caregiving duties, policies that improve access to care would do much more to increase employment than simply mandating workers to work more. Studies show that when barriers to care are reduced or policies like paid sick leave are passed, women experience economically meaningful increases in their employment. This suggests that if the Trump administration wants to get serious about improving labor market outcomes for low-income adults, policies to support caregiving would be more effective than work requirements at achieving this goal.

In the end, work requirements function as reporting requirements for all recipients, making the process more onerous and burdensome. All recipients, including people with documented disabilities getting Medicaid would have to jump through additional bureaucratic hoops to prove that they’re exempted from work requirements, further risking lapsing or losing their coverage. These burdensome practices and paperwork ultimately lead people to withdraw from programs (see examples for SNAP and Medicaid).

Mr. Vought’s view that work requirements would increase labor force participation and employment is flawed and reflects inaccurate beliefs (or just lack of concern) about the barriers to work for low-income adults.  My analysis shows that there are still plenty of barriers that keep low-income adults out of the workforce, but insufficient incentives are not one of them. When labor market conditions are right, low-income workers do work and earn more than they do when unemployment is high, suggesting that macroeconomic policy has more to do with low-income adults’ ability to work than any work requirement-imposed threat to take away their health care or nutrition assistance. If policymakers were serious about creating opportunities to work, they would pass policies like secure scheduling laws and affordable care policies that would meaningfully reduce barriers low-income adults face in gaining employment.

Introduction

In recent years, Republicans in Congress have embraced proposals to ratchet up work requirements as conditions for the receipt of some federal government benefits. These proposals are clearly trying to exploit a vague, but pervasive, sense that some recipients of public support are gaming the system to get benefits that they do not need, as they could be earning money in the labor market to support themselves instead.1 Essentially, the push to increase work requirements rests on a belief that the prime barrier stopping these beneficiaries from supporting themselves solely through employment is a lack of motivation—since public benefits provide too comfortable a living, and beneficiaries lack the incentive to find paid employment.

However, a careful assessment of the current state of public benefit programs demonstrates that almost none of the alleged benefits of ratcheting up work requirements are economically significant, but that the potential costs of doing this could be large and fall on the most economically vulnerable. The most targeted programs for more stringent work requirements are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, popularly referred to as food stamps) and Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people. EPI has surveyed the research literature on work requirements and how they interact with these two programs in particular, and we find that the existing safety net is too stingy and tilts too hard toward making benefits difficult to access. Tightening eligibility by increasing work requirements for these programs will make this problem even worse with no tangible benefit in the form of higher levels of employment among low-income adults.

Key findings:

• SNAP and Medicaid provide in-kind benefits for food assistance and health care to low-income families. These in-kind benefits are not generous enough to support a decent standard of living, and they provide no help with other expenses families have. In short, the incentive for adults to secure steady work at decent pay remains utterly enormous: It is the difference between living in profound material hardship versus having a more comfortable existence.
• Large numbers of beneficiaries of SNAP and Medicaid are children, retirees, or people with disabilities that prevent them from working. While most variants of work requirements seem to only apply to able-bodied adults without dependents or documented disabilities (ABAWDs), the administrative burden associated with these requirements might spill over and reduce take-up (and hence, incomes) for other beneficiaries.
• The primary barrier to work for low-income adults who want steady hours of employment is the state of the macroeconomy—conditions that are far beyond their control. The history of work requirements often casts them as an effort to break a “culture” of nonwork among some communities, with the implicit argument being that many beneficiaries will choose not to work even when steady jobs with decent pay are readily available. The evidence strongly contests this: Low-income adults’ employment surges when overall unemployment is low, and they work more hours and are able to earn more as a result. When unemployment is high, however, low-income adults are often the first to lose their jobs and see large hour declines as well.
• Too many jobs available to adults in low-income families are often characterized by irregular and unpredictable scheduling practices, making it hard for workers to plan for and maintain consistent work.
• More stringent work requirements implemented in the past have largely failed to boost work in significant ways because these requirements do not attack the core problems of weak macroeconomic conditions, the volatile nature of low-wage work, and other barriers to work like caregiving responsibilities.
• Many of the programs that some people might be excluded from by work requirements can meaningfully be thought of as work supports. Some public benefit programs—particularly Medicaid and SNAP—serve as human capital investments that can boost long-run earnings and employment prospects.

In the end, we suspect much public support for enhanced work requirements reflects imprecise thinking about the true costs and benefits of implementing them in the messy world of low-wage work in the United States. Other support might stem from the ethical decision that it’s worse for society to have even a tiny number of “undeserving” people receive public support than it is to have thousands of deserving families shut out of needed benefits because of the onerous administrative burden associated with tightened work requirements. But this is not an ethical decision we share. We think a decent, compassionate welfare state should err on the side of protectiveness rather than exclusion—but this trade-off is the hinge of political decisions around ratcheting up administrative reporting on work requirements.

What are work requirements, and what problem are they supposed to solve?

