--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: The recurring fight over whether to raise the debt ceiling is a uniquely American phenomenon. We've talked about this on the show before.
--:-- Dylan Scott: Yeah, my first debt ceiling fight was 2011, and I was an intern and still in college. And so I've been doing this my entire professional life, and it seems like it will never end.
--:-- Noel King: Recently, atop Capitol Hill, another uniquely American phenomenon unfolded. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed, as part of the negotiations over the debt ceiling, work requirements for Americans getting government assistance in the form of welfare programs and even Medicaid.
--:-- Dylan Scott: It is such a good campaign issue. And it makes people's blood boil, I think, for all of the reasons that we were just talking about, because it appeals to all these things we want to believe about America.
--:-- Noel King: McCarthy has pointed out that Americans voting for other Americans to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is nothing new. This is something that President Biden as senator voted for. He did. This is something that President Bill Clinton signed. He did. Welfare reform, class of 96. Decades ago, America decided if you want help, you need to work.
--:-- Dylan Scott: How's that been working out for us?
--:-- Noel King: Coming up on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform. Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Noel King: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at ServiceNow.com. Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form. All it takes is a bit of intention, style, and of course, the perfect cold weather staples. So find the perfect look for you with the help of Macy's Fall Fashion Guide, your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts.
--:-- Noel King: From leather to denim to cozy knits, find everything you need to piece together your new fall look. Explore the Macy's Fall Guide for yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King, and I'm joined by Dylan Scott, who's a senior correspondent at Vox. He's been looking into what the Republican Party wants.
--:-- Dylan Scott: We call him the other Dylan. House Republicans want two things and they were included in the bill that the house passed in the last few weeks to kind of get these negotiations started. One, they want to enhance work requirements that already exist for two programs called TANF, which provides, or originally was intended to provide, cash assistance to low-income families, and SNAP, which is food stamps, basically, cash assistance that helps people pay for food.
--:-- Noel King: What work requirements actually do, help people get a job. Every data point shows that, and it helps people move forward. What they also want to do is add work requirements to Medicaid, which is the big government health insurance program that covers people who live in or near poverty.
--:-- Dylan Scott: There are about 90 million people enrolled in Medicaid, at least at the start of this year.
--:-- Noel King: What are the existing work requirements for SNAP or food stamps and TANF?
--:-- Dylan Scott: So both SNAP and TANF largely cover low-income families. SNAP in particular, it's a big program. About 40 million Americans receive food assistance through that program.
--:-- Dylan Scott: With SNAP, people 18 to 49 are generally required to do some kind of work activity, be working, looking for work, maybe going to school, that kind of thing. Or they might be exempt because they're disabled or something like that.
--:-- Noel King: Now House Republicans are proposing that people who are 50 to 55 also be required to perform some kind of work activity in order to receive SNAP benefits. And so that equals about a million people, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, who would be newly subject to this expanded SNAP work requirement.
--:-- Dylan Scott: And then there's TANF, which came into being in the 1990s under the Clinton administration. This was welfare reform, as people might remember. And so it's kind of the next generation of the old cash assistance programs that existed before TANF.
--:-- Dylan Scott: But, you know, there was this major overhaul in the 1990s. And TANF, like SNAP, already has some work requirements. The change that House Republicans are proposing, it's kind of a technical change that has to do with, like, the formula that the feds use to assess whether states are meeting their—what they are required to do when it comes to work requirements.
--:-- Noel King: But the result is that more people would be subject to work requirements. There'd be fewer exemptions. And again, according to CBPP, about 500,000 people are expected to fall in this category of people who would be newly subject to a work requirement under TANF based on what House Republicans are proposing.
--:-- Dylan Scott: And what about Medicaid? Have there been work requirements attached to that entitlement at all?
--:-- Noel King: Yes. So, you know, the idea of Medicaid work requirements have been around for a long time. And under the Trump administration, there was actually sort of an experiment in how it would work.
