What the GOP work requirement proposal would really do
Sarah Westwood
Video Embed
A battle over the debt ceiling hinges increasingly on the prospect of strengthening work requirements for some government benefits, with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) calling it a necessity and many Democrats balking at even the most modest proposals.
What Republicans have floated would not affect the vast majority of recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits. The food stamp program grew significantly during the pandemic and, despite a low unemployment rate and nationwide labor shortage, dispenses benefits to more people now than it did in either 2020 or 2021.
BIDEN’S DEBT GAMES ARE ALL PLAYED OUT
Republicans have also floated stronger work requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program, which gives benefits to parents with children. Even those reforms, however, would essentially amount to the government enforcing the requirements already in place.
But many Democrats have fiercely opposed the proposals Republicans want in exchange for voting to lift the debt limit. They’ve warned of dire consequences for millions of people if Congress tightens work requirements.
“It’s against our democratic values,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who called adding work requirements to SNAP benefits “an absolutely terrible idea.”
Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said the work requirements are “cruel and ill-advised.”
Five liberal senators, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), wrote in a draft letter obtained by NBC News that “in a time of massive income and wealth inequality,” lawmakers should not agree to “balance the budget on the backs of children and the elderly and working families and force kids to go hungry.”
The proposed reforms would not immediately strip most people of benefits, said Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
“It’s important to understand what a work requirement is in this context,” Rector told the Washington Examiner. “In that context, it should mean that you would require that individual to come down to the food stamp office once a week to look for a job or receive some sort of training. You don’t just cut them off despite what the Left would say.”
“That’s not the way anyone has ever operated these programs,” he added.
The GOP proposal for SNAP — which involves extending work requirements that already apply to able-bodied, childless people aged 19 to 50 to such people up to the age of 55 — would affect less than 1 million of its more than 42 million recipients, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Eligible people from 50 to 55 who don’t spend at least 20 hours a week working or attending job training would, like everyone younger than them, only have access to SNAP benefits for three months at a time under the GOP proposal.
Republicans have also pushed to close what they describe as loopholes in the SNAP and TANF programs that allow some states to waive the existing work requirements, which would require all states to follow the same rules.
The GOP’s TANF proposal has generated perhaps more consternation among Democrats because its recipients include children and single mothers.
The 1990s-era welfare law establishing TANF included the requirement that states ensure at least half of their recipients on such assistance participate in the workforce in some way or else pay a penalty. House Republicans argued that because only six states met that requirement in 2021, Congress should eliminate elements of the program that allow states to skirt the existing rules.
According to the House Ways and Means Committee, 603,000 of the 700,000 adult recipients of TANF support are “work eligible individuals,” but most reported zero hours of work in 2020.
Although Republicans had initially floated the idea of attaching work requirements to Medicaid as well, President Joe Biden has indicated the idea is a nonstarter while showing a willingness to entertain the other proposals.
Rector, who helped write the landmark 1996 welfare reforms that established TANF and other current programs, said work requirements that force welfare recipients to search for a job, attend training, or join the workforce have proven successful.
“This type of work requirement has large beneficial effects, not only on employment but also on family structure and things like that,” he said.
The welfare reforms of 1996 implemented work requirements for government benefits that, then as in now, Democrats warned would result in the ruin of America’s most vulnerable.
That did not come to pass.
Child poverty fell in the decades after welfare reform passed, according to the Manhattan Institute.
Most adults that left welfare programs in the 10 years after the reforms passed went on to find employment, according to the Brookings Institution, and the percentage of single mothers who found work increased dramatically as well.
Rector said his research shows that most people subjected to a work or job training requirement voluntarily leave the benefit programs in which they’re enrolled, suggesting many people who collect the benefits don’t necessarily rely upon them.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Indeed, the enormous size of the SNAP program’s rolls relative to the low unemployment record suggests food stamps may be going to many people who don’t need them. Pandemic-era waivers related to who can receive the benefits are set to expire in July.
Biden, who voted as a senator for the 1996 welfare reform law, and Republican leaders have until the beginning of June to hammer out a deal that would trim the budget and raise the nation’s debt limit.