October 25, 2025
Opinion: Requiring Work For Benefits Is Wise
By John Hood
RALEIGH — There are good reasons to criticize the “Big, Beautiful Bill” the U.S. House just sent to the Senate. But its imposition of work requirements for able-bodied recipients of Medicaid — and more-comprehensive work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — are not among them.
I pray North Carolina’s senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, hold out for more budget savings. I pray their counterparts in the House rediscover the virtues of fiscal responsibility and agree to any additional Medicaid reforms or other savings the Senate includes in its version.
What lawmakers certainly shouldn’t do is fulfill the prayers of progressive critics who dislike work requirements. As currently written, the bill requires childless, able-bodied recipients of Medicaid or SNAP to spend at least 20 hours a week working, training for a job, or volunteering their time.
When then-President Bill Clinton signed a bipartisan welfare reform bill back in 1996, progressives similarly attacked its work requirement for cash assistance. They claimed it would wreak destruction among low-income mothers and children. That’s not what happened. While some households decided to forego cash assistance, most responded to the requirement by entering the job market. Developing marketable skills and a stronger work ethic, they gained rather than lost income and set positive examples for their children.
Federal policymakers should have applied the same logic to health care, food subsidies, housing assistance, and other in-kind benefits at the same time. Now, three decades later, Congress can rectify this mistake.
Chronic poverty doesn’t occur by happenstance. Among those who lack serious physical or mental disabilities, poverty is strongly correlated with self-destructive behaviors: dropping out of school, abusing alcohol or other drugs, getting pregnant outside of marriage, and staying out of the labor market.
To say these behaviors are self-destructive is not to say they are easily avoided, especially by young people with limited life experience and short time horizons. I’ve witnessed the consequences of some of these behaviors firsthand. Addictions are hard to overcome. Temptations are hard to resist. And the longer folks go without developing significant work experience, the harder it gets to thrust their feet into the necessary doors.
Most voters want their government to finance a basic safety net. But they also want their tax dollars to go primarily to temporary assistance for families in crisis and to long-term assistance to the disabled. When policymakers cross these two very different streams, the results aren’t pretty — and voters see that.
A recent survey found, for example, that 81% of Americans agree with work requirements for able-bodied recipients of Medicaid. In a 2023 poll, two-thirds of respondents felt the same way about work rules for SNAP.
Is it costly to administer such requirements? Absolutely — and conservatives ought to recognize that fact. There’s a competing model, popular with elements of both the Right and Left, that would use tax or spending tools to offer a universal basic income (UBI) without behavioral strings of any kind. Among their justifications is that the administrative savings would be considerable, reducing the overall cost to taxpayers.
They’re mistaken. It ought not be easy to receive public assistance for long. Otherwise, government weakens the incentive to work, study, marry, and develop other healthy habits. Such habits represent the only proven means of breaking the poverty cycle for good.
A study just released by the National Bureau of Economic Research examined one of the most-popular versions of the idea: unconditional cash payments to parents of newborn children. Some were randomly awarded $333 a month. Others received only $20 a month. After four years of receiving monthly allotments, the two groups of children exhibited no statistically significant differences across seven measures of language, cognition, and behavior.
At the same time, another new NBER paper found that the Earned Income Tax Credit and other tax benefits predicated on parental work had positive impacts on a host of different outcomes, including infant birthweight, childhood health, educational attainment, wages, and poverty in adulthood.
Work works.
John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
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2 Comments
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I’m confused hasn’t this model already been explored in Arkansas and Georgia with no meaningful impact on workforce participation? So basically you are advocating for a model has been shown to not work in favor in just billionaires more tax incentives? It sounds good in theory but it has shown not to work.
The push for work requirements in Medicaid and SNAP is not about fiscal responsibility—it’s about punishing the poor while pretending to help them. It moralizes poverty, portraying it as a result of bad decisions rather than what it really is: the predictable outcome of decades of economic policy rigged against working people. The truth is, most recipients of these programs already work, often in low-wage or unstable jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. Working 20 hours a week at the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hour) nets under $600 a month. Even $15/hour part-time doesn’t cover basic expenses in most of America. This isn’t a motivation problem—it’s a wage problem.
The idea that forcing people to work, volunteer, or train for 20 hours a week will lift them out of poverty ignores how few real opportunities exist in rural communities or low-income urban areas. And it erases the lived reality of people juggling caregiving, disabilities, lack of transportation, or gig work with inconsistent hours. These work requirements do nothing to create good jobs—they simply create red tape. When Arkansas tried them, over 18,000 people lost Medicaid coverage—most not because they were unwilling to work, but because of paperwork errors, confusion, and technological barriers.
Citing the 1996 welfare reform law as a success, as the article does, is a dangerous and dishonest move. That law targeted cash assistance (TANF), a much smaller program—and it led to increased hardship for millions. Applying the same logic to food and healthcare programs today is not reform, it’s sabotage. It’s setting people up to fail, then blaming them when they fall.
The truth is, these systems aren’t broken—they’re working exactly as designed: to keep poor people poor while claiming to help them. Republicans routinely blame the poor for needing help, all while defending a rigged economy where wages stagnate and billionaires get tax breaks. They say they support “self-reliance” but fight tooth and nail against raising the minimum wage, expanding child care, or ensuring universal healthcare. When programs do work—like the expanded Child Tax Credit or Medicaid expansion—they either let them expire or vote them down.
This is not about lifting people up. It’s about control. It’s about blame. And it’s about preserving a system where wealth flows upward while struggling families are lectured about “personal responsibility.” If lawmakers truly wanted to reduce poverty, they’d raise wages, build affordable housing, fund childcare and transportation, and stop punishing people for being poor.
Work isn’t the issue. People want to work. But work should come with dignity, stability, and enough income to survive. These so-called reforms offer none of that. They’re not a safety net—they’re a trap. And we see through it.