Work requirements are policies that mandate individuals work and administratively document a certain number of hours as a condition to receive benefits like SNAP and Medicaid. At a broad level, work requirements don’t seem to belong with welfare-state programs like SNAP and Medicaid. These programs were historically established precisely to provide a floor to living standards for people who cannot support themselves through earnings from the labor market. This includes children, the elderly, students, adults with disabilities or primary caregiving responsibilities, or those seeking work who cannot find it.

The implicit claim made by many advocating for strict work requirements on public support programs is that benefits have become too easy to obtain (even for those who could find paid work) and too generous relative to labor market earnings. The claim continues that this excess generosity has incentivized a portion of the population to game the system by choosing to live on public benefits rather than work. The argument, hence, claims that by making it harder for this group to obtain benefits, their incentive to work will be increased, and this will raise employment rates. In practice, existing work requirements are mainly aimed at adults without dependents or documented disabilities—a group that proponents of work requirements think could be working if only the public support systems were not so generous relative to paid employment. 

Before moving on to the flawed assumptions this view makes about the population that work requirements apply to, it is worth noting that there is almost no cash assistance that is unconditional on work and available to that population. Most current policy debates about work requirements center on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid. These programs provide in-kind benefits to purchase food and health insurance to cover medical bills if one needs health care. In short, there is no prospect at all of somebody achieving a remotely comfortable living standard by forgoing work and relying exclusively on the benefits provided by these programs. People need much more than food and health care to live a decent life.

Besides the logical flaw that millions of Americans are voluntarily choosing to not work because public benefits offer such a comfortable alternative, the advocacy of tighter work requirements often makes several flawed assumptions about the labor market trade-offs that individuals affected by work requirements face (often referred to as ABAWDs, short for able-bodied adults without dependents or documented disabilities). Supporters of stricter work requirements assume that existing social safety net benefits are easy to access and provide a generous-enough living standard to be a reasonable substitute for steady work. In addition, these supporters assume that good-paying, steady jobs are readily available and a viable alternative to living on public benefits. This is often false. Our analysis shows that low-wage labor markets in the United States do not readily provide enough hours or wage and salary income high enough to guarantee a minimally decent life for workers. Further, it assumes that ABAWDs have no other health issues or caregiving responsibilities that would prevent them from finding steady work.

This view doesn’t square with reality, both with respect to the trade-offs low-income families face between work and nonwork and the labor market experiences of people who would be affected by work requirements (many of whom already seek work regularly and take it when it’s available). In this report, we document the economic claims (some implicit, some explicit) made by policymakers who support taking away benefits from individuals who fail to meet work reporting requirements, and we show why these claims don’t reflect the reality of low-wage labor markets and the poor and near-poor families who must try to carve out a living from them. We further document the evidence of the impacts of work requirements on individuals and communities. The evidence shows the real harms work requirements can cause and suggests that ratcheting up their stringency would greatly amplify these harms.

Adults without dependents or documented disabilities are most likely to be targeted for work requirements

Today’s work requirements generally target non-elderly adults without documented disabilities who do not have dependents living in the home, a group that work-requirement advocates claim should be able to find steady and income-sustaining work. These ABAWDs make up one-third of the U.S. population (Bauer, Hardy, and Howard 2024). ABAWDs that have incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty line (FPL) are 8.2% of the total population, which would put them in income ranges to be eligible for social safety net programs like SNAP and Medicaid (Bauer, Hardy, and Howard 2024). Table 1 compares the demographic and safety net profile of all adults ages 18 to 59, adults who are SNAP and Medicaid users, and low-income ABAWDs. Compared with all adults, those receiving SNAP and Medicaid are disproportionately likely to be women and nonwhite. They are also less likely to have a college education—only 15% of adults on SNAP and Medicaid have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Finally, adults on SNAP and Medicaid are much more likely to have an elderly person in the household. This population looks very similar to the ABAWD population, in which nearly 50% of low-income ABAWDs are women, and a disproportionate share are Black and Hispanic (18% and 23%, respectively), relative to all adults. More than half of low-income ABAWDs have a high school diploma or less.

Table 1

While ABAWDs might not have documented disabilities that result in benefit receipt or have dependent children living at home full-time, they often experience health challenges and must take on some caregiving duties, each of which could provide a genuine barrier to finding steady work. We find that 21% reported having a disability that affects their ability to find and sustain work, suggesting that adults with genuine health barriers are being swept up in overly stringent work requirements. One potential outcome from a push to ratchet up work requirements for adults with disabilities is increased time spent doing administrative paperwork to more precisely define their health challenges.

Table 1 also shows that 13.8% of ABAWDs live with an adult over the age of 65 in their household, suggesting that many are potential caregivers in some form and likely have caregiving responsibilities beyond what is captured on paper. A recent Brookings Institution report corroborates this finding, showing that nearly 40% of low-income ABAWDs are parents, and 5% are noncustodial parents to children under the age of 21 (Bauer, Hardy, and Howard 2024). While most variants of work requirements seem to only apply to ABAWDs and not all SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries, given how similar the overall populations are, and the fact that many SNAP and Medicaid adult users often have children, the administrative burden associated with these requirements might spill over beyond ABAWDs alone and reduce take-up (and hence incomes) for these other beneficiaries. Adding more work requirements will create confusion and more paperwork for all adults who receive SNAP and Medicaid, not just ABAWDs, the group most likely to have work requirements levied on them.

