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Trump administration officials are championing Republican proposals to put new work requirements and other restrictions on mainstay social welfare programs like Medicaid, despite fierce protests from disability advocates and criticism from prominent Democrats.
In an op-ed published Wednesday in The New York Times, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins, and Scott Turner — the heads of Health and Human Services, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, respectively — wrote that while welfare programs were “created with a noble purpose,” they are now “breaking under the weight of misplaced priorities.”
“Too many able-bodied adults on welfare are not working at all,” they wrote. “And too often we don’t even ask them to. For many, welfare is no longer a lifeline to self-sufficiency but a lifelong trap of dependency.”
“This is about opportunity,” they added. “We believe that work is transformative for the individual who moves from welfare to employment.”
This week, House Republicans released the text of the Medicaid-related aspects of their large-scale domestic policy package, which the Trump administration often calls the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”
The proposal requires able-bodied adults without children or dependents to work, volunteer, or seek training at least 80 hours per month to qualify for the low-income healthcare program.
People younger than 19 and older than 64 would be exempt, as would pregnant women, foster youth, former foster youth up to the age of 26, people with disabilities, members of Native American tribes or people already in compliance with work requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, formerly known as welfare.
Elsewhere, Republicans are hoping to expand work requirements to qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, which replaced food stamps in 2008.
Polling from KFF suggests the vast majority of Americans think funding for Medicaid should be increased or stay the same, while a sizable majority supports work requirements for adults.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has found that the proposed changes to Medicaid, along with the expiration of tax credits related to the Affordable Care Act and other provisions, could increase the number of people without health insurance by 13.7 million.
The GOP’s welfare proposals have prompted pushback from some quarters.
Disability rights protesters were thrown out of a Tuesday hearing on Medicaid at the Capitol, while Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused Republicans of “robbing people in order to hand it over to the rich.”
“They’re not just out here to cut health care for health care’s sake, they have an assignment,” the New York Democrat told Rolling Stone. “Their assignment is to cut the taxes of their donors, and to have giveaways to Big Oil, which financed their election, Big Tech, which financed their election, Elon [Musk], [Jeff] Bezos, etc.”
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