--:-- Dylan Scott: The Trump administration will begin permitting states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. It is a major reversal of decades of policy.
--:-- Noel King: Three states at least actually made proposals and had them approved by the Trump administration. They were Arkansas, Kentucky, and Indiana.
--:-- Dylan Scott: Now, as you might imagine, like almost immediately there was litigation filed to try to block these policies from going into place. And in Indiana and Kentucky, they never actually got off the ground. But in Arkansas, they did.
--:-- Dylan Scott: There was a brief period, only a matter of months, where Arkansas actually had a work requirement in place. The results were pretty disastrous, as best as we can tell.
--:-- Noel King: So for starters, about 17,000 people lost their health insurance benefits through Medicaid because they either didn't meet the work requirement or they failed to maybe submit the paperwork.
--:-- Dylan Scott: Some kind of administrative of hiccup led to them losing coverage.
--:-- Noel King: I thought that everything was good about this. I thought it was just a one-time deal that you reported and then that was it.
--:-- Dylan Scott: He was wrong. He was supposed to log those hours online every month. He became one of the 12,000 people that the state has booted from the Medicaid rolls in the last three months
--:-- Dylan Scott: But what researchers went back and looked at later was like OK so people lost their health insurance But like part of the idea of work requirements in Republicans mind is like with a work requirement, people are going to try to get a job. You know, maybe that leads to them getting another job and eventually making more money and potentially getting a job with health insurance.
--:-- Noel King: And you know, the goal here is to move more people off of government assistance. And so these researchers went back and looked at Arkansas and said, okay, like people lost coverage, but was there any change in their employment situation?
--:-- Dylan Scott: And basically what they found was no. There was not any meaningful improvement in employment, especially among this population of people who were subject to the work requirement.
--:-- Noel King: Let's say that I am the person that the Republican Party is talking about. I am the person who currently does not hold a job. They want me to do what exactly?
--:-- Dylan Scott: Under what House Republicans are proposing, people have to work or perform some kind of work-related or community service activity in order to continue receiving Medicaid benefits.
--:-- Noel King: And so that's 80 hours a month, works out to about 20 hours a week, which is sort of what's standard for these proposals, And that's what exists already in SNAP in particular.
--:-- Dylan Scott: And so states would presumably create, you know, paperwork that people would have to file to show that, you know, you have met that requirement. You are working these numbers of hours.
--:-- Noel King: But if the effectiveness of work requirements is unclear and a situation like Arkansas suggests it actually doesn't work, at least not as well as it's supposed to, why do Republicans feel so strongly about work requirements?
--:-- Dylan Scott: Well, here's where I think it's maybe useful to bring in like the political context here in terms of the debt limit negotiations.
--:-- Noel King: You know, Republicans, they want to get something out of these debt limit negotiations. My Republican colleagues would like to see a plan that actually starts to bend that curve of exponentially increasing spending.
--:-- Dylan Scott: We want to claw back some of the covid funds that are unobligated. We want pro growth policies like H.R.1. They set out a marker very early that they needed to get something in exchange for lifting the debt limit, even though it could lead to very serious economic consequences.
--:-- Noel King: And they put it out very early that work requirements for social programs was a priority for them, along with spending cuts in general, permitting reform, a couple other things.
--:-- Dylan Scott: I thought that language was telling. It was very vague. Like, work requirements for social programs was the language I saw used, you know, early on from, like, really good congressional reporting outlets like Punchbowl News.
--:-- Noel King: And you're talking about SNAP? Which program are you talking about specifically?
--:-- Dylan Scott: We're talking about all the programs. But now we're in this haggling game between the White House and Senate Democrats and the Senate in general and House Republicans.
--:-- Noel King: And there's been some signals that, like, there's the potential for a trade here if we're going to be sort of crass and cynical about it. The Biden White House has said we're not doing a policy that would result in people losing health coverage.