The social safety net offers minimal support to low-income ABAWDs

Despite ABAWDs having health challenges and caregiving responsibilities that make participation in the labor market difficult, our current social safety net does very little to support these adults. ABAWDs receive a very small share of in-kind income from benefits, and these benefits come with strings attached. In the case of food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, ABAWDs who are not homeless or veterans must work 80 hours per month to receive SNAP benefits or lose these benefits if they don’t meet the hours-worked criteria for three months in a row (USDA 2024). In the case of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), adults without dependents receive an average annual benefit of $295, one-tenth of what families with children get (Crandall-Hollick, Falk, and Boyle 2023).

To get a sense for how much support ABAWDs receive from the government, researchers compared the poverty rate of ABAWDs with comparable adults with children before and after social safety net transfers (Gornick et al. 2024). Between 2016 and 2019, the pre-tax, pre-transfer poverty rate for nondisabled childless adults was 12.7%, and after taxes and transfers, the poverty rate for this group was only 2.4 percentage points lower (10.3%). By contrast, for nondisabled adults with children, social assistance programs reduced the incidence of poverty for this group by 5.4 percentage points—more than twice as much as that of childless adults. This lack of social safety net support for nondisabled, childless adults is unique to the U.S. Further, the U.S. ranked last in its ability to reduce poverty for nondisabled, childless adults—reducing poverty for this group by only 19% compared with 35%–66% for Canada, the UK, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, and the Netherlands (Gornick et al. 2024).

With very few safety net programs to support them otherwise, ABAWDs are hence already heavily incentivized to work, so tighter work requirements are not needed to further this incentive. Under the status quo, living standards for ABAWDs are far higher if they are able to find steady, sustaining work.

Low-income adults generally face steep labor market challenges, making it difficult to meet work requirements

With such meager government support, adults without dependents or documented disabilities are clearly motivated to turn toward employment and to work more when possible. Moreover, just because adults with children are so far exempt from some work-requirement proposals, they, too, would benefit from increased employment. If advocates of work requirements were motivated to boost living standards for low-income households through policy, then efforts to boost employment opportunities across all low-income households, not just ABAWDs, would make sense.

The first clear labor market challenge for ABAWDs is one shared by low-income families with children and even by more privileged job seekers—the United States has spent far too much time with excess unemployment rates in recent decades. This excess unemployment rate represents a clear and profound macroeconomic policy failure: the failure to maintain economywide spending at levels that would ensure that employer demand for workers was strong enough to soak up all willing workers in a reasonable amount of time (Bivens and Zipperer 2018). This macroeconomic failure is something no individual worker has control over, yet it is entirely determinative of whether all (or even the vast majority of) potential workers are able to find regular work at sustaining wages.

Advocates for more stringent work requirements gloss over this reality of the labor market. They portray the population affected by work requirements as stubbornly refusing to move into paid employment when it is available—often claiming they are afflicted by a “culture” of nonwork. But when unemployment is high, steady work is often unavailable. Employment rates for low-income adults without dependents (just like work for all adults) is highly cyclical, rising when the macroeconomic environment is more favorable and overall unemployment rates fall, and falling when overall unemployment rises due to slack job markets.

Figure A shows the number of hours worked for adults in the bottom 30th percentile of the household income distribution between 1979 and 2019. As unemployment increases, the number of available jobs in a given local labor market becomes scarce, and workers work fewer hours, suggesting that the jobs low-income adults take are much more tied to aggregate labor market health. Given that more than 80% of workers in this group lack a college degree, these adults are much more likely to work in sectors that don’t require higher levels of education, such as construction or the restaurant industry, which are highly cyclical in nature.

Figure A

Figure B shows a similar pattern for household income from wages. When unemployment is low, income for low-income adults increases, presumably because jobs are less scarce, and workers are able to work more hours. However, as unemployment increases, household income from work declines.

Figure B

By making the incentives faced by ABAWDs the central policy concern that motivates work requirements, rather than the larger macroeconomic environment, advocates for work requirements are not being honest about the real barriers to work.

Low-wage work is precarious, making work time hard to maintain

In addition to work availability being tied to labor market health for low-income ABAWDs, the types of jobs available to this group even in times of general economic health often pay low wages and are precarious in nature. It is difficult for workers to maintain a consistent number of work hours each month when they are scheduled for many hours one week and a few hours the next week, or when their employee classifications shift from full-time, full-year employment to part-time, temporary, and contractor work arrangements (Farber 2008; Kalleberg 2009, 2011, 2012; Kalleberg and Marsden 2013). These employment arrangements and scheduling practices, which are often out of workers’ control, decrease the regularity and predictability of work time and can make it hard for workers to maintain the consistent work-hour requirements needed to satisfy the documentation (by either working 80 hours per month or 20 hours per week). For example, workers with seasonal jobs would only be eligible for benefits during the season that they work but would be unable to access benefits at crucial moments when they’re laid off, even if they have reasonable assurance that they will be reemployed or they are actively seeking employment. Moreover, a disproportionately large share of workers in low-wage jobs (66% of janitors and housekeepers, 90% of food service workers, 87% of retail workers, and 71% of home care workers) reported their hours varied within the last month, which highlights the pervasiveness of such practices (Lambert, Fugiel, and Henly 2014).

