Multiple themes define the massive budget reconciliation bill currently winding its way through the House. Since it extends major portions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, one is preventing tax hikes on workers and families if those policies expired at the end of this year. Additional tax cuts promised by President Trump in last year’s campaign—for those with tip or overtime income, for example—expand on that theme. And then there are policies that would cover the cost of some of that tax relief, including reforms targeting fraud and abuse and increasing cost-sharing with states.
But one theme recurs across multiple committees: expecting work or related activity in exchange for key welfare benefits. A New York Times op-ed (“Trump Leadership: If You Want Welfare and Can Work, You Must”) published today drives this point home. Authored by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner, the op-ed argues for new and expanded work requirements proposed in the legislation, while placing those requirements in their historical context.
For example, as my AEI colleague Angela Rachidi has noted, the House Agriculture Committee has proposed multiple changes to work and activity requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called food stamps. First, reforms would prevent states from waiving current requirements that apply to “able-bodied adults without dependents” (ABAWDs). Second, the age of ABAWDs subject to part-time work requirements would increase to 64, up from 54 now. Third, the SNAP work requirement would apply for the first time to parents when their youngest child reaches school age.
Similarly, legislation proposed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee would require states to ensure that able-bodied adults without dependents satisfy new “community engagement requirements” for Medicaid benefits. As the name suggests, that policy falls short of requiring actual work. Instead, able-bodied adults could satisfy it through community service or participation in a work or educational training program for roughly 20 hours per week.
For its part, the House Ways and Means Committee approved a permanent extension and expansion of the child tax credit, including the work requirements that now apply to that benefit. Along the way, committee Republicans beat back a Democratic proposal to repeal that program’s work requirements, as the 2021 Biden stimulus law temporarily provided. That legislation paid monthly benefit checks to even non-working parents, effectively reviving work-free federal welfare checks that ended a generation ago. But as Rep. Rudy Yakym (R-IN) noted, that temporary 2021 policy lapsed after just a year despite Democrats’ holding the White House and congressional majorities, driven by concerns over its enormous cost and lack of work requirements.
Beyond the reconciliation bill, HUD Secretary Turner recently pledged to apply work requirements to able-bodied adults in HUD-funded housing, marking that as a priority “over the next 100 days.” And Republican leaders have introduced separate legislation to update work requirements in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program created in the 1996 welfare reform law. Despite predictions of disaster from liberal opponents, that law was followed by significant increases in work and earnings by low-income parents alongside historic declines in benefit dependence and poverty.
Given those results, it’s a testament to the resistance of government programs to change that expecting part-time work or training by able-bodied adult recipients is even an issue. Meanwhile, the public remains solidly in favor of work requirements for able-bodied adults. As Trump administration officials note, “polling shows that 60 to 80 percent of all Americans support work requirements in Medicaid.”
Democratic politicians used to agree, with more than half of Democrats in Congress—including then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE)—voting for 1996 reforms applying work requirements to welfare checks. But in recent decades, Democrats veered to the left, opposing new work requirements and seeking to remove or neuter the few that exist. They also enacted benefit expansions for able-bodied adults, whom Beltway liberals argue against expecting to work. The absence of that common-sense condition has contributed to rapidly growing benefit rolls. Republicans are now seeking to reverse course, yielding savings. But as the Trump administration op-ed notes, such reforms are worth pursuing on their own, including because they would “protect welfare for the truly needy” while improving “the trajectory of millions of families” in the long run. All are worthy goals.