--:-- Dylan Scott: And they themselves, like the administration, has released projections that like as many as 20 million people could be at risk of losing health insurance under Medicaid work requirements.
--:-- Dylan Scott: So it's going to be really hard for them to then agree to Medicaid work requirements as part of a final debt limit deal with the House. But it's not that hard to imagine a situation where Medicaid work requirements get dropped by House Republicans because the Democrats have said this just isn't going to happen for us.
--:-- Noel King: But some kind of deal on SNAP and TANF is reached. And like, you know, for the people who would be subject to these work requirements, obviously the consequences are very real.
--:-- Dylan Scott: But if you take a step back and look at it at a really high level, they are relatively marginal changes to work requirements that already exist.
--:-- Noel King: As opposed to with Medicaid, like, it would be an entirely new policy that, beyond this brief experiment in Arkansas, hasn't really existed before.
--:-- Dylan Scott: I'm not going to accept any work requirements that's going to impact on medical health needs of people. I'm not going to accept any work requirements that go much beyond what is already.
--:-- Noel King: Well, I voted years ago for the work requirements that exist. But it's possible there could be a few others, but not anything of any consequence.
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
--:-- Noel King: Coming up from Capitol Hill to Elizabethan England, the history of work requirements.
--:-- Noel King: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
--:-- Dylan Scott: Adio Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Noel King: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Dylan Scott: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Noel King: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Dylan Scott: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Noel King: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to addio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Noel King: Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy?
--:-- Dylan Scott: Like, really happy?
--:-- Noel King: The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that.
--:-- Dylan Scott: Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
--:-- Noel King: But still, we stick it out, And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse?
--:-- Dylan Scott: I've already put years into this place.
--:-- Noel King: And maybe the most common one, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work?
--:-- Dylan Scott: But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving.
--:-- Noel King: It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry.me.
--:-- Dylan Scott: They match you with a certified career coach who helps you go from where you are to where you actually want to be.
--:-- Noel King: Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, create a plan, build your confidence, and keeps you accountable along the way.
--:-- Dylan Scott: So don leave your career to chance Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner Go to strawberry slash unstuck to claim a special offer
--:-- Noel King: That strawberry slash unstuck
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
--:-- Noel King: You're listening to Today Explained. My name is Chrissy Clark, and I am the senior correspondent and host of the Marketplace investigative podcast, The Uncertain Hour.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: We explore obscure policies, forgotten histories, and why America is like this. And so we've looked at lots of things, including the long, fraught, and really misunderstood history of welfare.
--:-- Noel King: Is the call for work requirements to get entitlements like SNAP and Medicaid anything new? Not at all, is the short answer.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: All the way back in Elizabethan England, there was this idea of the deserving poor, people who were too old or too young or too sick to work, and those people were considered deserving of help.
--:-- Noel King: And then there were what was called the idle poor, people who it was thought could work but refused to work. They were whipped in the streets and then sent to poor houses often where they were forced to work.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: And then there was also this group of folks that were called the able-bodied poor, people who it was thought wanted to work but couldn't find a job. And they were also required to do labor often in return for aid.
--:-- Noel King: So going all the way back to that time, we have these impulses to sort of try to sort people and figure out who deserves this help. Are they working hard enough to get it or are they just being lazy?
--:-- Chrissy Clark: OK, and then we fast forward 11,000 years to the creation of the United States. When in the U.S. do we first start proposing things like work requirements?
--:-- Noel King: Yeah, so imagine a world where welfare, cash assistance for poor families, was completely uncontroversial, didn't even go very noticed, and had no work requirements attached to it.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: And in fact, the whole idea of the earliest versions of welfare, this is back in the early 1900s, was to help mothers, often widowed mothers, who didn't have a male breadwinner, to stay in the house, not work, so that they could raise their children.