Figure C shows the rate at which workers report having variable hours, conditional on working, for workers in the bottom 30% of household labor income and workers in the upper 70%. Workers in low-income households have substantially higher rates of hour variability, with the gap widening during economic downturns and narrowing during periods of labor market health. Critically, research has shown that the rise in hour variability often goes hand in hand with low numbers of work hours, where workers with low income both work the fewest hours during downturns and have the most variable hours (Cai 2023).

Figure C

Hour variability is just one type of scheduling practice that might make it hard for workers to document working a consistent 20 hours per week to fulfill work requirements. Figure D below, reproduced from the Shift Project, highlights the pervasiveness of scheduling practices that make it challenging to rely on a job to provide steady income over time (Zundl et al. 2022). These practices include employers canceling shifts, changing shift times, and giving less than two weeks’ notice for a work schedule to employees. While these trends are just for the service sector, this is an important industry to understand in the context of work requirements since many of the workers in the service sector earn low wages and are eligible for SNAP and Medicaid.

In 2021, around 15% of workers reported having their shifts canceled, and nearly 40% of workers reported working a so-called “clopening” shift (a scheduling practice where managers schedule the same worker to work a closing shift followed by an opening shift the following day). Just over one-third of the service sector reported being scheduled for an on-call shift, and around 60% of workers reported a shift-timing change or were given less than two weeks’ notice of a schedule change (Zundl et al. 2022). Critically, the graphs further show how these conditions persist even in favorable macroeconomic conditions. 

Figure D

These scheduling practices have implications for workers’ ability to have consistently predictable schedules and can have spillover impacts on their ability to hold down jobs altogether. Late notice or on-call shifts, for example, can make it very hard to plan for caregiving duties, and if workers need to use public transit, last-minute notice may cause them to be late or miss their shifts if they can’t catch the right bus. Unsurprisingly, job turnover is high in jobs with these scheduling practices. Figure E shows that workers who have to work on-call shifts have around a 7 percentage point higher rate of job turnover than workers who do not. Similarly, workers who experience scheduling time changes have a higher rate of turnover than workers who do not have employers that change schedules at the last minute. Workers with little schedule notice and workers who experience canceled shifts, similarly, are more likely to experience job turnover than workers with more notice (Choper, Schneider, and Harknett 2021). 

Figure E

Taken together, the available labor market options for ABAWDs present often-overlooked challenges to maintaining steady work. Work is only available under the right macroeconomic conditions, and even then, the conditions of work can prevent workers from maintaining steady hours or employment. The high levels of turnover that occur from workers seeking better work conditions make it nearly impossible to maintain eligibility for income assistance if recipients are required to demonstrate consistent work. 

A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) report corroborates this by showing that half of low-income workers who were subject to Medicaid work requirements would have failed a work-hours test in at least one month over the course of the year (Katch, Wagner, and Aron-Dine 2018). Note, though, that this means that those workers would likely have passed the work-hours test in the eleven other months. Moreover, in occupations in which SNAP or Medicaid beneficiaries are concentrated, unemployment is twice as high as the unemployment rate for typical middle-class occupations (Butcher and Schanzenbach, 2018). Penalizing workers for job conditions beyond their control is yet another way that advocates for work requirements are not being honest about the real intent of work requirements.

Work requirements don’t actually boost employment

The stated goal of work requirements is often to increase work effort, often to 80 hours per month or 20 hours per week for ABAWDs. But the prior section showed that the jobs available to low-income workers generally are not good-quality jobs with dependable hours that enable workers to meet the thresholds to maintain benefits. Moreover, ABAWDs cannot rely on the social safety net for economic security, suggesting that the argument—that changing ABAWDs’ incentives (via work requirements) will bring more people into the workforce and off social safety net programs—is flawed. This flaw is confirmed in academic research: Where work requirements exist, there has been no meaningful increase in employment.

In the past, there have been empirical challenges in causal analysis estimating the impact of work requirements on employment. Described in Gray et al. (2023), participation in programs like SNAP is underreported in most major surveys, making it difficult to gauge any change in participation in response to policy (Meyer, Mittag, and George 2020; Ziliak 2015; Meyer and Mittag 2019). Additionally, not all adults who are eligible for programs like SNAP actually take up the programs, and these underlying preferences driving the take-up decision are unknown to researchers. As a result, estimates of employment based on a policy change on this population might be smaller in magnitude than they would be if we could simply capture adults who were eligible for SNAP and had a preference for using it. Finally, there may be selection bias if researchers limit the study sample to those most likely to be impacted by work requirements. In the context of SNAP, Gray et al. (2023) overcame empirical challenges by using linked administrative data to causally assess the impact of work requirements when they were reinstated after the Great Recession and found that the work requirements had no impact on employment. Others have similarly found no impact of work requirements on employment (Vericker et al. 2023; Stacy, Scherpf, and Jo 2018; Feng 2022; Cook and East 2024).

