The deal struck between President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to raise the nation’s debt ceiling includes new work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps — changes that target people ages 50 to 54 without children. Conservatives wanted far more expansive new work requirements, and the deal will actually expand SNAP access to some. Yet the agreement still promises to reinforce historically pervasive stereotypes about low-income working Americans and the elderly.
Agreeing to these work requirements may also undermine the goals of the historic conference the White House convened around food and nutrition equity a mere eight months ago. The White House supported policy proposals by scholars and advocates that included expanding the reach of nutrition programs like the National School Lunch Program and better access to food assistance for college students. It also pledged to end hunger by 2030, signaling the federal government’s commitment to understanding the systematic barriers that continue to keep Americans in poverty and without access to high-quality, nutritious food.
New work requirements that create barriers for low-income Americans to access food assistance not only call into question that commitment but history also reveals that they represent the triumph of politics over evidence. For decades work requirements have been politically popular even as ample evidence has revealed that they actually leave Americans without sustainable employment or adequate food, while damaging the economy.
The modern Food Stamp Program began in August 1964 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act into law. Johnson and the architect of the FSP, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, did not expect the program to eradicate all hunger but they hoped it would stimulate the economy, move farmer surpluses and put low-income Americans on a path to self-sufficiency. For all of these reasons, politicians and the public alike celebrated the new FSP.
Yet, the mid-1970s served as a turning point in the way that Americans understood and talked about the right to food. Opponents of the FSP compared the burdens carried by hard-working taxpayers with the perceived unwillingness of welfare recipients to work at all. One historian has explained that non-recipients of food stamps saw it as their right and responsibility to police food stamp users because of their own “widespread anxiety about the rising cost of living.” One New Orleans woman struggling to maintain her lifestyle, but ineligible for food stamps, epitomized this thinking. She argued that “giveaway programs,” like food stamps, took “the incentive out of wanting to work.”
Tapping into these sentiments, in September 1974, California Gov. Ronald Reagan called the “out of control” FSP “a national scandal.” He boasted that “we introduced [in California] something that had been missing from public assistance for a long time: the work ethic.”
In 1977, eligibility requirements expanded and some political leaders and their constituents escalated a language of fear about the fairness of social welfare programs. They judged the worthiness of recipients based on ideas about work, race and gender. This reflected how a new breed of conservative Republicans like Reagan understood the political potential inherent in these debates.
By the 1980s, Reagan’s attacks on the “chaos” of welfare programs provided a counterargument to the claims just a decade earlier that poor Americans needed help surviving and therefore required an expanded central government. In blaming food stamp recipients, rather than the economic and political inadequacies that put them in poverty, the conservative movement gained traction among disillusioned working- and middle-class voters. By the time Reagan won the presidency in 1980, conservatives were less likely to carry the stigma of “kicking little old ladies out in the snow.”
After winning the presidency in 1980, Reagan sought to slash the budget for food stamps and other welfare programs to finance a massive tax cut. He and his allies moved to exclude the working poor among other stigmatized populations from the program. As the most affected group, the working poor stood to lose an estimated $684 per year in their benefits. Fighting against these cuts, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) argued that many low-income people in his state didn’t make enough to pay for essentials, forcing them to make painful choices like “eat or heat.” But such realities didn’t dent popular perceptions about freeloaders.
To justify the cuts by shrinking the population eligible for benefits, Republicans demanded that work requirements be attached to federal food aid and welfare programs more generally. This meant some low-income people had to meet a predetermined number of working hours or join federal employment training programs. They also had to routinely report their progress to be eligible or to continue to receive their benefits despite the inadequacies of the training programs, lack of vocational training or education and a tight labor market.
Reagan adamantly promised that slashing the FSP funding would curtail unnecessary taxes by removing people who were not poor enough to deserve government benefits from the program. But many Americans had already felt the consequences of the budget cuts combined with a recession by the early part of 1983. A report by a nonprofit research and analysis organization found “dramatic increases” in the number of Americans seeking federal food assistance between February 1982 and February 1983. The number of people seeking food aid had increased by more than 50 percent during that year. Scholars and experts also warned that work requirements were costly and ineffective.
Yet, rather than forcing a reconsideration, these warnings fell flat because of politics. Working and middle-class anxieties over the shifting economy and social atmosphere fueled continued public support for the idea that people in poverty should work for their food regardless of their individual circumstances or the effectiveness of federal workfare programs. The thinking of the New Orleans woman from 1974 had become widespread.
By the mid-1990s, the popularity of work requirements for impoverished people became a bipartisan mantra.
Political popularity, however, did not signal efficacy. What in theory seemed to proponents like a means of helping low-income Americans climb their way out of poverty became, in reality, a bureaucratic and underdeveloped system where more people found themselves persistently unemployed and with no federal benefits either.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which delivered on his promise to enact stricter welfare requirements to force low-income people into jobs, whether those jobs actually helped recipients climb out of poverty or not. Conservatives celebrated the new policy, which validated their decades-old claim that work requirements prevented what they called “freeloaders” from abusing the system.
The 1996 legislation ultimately reshaped ideas about food rights and citizenship. It changed the food stamp program into SNAP, and mandated time-limits on how long able-bodied adults could access benefits. Unless they worked at least part-time or enrolled in one of the states’ employment or jobs training programs, these recipients lost their food stamps after 90 days.
Again, however, good politics didn’t necessarily mean effective policy. The bill allotted $75 million to establish training programs. But that proved to be woefully inadequate. It provided the funding for a mere 230,000 individuals — despite 22.5 million Americans receiving food stamps in 1994. This meant that the bill punished people for not working without providing them with realistic opportunities to find employment. Even worse, it repealed existing employment and job training programs established in 1988 and, as a result, states lost the associated funding.
Clinton’s welfare bill institutionalized long-standing efforts by conservatives to devalue the central government’s responsibility to provide a safety net for Americans and, instead, blame individuals and their perceived behavior for their inability to afford nutritious food.
In the decades since the signing of PROWRA, conservatives have persisted in fighting for stricter workfare requirements that would ultimately bar many low-income Americans from continuing to receive SNAP benefits.
The debt ceiling deal represents Republicans’ first policy success in decades. It directly targets low-income Americans, despite years of evidence that work requirements are harmful and do little to strengthen the economy or American families. That is especially true for food safety programs.
This renewed attack on SNAP recipients comes at a time when millions are already suffering from falling off the “hunger cliff” as Congress allowed pandemic-related emergency measures to expire.
It represents a policy change that ignores the lessons of the past.