--:-- Noel King: These were called mother's pensions. To provide for children who have lost their breadwinners, the state and federal governments provide monthly cash payments so that these children may grow up at home with their own families.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: The program was pretty uncontroversial. Different states and localities had these cash assistance programs for poor families.
--:-- Noel King: But that question about who was deserving and who was not was still lurking in it. The program was explicitly meant for mothers of worthy character that was often written into the way these programs were formed.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: And of course, that's a really subjective term. Oh, yeah. And it was up to local officials who were running these programs to decide what that meant.
--:-- Noel King: And very often, in fact, usually, that meant white women.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: In 1931, only 3% of the people getting these mothers' pensions were Black. And in the Deep South, where most Black people lived, the mismatch was even worse.
--:-- Noel King: There were about 3,000 white families who got this help and only 39 Black families.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: When welfare really starts to get noticed and get all this public scrutiny and more calls for we need work requirements to determine, you know, who are the loafers, who are the lazy people that are just on this program, even though they could work.
--:-- Noel King: That really starts to take hold in the late 50s and early 60s. And that is at a time when the welfare roles have become more inclusive and more Black families are joining them.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: That's the moment when it starts to get a lot, this program starts to get a lot of scrutiny. And especially in this town, Newburgh, New York.
--:-- Noel King: This is one of the first places that really experiments with work requirements. And it starts in the 60s with this rumor that there are signs in bus stations around the South saying, move to Newburgh, New York, so you can get on welfare and not have to work.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: Completely unsubstantiated. There is no evidence that there actually were any signs like this. But this rumor took hold in Newburgh, and this one politician, the city manager of Newburgh, starts to just laser focus on blaming all of this on these Black migrants on welfare.
--:-- Noel King: And so he wages this war against welfare and puts some of the very first work requirements in place in the country that are meant to sort of, quote unquote, weed out chiselers, as he calls them, people who are just loafing on the rolls.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: We challenge the right of preloaders to make more on relief than when working. We challenge the right of those on relief to loaf by state and federal edict. and we challenge the right of people to quit jobs at will and go on relief like spoiled children.
--:-- Noel King: Very quickly, groups like the NAACP, the local chapter in town, they see what's going on and they push back. The federal government, state government, they start to look and say, actually, this is illegal. You can't put work requirements into this program. That's not part of the policy.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: Eventually, the city manager, Joseph Mitchell, who had championed this idea, is run out of town. The work requirements are canceled, rolled back.
--:-- Noel King: But a seed was planted, and of course that comes to a head in the 80s and 90s when welfare reform takes hold and you hear rhetoric around quote-unquote welfare queens and welfare fraud and all of these people who are just dependent on the government and want a government check and not a paycheck.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: The question I ask about any welfare reform proposal is, Will it help people become self-sufficient and lead a full life, or will it keep them down in a state of dependency?
--:-- Noel King: The big thing that I remember, Chrissy, about welfare reform, those two words together, is that it was Bill Clinton who signed it into law. It was a Democrat.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: What did Clinton's welfare reform law do exactly?
--:-- Noel King: So it basically took what this program ADC Aid to Dependent Children or eventually it became AFDC Aid to Families with Dependent Children what everybody calls welfare It takes that program and turns it into what is now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: The whole idea was, and what you heard Bill Clinton talking about all the time is, This bill will help people to go to work so they can stop drawing a welfare check and start drawing a paycheck.
--:-- Noel King: What does work count as? Like, how do they know that I'm working and what kind of job do I need to get? Like, what are the specifics?
--:-- Chrissy Clark: You're speaking my love language right now. Let's talk policy. So yeah it i think and it is it's really confusing because i think there is this sense of like oh yeah of course you know if you're poor you should get a job you should be working if that's the best way out of poverty but if you look at like the details sort of where the rubber meets the road of like okay we've said we want to require people to work in order to get welfare what does that actually mean? How do we actually turn that into policy?