Studies of the effects of work requirements on Medicaid have yielded similar results. Two phone surveys in Arkansas following the 2017 introduction of work requirements to Medicaid found no discernible change in employment, in part because an estimated 38%–48% of recipients newly subject to work requirements were already working at least 20 hours per week (Sommers et al. 2020). This finding is totally consistent with our general argument here: Low-income adults already have a huge incentive to work but face high external barriers, aside from any internal barrier that might exist such as a lack of motivation. Given this, there is little reason to think that work requirements would meaningfully boost employment.2

By making the process of applying for crucial safety net programs more burdensome, work requirements effectively function like a cut to programs

While work requirements do not reliably increase employment, they do significantly increase the administrative burden and costs of applying for safety net programs. This increased administrative burden, in turn, reduces access and take-up. Prior studies have shown that administrative burdens of all kinds can reduce program enrollment (Cook and East 2024; Deshpande and Li 2019; Finkelstein and Notowidigdo 2019; Gray 2019; Homonoff and Somerville 2021), and increases in work requirements are no exception. 

For adults trying to ascertain if they’re eligible for safety net programs, policies that increase work requirements will lead to increased learning and compliance costs associated with gaining access to these programs (Herd and Moynihan 2018). For example, when new work requirements go into place, adults with limited literacy or who face language barriers may not know about these requirements and lose coverage as a result. Workers may also face hurdles in getting employers to provide enough hours to meet the work requirements and the additional paperwork to verify employment hours per week (Bauer and East 2023).

While some of the reductions in caseloads due to work requirements may truly be because workers can’t satisfy the arbitrary hours threshold, in many cases, the sheer amount of additional administrative burdens levied on adults seeking benefits, and on case workers screening to ensure that work requirements are met, is a major driver in the decline in participation. In the same rigorous academic studies that found minimal employment impacts in response to work requirements for SNAP, researchers found that the new work requirements increased program exits by 64% among incumbent participants, and for participants newly subject to work requirements, program participation was reduced by 53% (Gray et al. 2023). In response to Medicaid’s work requirements in Arkansas, researchers documented a decline in Medicaid coverage by 13.2 percentage points, while the share of the uninsured increased by 7.1 percentage points (Sommers et al. 2019).

The consequences of losing access to SNAP and Medicaid for low-income adults are severe, often resulting in food and health insecurity. Losing SNAP eligibility has been found to increase the incidence of experiencing physically unhealthy days by 14% (Feng 2022). Following the Medicaid work requirements experiment in Arkansas, researchers compared outcomes for respondents who were still enrolled and respondents who were disenrolled from the program. Among those disenrolled, 49.8% reported serious problems paying off medical debt, almost twice as many respondents compared with 26.8% for those still enrolled. Moreover, 55.9% of disenrolled respondents delayed needed care in the past year because of cost, and 63.8% delayed taking medications because of cost. By contrast, only 28.2% of enrolled respondents delayed needing care, and 32.8% delayed medications (Sommers et al. 2020).

The silver lining in these findings is that when administrative burdens are reduced, people regain access to crucial benefits. For example, during the 2008–2009 Great Recession, policymakers significantly (if temporarily) reduced requirements for SNAP receipt. These changes were made because it was recognized that the recession—a change in macroeconomic conditions outside the control of potential beneficiaries—was driving the increased need for SNAP. Researchers found that these administrative policies that relaxed requirements explained 28.5% of the 69% increase in SNAP participation (Ziliak 2013). Research has further shown that participation is greatest when measures to reduce the administrative burden for SNAP—like lengthening eligibility and recertification periods, eliminating in-person interviews, and offering online applications—are more generous (Herd and Moynihan 2018; Prenatal-to-3 Policy 2024).

Policies that would measurably improve employment in low-income households

For those genuinely concerned about improving access to work, there are policy choices that are far more effective than work requirements.

This agenda would include macroeconomic policy to maintain full employment but would also stress policy choices that remove real-world barriers to work like providing access to child and elder care, reducing incarceration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, and removing unnecessary credentialization in the hiring process.

Maintaining full employment: Our analysis in prior sections shows a clear link between hours worked and earnings for low-income adults and the national unemployment rate, suggesting that when the economy is at full employment, low-income adults stand to benefit the most from greater access to work opportunities. It is also worth noting that full employment also leads to strong reductions in the federal budget deficit—something else proponents of work requirements also claim is a goal (Bivens 2019).

Increasing scheduling predictability: Adding hours criteria to individuals in jobs with schedule practices that are out of their control only increases both barriers to work and economic insufficiency. If policymakers were serious about supporting individuals who want steady work, they would call for workplace protections that reduce precarious scheduling practices, thereby providing more employment security. Policies like secure scheduling laws can go far to improve employment prospects for low-income ABAWDs. Studies of new secure scheduling laws, which mandate that workers get at least two weeks’ notice of their schedule, among other rules, found that these policies increase economic security and worker health and well-being (Harknett, Schneider, and Irwin 2021).

