Work Requirements Just Won’t Die

Sep 01, 2023

The debt-ceiling deal rests on a cruel and ineffective policy.

Republicans and Democrats have reached a debt-ceiling deal. Republicans will agree not to blow up the global economy if Democrats trim federal spending over the next two years, claw back money from the Internal Revenue Service, speed up the country's energy-permitting process, and impose new work requirements on the food-stamp and welfare programs, among other changes.

Perhaps this is the best deal the two sides could have reached. Perhaps it is not that big a deal at all. But Congress got the deal by selling out some of America's poorest and most vulnerable families. And it did so by expanding the use of a policy mechanism so janky, ineffective, and cruel that it should not exist. No work requirements in any program, for anyone, for any reason: This should be the policy goal going forward.

The deal, which is pending a vote in the House later today, requires "able-bodied" people ages 18 to 54 without dependents in the home to work at least 20 hours a week in order to get food stamps for more than three months every three years; previously, people only had to do so up to the age of 50. (The deal does expand access to the program for veterans and kids leaving foster care.) It also hinders states’ ability to exempt families on welfare from the program's onerous work requirements.

Work requirements have a decent-enough theory behind them: If you are on the dole and you are an able-bodied adult, you should be working or trying to find a job. It's good for people to work, and the government should not send citizens the message that it is fine not to.

The theory runs into problems in theory long before it runs into problems in practice. The point of Temporary Aid to Needy Families, the cash-welfare program, is to eliminate deep poverty among children. The point of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is to end hunger. The point of Medicaid—to which Republicans are desperate to add work requirements, which, thank goodness, failed in these talks—is to ensure that everyone has health coverage.

James Surowiecki: The GOP's unworkable work requirements

Should infants and kids remain in poverty because their parents can't hold down a job? Should people go hungry if they can't work? Should they lose their health insurance if they won't? The answer is no—of course not, no.

Then, there are the problems in practice. Work requirements impose grievous costs for limited (or possibly nonexistent) benefits. For one, determining who is "able-bodied" is difficult and invasive. Having a disability or a disabling condition is not enough. A person needs to have a specific kind of disability, certified in a Kafkaesque, months-long process. "It is notoriously difficult," Pamela Herd, a Georgetown professor and an expert on administrative burdens, wrote in a blog post this week. "Not only does it require reams of paperwork and documentation, it requires effectively navigating a complex medical diagnostic process to verify one's eligibility." Each year, she noted, about 10,000 people die while waiting for their application to be processed.

It is worth pausing here for a moment to appreciate the cruelty. Imagine you have long COVID. Or incontinence due to pelvic-floor trauma from childbirth. Or an undiagnosed psychiatric condition. You’re having trouble coming up with enough money for groceries, so you decide to apply for SNAP. But you realize you need a disability exemption from the work requirement. You wait months to offer up intimate details about your body to a civil servant, and face a one-in-three chance of getting denied.

Then comes getting SNAP itself. Applying is quick and easy in some states, for some people. It is long and arduous for other people in other places. Half of the New Yorkers applying for SNAP in December failed to get their benefits within a month, as required by federal law; pervasive delays have spurred a class-action lawsuit against the state. If and when people do get approved, they must comply with their state's work requirements, really two interlocking sets of work requirements. (Don't get confused!) Folks have to document their hours and log them on buggy online systems. If they’re looking for work, they have to search in certain ways in certain locations. It's annoying. It's finicky.

Again, it is worth appreciating the cruelty of it all. Years ago, I spoke with a Texan on food stamps. She had been exempted from her state's work requirement because she was pregnant. But she suffered a late miscarriage. Did she have to call her caseworker to tell them she had lost her baby? Would the state come after her for not informing them, clawing her food stamps back? Was there some kind of bereavement policy? Did she need to start complying with the work requirement there and then? Another person I spoke with, in Maine, struggled to use a computer or phone and did not have reliable transportation to bring her paperwork to her caseworker in person. What was she supposed to do?

You might argue that such policies are worth it, if they get people to work. But they don't. Most adults using safety-net programs who are capable of working are working. They just earn too little. And many adults who aren't working can't work, because of illness, a lack of transportation, or some other reason. As a result, work requirements at best lead to modest increases in employment, ones that fade over time. In some cases, they do nothing to bolster it. Yet work requirements have a catastrophic impact on the people who will not or cannot comply with them. Those people become more likely to live in poverty, get evicted, and end up incarcerated or homeless.

Derek Thompson: Why Americans care about work so much

At a more philosophical level, work requirements cement the narrative that poverty is the fault of the poor rather than the fault of a society with inadequate social services, unchecked corporate concentration, an overgrown carceral system, low wages, and massive discrimination against Black and Latino workers. They bolster the theory that a lack of personal responsibility and cultural rot are the reasons that deprivation persists. They are a way for the state to bully the poor.

Perhaps the best argument for work requirements is that they make safety-net programs palatable to higher-income folks. But the truth is that few people have any kind of granular understanding of these policies; not a lot of people vote on the basis of the fine print in the TANF program.

Republicans worried about poor people working should start supporting policies proven to boost employment, like universal child care and effective job training. Democrats should feel ashamed for ever having supported work requirements. They should feel even more ashamed for offering them as a policy concession to Republicans now, when we have so much evidence of how little they help and how much they hurt.