--:-- Noel King: Basically, what it does is it requires a person to be doing a certain number of hours, usually between 30 and 35 hours, of this list of 12 federally approved work activities, quote unquote.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: And so a paying job could count as a work activity, but then there are all of these other activities. One is job search. There's also going to job readiness classes, sort of these motivational classes where you learn how to dress and how to interview for a job.
--:-- Noel King: There is some vocational training, but only short-term vocational training that counts as work.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: That is the main metric that any state welfare program, they have to show to the federal government each month. These are the number of people that are on our welfare roles who are able-bodied and we've deemed they can work, and so they're subject to these work requirements, and out of them, how many of them are actually doing the right number of hours.
--:-- Noel King: And so what has happened, the whole thing has kind of become this compliance machine where there is so much red tape and paperwork involved in monitoring and documenting whether people are involved in these work activities and proving that they were there at the right time.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: That is what most of the energy is spent on. And a lot of the people that I spoke to who have gone through these programs, they felt actually completely counterproductive to their goal, which is, yes, I want a job, but I've actually had a bunch of jobs. They were super low paying and they got me to this point that I'm at right now, which is that I didn't have a financial safety net and had to turn to welfare to help me because something bad happened or, you know, my car broke down or I'm fleeing domestic violence.
--:-- Noel King: I want to work, but instead I'm being told I have to do these 30 hours of work activities that are not helping me train to get a better job that's actually going to allow me to become self-sufficient and not need to turn to welfare in the first place.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: You know, Chrissy, I have always gotten the impression that this rhetoric about working, working if you want an entitlement, works because it sounds like it's going to work. You motivate people. You give them a reason to get up in the morning. You give them some discipline in their lives. It sounds reasonable.
--:-- Noel King: Does it actually work? Does it improve people's lives and does it make it more likely that they get off welfare in the end?
--:-- Chrissy Clark: Yeah, no, of course. I think it appeals to our sense, you know, the good old American work ethic, sort of the American dream that like we, you know, if you work hard, you can get to where you want to go.
--:-- Noel King: And that sounds so good. And we want to believe that. And it is certainly true that there are some people who have had success with after they've gone through these welfare to work programs.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: But when you look back at what's happened since the 90s, when work requirements were put into welfare programs, there is very little evidence that any of it has had much broad success on moving the needle.
--:-- Noel King: So there was a comprehensive survey that RAND did in the early 2000s where they looked at dozens of other studies of state welfare reform initiatives that had mandated work activities, work requirements, and they found that it could modestly increase employment and earnings in the short term.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: But then when they would go back and check in with those families a few years later, the impacts were much smaller, if not gone away altogether.
--:-- Noel King: And the average earnings of program participants generally stayed very low and was not enough to move most of them above the poverty line.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: As that story in Newburgh showed, and the same thing happened in the 80s and 90s, there are easy reasons that a politician might turn to work requirements. And that's also not to say, you know, I'm sure there are some folks who genuinely believe like this is the best way to get people out of poverty.
--:-- Noel King: But I think if you look at the evidence, if you look at the research, and often people point to caseloads, they say, hey, look, if you look in the 90s and compare it to now, the caseloads have dropped. That must mean the program is working, that people are not turning to welfare because they don't need to because they're not in poverty anymore.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: But if you actually look at the statistics now, out of every hundred families that are in poverty, only 21 of those families turn to welfare anymore. So it's not that there aren't people in poverty. It's just that they've kind of given up on the system, I think often because they feel like the system has given up on them.
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
--:-- Noel King: Chrissy Clark is host of The Uncertain Hour from Marketplace. It is a rigorously reported and beautifully produced podcast. Chrissy, thank you so much.
--:-- Chrissy Clark: Thank you, Noelle.
--:-- Noel King: Today's show was made by Amanda Llewellyn, Amina El-Sadi, Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, Michael Raphael, and myself, Noelle King.
--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. Thank you.