Providing better help with caregiving responsibilities: For adults with caregiving duties, a key barrier to work is the prohibitively high cost of care. Given that 5% of ABAWDs have noncustodial children under 21 and 14% of ABAWDs live with a person over the age of 65, access to affordable child and elder care could make a huge difference for this population of adults. Women charged with caregiving have lower employment and earnings than those with similar characteristics who are not caregivers (Maestas, Messel, and Truskinovsky 2024). Policies that could support caregivers or reduce the cost of elder care could significantly help ABAWDs gain access to employment. For example, studies show that when barriers to child care are reduced through informal or formal care, women are much more likely to work (Posadas and Vidal-Fernandez 2013; ASPE 2016).

Reducing the labor market scarring of incarceration: For Black men, incarceration presents a uniquely challenging obstacle in terms of gaining employment (Pager 2003; Williams, Wilson, and Bergeson 2019). At least one in five Black men will experience incarceration at some point in their lives (Robey, Massoglia, and Light 2023), and any instance of incarceration severely reduces their subsequent likelihood of gaining employment (Pager 2003). Policies that reduce incarceration and recidivism rates, such as job reentry programs, could do much more to support this population’s gaining employment.

Reducing misplaced credentialization: Degree inflation—the rising demand for a four-year college degree for jobs that previously did not require one—has been found to be costly to workers in terms of missed job opportunities (Cohen 2023). A Harvard Business Review study found that over 60% of employers indicated that they would reject candidates that otherwise fit their job descriptions because they did not have college diplomas (Fuller and Raman 2017). Given that a large share of ABAWDs lacks college degrees, this can hinder their ability to gain access to employment they might be fully qualified for otherwise. Moreover, degree inflation appears to be responsive to local labor market supply. When there is an economic downturn and an increased number of people looking for work, employers are more likely to increase skill requirements (Modestino, Shoag, and Ballance 2020). By contrast, when the economy is tight, employers tend to relax them (Modestino, Shoag, and Ballance 2016). This suggests that the degree requirement, rather than being a necessary qualification for a job, serves as an unfair screening device that may actually hurt employers in the long run.

Reducing education requirements has been a bipartisan policy initiative in Alaska, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Utah, where governors eliminated the requirement of a four-year college degree for many jobs in state government. Research has also shown that when degree requirements are dropped, employers are more specific in their job descriptions about the types of skills required for a job, which has the potential to open up new job positions for an additional 1.4 million workers (Fuller et al. 2022).

Offering better transportation options: Transportation access continues to be an issue for low-income adults and adults in rural areas (Mengedoth 2023). Low-income adults are less likely to own cars and more likely to take public transit. Public transit tends to have longer commute times and can occasionally break down, making it difficult for workers to get to work on time. Investments in more frequent public transportation with wider geographic coverage could support low-income workers’ employment prospects.

Reducing existing work requirements: This is intentionally provocative, but prior sections have described the health and nutrition consequences of failing to gain access to safety net programs like SNAP and Medicaid, such as food and health insecurity, which could be a barrier to work. Further, the existing research base shows near-zero measurable benefit of existing work requirements in promoting work. The upshot of these findings is that it is entirely possible that reducing eligibility barriers to safety net programs—barriers like work requirements—may well be more effective in promoting work than raising those barriers would be. A majority of adults who gained coverage through Medicaid expansion in Ohio and Michigan found that having health care made it easier to find and maintain work (Katch, Wagner, and Aron-Dine 2018).

Conclusion

A key policy trade-off for all welfare state programs is making sure that they reach all eligible populations while avoiding free riders who claim benefits that society and policymakers did not aim to make available to them. When eligibility rules are inclusive and generous, more people will be able to access these programs but with the risk that those who are not meant to be recipients may access these programs anyway. When eligibility rules are stringent and harsh, the likelihood of benefits going to populations not intended to receive them is certainly reduced but at the cost of reducing access to populations all agree the programs are meant to help.

The evidence surveyed above highlights that the U.S. safety net is too stingy and already tilts too hard toward making safety net benefits difficult to access. Further tightening eligibility screens will make this problem worse, with zero tangible benefit in the form of higher levels of employment among low-income adults.

Despite these facts, proponents of work requirements argue that these adults “have no excuse” to not be working since they don’t have children to take care of that live in the home or documented disabilities. Our analysis shows that there are still plenty of barriers that keep low-income adults out of the workforce, including disabilities and the increased likelihood of having an elderly person in the household. Further, we survey the available evidence on work requirements and find that they do not meaningfully increase employment. They ultimately just reduce the number of workers able to access safety net benefits. By picking ABAWDs as the group to be mandated to maintain work requirements, policymakers are effectively identifying a group they view as “least deserving” to access benefits and punishing them with the hope of not receiving a lot of backlash.

We also show that when labor market conditions are right, low-income workers do work and earn more than they do when unemployment is high, suggesting that macroeconomic policy has more to do with ABAWDs’ ability to work than the absence of incentives does. Finally, we outline a wide range of policies that support work for low-income adults and argue these policies would be better at promoting work than any work requirement restriction. If policymakers were serious about creating opportunities to work, they would pass policies like secure scheduling laws and affordable care policies that would meaningfully reduce barriers low-income adults face in gaining employment.

Notes

1. Survey evidence shows that support for work requirements in Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is high—69.8% of adults surveyed in 2022–2023 supported work requirements for Medicaid, and 72.5% supported work requirements for SNAP (Haeder and Moynihan 2023).

2. The Arkansas program was later deemed unconstitutional.

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Congress needs to reauthorize the now-expired Farm Bill—the enormous legislative package that includes funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps)—but a privatization scheme was attached to the bill.

Earlier this Congress, Rep. Don Bacon (R, NE-02) introduced the “SNAP Staffing Flexibility Act,” which was also included as a provision in the current version of the Farm Bill. The bill would allow state agencies to hire outside contractors to administer key requirements of the SNAP program under certain conditions, such as in the aftermath of natural disasters or during pandemics and public health emergencies. Rep. Bacon and supporters of this proposal now aim to tack this provision onto the emergency disaster relief package under consideration this year. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to use emergency disaster relief as cover to privatize the SNAP program and workforce, instead of giving the SNAP program enough money to operate effectively.

Privatization is often touted as a solution to bureaucratic red tape or cutting “wasteful” government spending, but in practice, it can mean cutting the experienced public workforce who administer complicated government programs. This can result in prolonged delays, more people wrongly denied benefits, and ultimately worse outcomes for people who need the benefits most.

SNAP is our most important anti-hunger program, but it is facing renewed privatization threats

SNAP serves tens of millions of low-paid working families and other households with low incomes (including disabled and older adults). Like unemployment insurance, SNAP is responsive to the business cycle—meaning SNAP is particularly important during economic downturns when poverty and food insecurity rise. Between fiscal years 1980 and 2008, anywhere from 7 to 11% of U.S. households received SNAP. Participation grew dramatically during the Great Recession, peaking at 18.8% in fiscal year 2013 (47.6 million people).

Participation spiked again during the COVID-19 pandemic amid increased poverty and food insecurity. In fiscal year 2022, although total participation was lower than during the Great Recession (12.4% of all US households participated in the program), SNAP saw a record-high participation rate among eligible individuals, equivalent to 41.2 million people receiving benefits in an average month. Expanded SNAP eligibility—alongside other relief measures such as Child Tax Credit expansions, universal free school lunches, and federal stimulus payments—kept food insecurity at bay during the height of the pandemic in 2021. However, as those programs expired—and the shocks of pandemic reopening and the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to food prices growing at an unprecedented rate—food insecurity increased in 2022.  

As part of the SNAP quality control process, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) examines each state’s application processing timeliness (APT). The rate is calculated by dividing the number of SNAP applications processed by the number of applications that were expected to be processed during that period, typically 30 days since the application was submitted. In fiscal year 2023, APT rates ranged from a low of 39% in Alaska to a high of 98% in Idaho, with a median rate of 85% across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In 2023, only four states met the FNS benchmark rate of 95%. Failure to meet this benchmark is not a new phenomenon. Based on available data, no more than a third of all states have ever met the 95% timeliness standard in any given year.

Proponents of SNAP privatization often point to slow application processing rates as evidence that the existing program is inefficient and in need of “reform.” However, this argument ignores important context on these rates and its connection to declining federal funding for SNAP and shrinking public-sector employment.

Chronic underfunding of SNAP strains workers and delays processing of essential benefits

SNAP is a federal-state partnership, so the federal government pays the full cost of nutrition benefits and splits the costs of administration with states, but federal spending on SNAP administration has declined over time. Meanwhile, SNAP administrators’ caseloads have grown dramatically. Many states point to administrative problems—including low staffing, hiring freezes, and high turnover—as one of the biggest barriers to improving slow processing times and backlogs.

To be clear, low APT rates are a cause for concern because they indicate that many eligible households in need of food assistance are not quickly receiving those benefits. But the solution to ensuring applicants receive their benefits quickly is simple: Policymakers must increase funding for SNAP and restore sufficient staffing levels so that case workers can process applications effectively and efficiently.

Starving SNAP of funding serves the long-term, right-wing privatization agenda

The push to privatize SNAP eligibility determinations is decades-old and has produced serious problems in states that have contracted out these services or automated certain functions of the process. When Texas outsourced its SNAP eligibility determinations to a for-profit company in 2006, thousands of people were unable to apply or were given incorrect information and many were wrongly denied benefits. Public-sector staff were then forced to fix mistakes, and eligible SNAP participants were subject to long delays to receive benefits.

Efforts to defraud the SNAP program, including misuse of benefits or selling them for cash, is very rare. However, attention to purported fraud has increased in recent years, and SNAP workers have been forced to take on additional anti-fraud measures, further delaying processing and potentially contributing to low APT rates.

The SNAP program needs support, not a license to cut more corners

Congress should not be using much-needed disaster relief as a back door to privatize the SNAP program’s workforce. There are other real and urgent problems with the SNAP program this year—for instance, families have had their SNAP benefits stolen by card “skimmers” when they swipe their cards at grocery store cash registers. In 2022, Congress passed a provision that would allow states to pay back the stolen benefits to victims of theft, but that has since expired.

Farm Bill reauthorization should focus on preserving nutrition assistance benefits without cuts and on reducing administrative burdens and red tape for SNAP recipients, applicants, and staff—all of which could help reduce backlogs and improve how quickly people can receive their benefits. And disaster relief spending should focus on providing aid to vulnerable communities trying to rebuild after storms—not opportunistically trying to cut corners and privatize vital services.

“Debt limit deals” are a way to force policy change through a backdoor by holding the U.S. (and global) economy hostage. Accepting that “debt limit deals” are just business as usual every time we approach the ceiling basically means that one political party can gain access to an inordinately powerful “hack” around the normal democratic process so long as some arbitrary conditions prevail.

Republicans have a majority in just one chamber of Congress, and face a president of the opposing party. Normally, this would mean they would have to argue their case for policy changes on the floor of the House, and compromise more often than not. However, just because we were about to cross over the utterly arbitrary debt limit, Republicans magically gained enormous amounts of leverage to dictate policy—including a lot of policy divorced from the specific conversation of addressing the debt and deficits. This is not a sensible way to govern.

This deal looks significantly less harmful than the original McCarthy proposal that passed the House last month, but it still contains several worrying provisions. Notably, it still includes a concession to expand and tighten work reporting requirements for some of the most vulnerable Americans to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). These should never have been part of a debt ceiling discussion.

While the deal includes new exemptions that could actually extend access to SNAP to people in certain categories (like veterans), it would needlessly still put a large number of older adults ages 49–54 at risk of losing their food stamps if they can’t meet the new burdensome requirements to report on work activities. (This is despite the fact that we know workers over 50 already face difficult working conditions and a tougher labor market than younger workers.)

Paperwork and reporting for these programs are already excessively burdensome and deny aid to those in need. The fact that the deal’s new exemptions for certain groups might actually expand receipt of food stamps just highlights the damage being done by current work requirements. They increase red tape and increase the risk of getting kicked out of much-needed safety net support—they do not boost job opportunities or employment for individuals in need. The inclusion of this provision from conservatives has nothing to do with reducing federal spending or encouraging work, and everything to do with punishing poor people.

While less severe than the original Republican proposal, the deal will also place a cap on non-defense discretionary spending at current levels for the next two years, meaning that federal spending will not keep up with inflation. This is effectively a spending cut to nearly every spending area outside of the military, from housing and child care assistance to environmental protection.

It’s ridiculous that Republicans claim to care about fiscal responsibility in this debate, but also completely took tax increases off the table in negotiations. This is despite the fact that tax cuts passed in recent years are prime contributors to the deficit, offering little to no economic benefit to the rest of us in return.

In fact, the Republicans did not just take tax increases off the table; they demanded constraints on the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) ability to enforce tax laws by taking away the budgetary resources needed to modernize their systems and to audit wealthy tax cheats. While Republicans didn’t get everything they wanted, the final deal will claw back some of the boost to IRS resources provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. This is essentially an attempt to return to the era of “do-it-yourself tax cuts”—something we’ve allowed for the richest Americans since the last harmful debt limit deal in 2011 decimated IRS funding.

Ultimately, we need to abolish the debt ceiling, and, at minimum, we should have had a clean debt limit increase. The administration should never have been in a position of negotiating the ability for the government to meet its basic existing obligations. As long as we have a debt limit, we will continue to risk forcing unpopular, harmful cuts to federal investment at the expense of the economic well-being of low- and middle-income people.

Short of getting votes for abolishing the debt limit altogether, we can at least have the Treasury Department start experimenting with measures that would allow workarounds in the future. For example, Treasury could issue and auction a small amount of consols or premium bonds. If Treasury begins doing so early, they could ensure that a market for these premium bonds exists before they need to be used, when the debt limit threatens to bind us again in 2025. This would make issuing them much more credible in the next debt ceiling crisis, and could shift leverage away from those attempting to weaponize the debt limit in future.

Read the full Twitter thread here.

It turns out “work requirements” don’t work. How do we know? Because the same corporate interests pushing so-called “work requirements” right now in Congress have been pushing the same idea in states for years. @EARNetwork @AACF https://t.co/cm2GEryDiA

— Economic Policy Institute (@EconomicPolicy) May 22, 2023

Most adult Medicaid enrollees who can work are already working, except for those out of the workforce due to school enrollment, a disability, or caregiving responsibilities. @EveryTxn https://t.co/YvapaoKdI4

— Economic Policy Institute (@EconomicPolicy) May 22, 2023

“Work requirements” disadvantage those who are working hardest at low-wage jobs with unpredictable schedules. Those in temp or part-time jobs may struggle to meet arbitrary hours worked quotas each month, facing constant risk of losing benefits. @ncjustice https://t.co/jqr5iEwrCU

— Economic Policy Institute (@EconomicPolicy) May 22, 2023

Who does benefit from “work requirement” policies? Multimillion dollar corporate temp agencies and staffing services who profit off government contracts to place Medicaid or SNAP recipients in low-wage, short-term jobs that trap families in poverty. https://t.co/C1ynWAAGDS

— Economic Policy Institute (@EconomicPolicy) May 22, 2023

Policymakers must reject dangerous TANF proposals that encourage states to restrict benefits for families with the greatest need. https://t.co/p5GElRszyV

— Economic Policy Institute (@EconomicPolicy) May 22, 2023