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���������� Note: This past Saturday President Biden signed a budget deal to raise the country’s debt ceiling to prevent defaulting on loans while also reducing federal spending over the next few years. The original bill passed by the House included work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP beneficiaries, along with many other cuts ���������� and the wider disability rights community vehemently opposed. Thanks to strong advocacy from our community, including a national petition to save Medicaid many of you signed, federal lawmakers negotiated to drop work requirements for Medicaid recipients. While the final deal did not change Medicaid requirements, it does include work requirements for a group of SNAP beneficiaries unfortunately. The deal extended work requirements for adults aged 18-54 who are not currently homeless, do not have a disability, did not age out of foster care, and are not veterans. The higher age limit will be phased in over the next year and a half. Read below for more information on the debt deal’s impact on SNAP benefits and whether adding work requirements get more people to work. 

How the Debt Ceiling Deal Will Impact SNAP Benefits
By Solcyre Burga | Time | June 4, 2023

The highly-debated debt ceiling deal, which Biden signed on Saturday to prevent the country from falling into default, made cuts to federal spending— including new work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Concessions with Republican legislators increased the age at which SNAP beneficiaries would need to provide proof of work to 54 years old, an act that anti-hunger advocates say will be detrimental for older adults who will lose their eligibility. The deal does however make some exceptions to the new rule, exempting veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young adults aged 18 to 24 who were previously in foster care from the new requirements.

“There was a lot at stake for the country but the provisions that were included with regard to SNAP really did not have to be added to the debt ceiling,” says Ellen Vollinger, SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). “The amount of money that gets taken away from people on SNAP as a result of this debt deal has enormous consequences for them on an individual level.”

The deal is the latest to affect SNAP, which was already impacted earlier this year after Congress ended pandemic-era emergency allotments to the program, affecting more than 41 million Americans.

Here’s what to know about the deal.

What Are the Work Requirement Changes?
Previous SNAP eligibility provisions required able-bodied adults who were 18-49 years-old without dependents to show they were enrolled in a job training program or worked for at least 80 hours a month in order to receive SNAP assistance.

The new work requirements would expand that to affect adults aged 18-54, meaning older adults will have to prove that they reach the monthly 80 hours quota. The change will be gradual. In October 2023, adults aged 50-52 will have to abide by the new rules. By the fall of 2024, adults up to 54 will have to adhere to new standards.

“People who are in that age category may have had decades of work experience, but yet now something’s happened to their situation [and they will] need to get a new skill set [to return to work],” Yellen says.
Estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities show that some 750,000 adults aged 50-54 will lose food assistance as a result of the change, which Republicans vouched for under the presumption that it would force people to find employment instead of relying on government assistance. A study by the American Economic Association, however, found that SNAP’s work-reporting requirement does not “increase economic self-sufficiency.” Instead, it decreased overall participation in the program by 53%.

Anti-hunger advocates warn that the benefits of new exemptions for veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young adults aged 18 to 24 who were previously in foster care, all depend on how the change will be carried out. “[The impact of this change] is going to depend a lot on how this is implemented, how much the word gets to [potential beneficiaries], and how well trained caseworkers are going to be on this,” Vollinger tells TIME.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO)—which produces objective analyses of economic issues for Congress—, however, recently assessed that the debt ceiling SNAP changes would cost the country an additional $2.1 million, not reduce costs. New work requirements for older adults alone would have cut spending by $6.5 billion, but because a new subset of people are exempt from the work requirement, an additional 78,000 people would gain benefits, the CBO wrote.

Vollinger, however, notes that their assessment does not take into account the reality of how SNAP works across the U.S. She says the new exemptions do not necessarily mean that all newly eligible recipients will be able to enroll in the program, which she describes as a “rigorous application process.” “It’s one thing to look at a category on paper and say, ‘This is the group we don’t think [work requirements] should be subject to. That’s not how it plays out in reality,” Vollinger says.

 

What Else is in the Deal?
Under previous standards prior to the debt ceiling deal, each state had the jurisdiction to waive work requirements on a case-by-case basis. Each state received a certain number of hardship exemptions per year, equivalent to 15% of the number of individuals in the state that were subject to SNAP’s work requirements. Typically, states would be able to accrue and carry over to the following year if not all of the exemptions were used.

And in the past, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says, those hardship exemptions were used to help survivors of domestic abuse, or to help people who were working less hours a week due to temporary barriers.

The new changes, however, reduce states’ hardship exemptions to 8%, and do not allow states to carry over unused exemptions for the following year.

“Let’s suppose you’re a state and you don’t feel you need the exemptions right now [but] you think you’re gonna have greater problems at other times and so you just haven’t used them,” says Vollinger. “This now is going to restrict the state if you don’t use them in the current year you have them. You get one more year to use them and then they go away.”

Do SNAP Work Requirements Really Work?
By Sam Klebanov | Morning Brew | June 2, 2023

New rules requiring older people to work for government food assistance have reignited an age-old debate.
The ancient adage “those who don’t work, won’t eat” sounds like the inspo behind a new US law.

Older low-income people will now have to get employed in order to receive government food assistance as part of the debt ceiling agreement that President Biden signed this week.

The deal raises the age cutoff for work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) from 50 to 54. Adults younger than 54 without disabilities and with no dependents must work at least 80 hours a month to get long-term SNAP benefits.

That would appear to be a win for Republicans, who pushed for more work requirements to cut government spending and incentivize people to get jobs. But, according to a surprise finding from the Congressional Budget Office, the deal will actually cause the government to spend more on food aid since the legislation also expands SNAP access for jobless unhoused people, veterans, and young adults who were in foster care.

The wrangling over the work requirements and subsequent questions about just how much the government will save reopened the decadeslong debate over whether a no-free-lunch-for-the-jobless policy actually boosts economic self-reliance. In short, do work requirements work?

The Grind-to-Eat Mindset
The conservative think tank Foundation For Government Accountability claims that doling out help without strings attached “traps people in government dependency.” It recommends adding universal work requirements to poverty aid programs, arguing the measures would boost the economy by spurring folks into job-seeking action and alleviating labor shortages.

“Let’s help people get lifted out of poverty into jobs,” said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as he promoted work requirements for government aid last month.

But Economists Say the Numbers Don’t Add Up
Though quality data on the subject is hard to come by, many researchers say that having a job as a prerequisite for getting food from Uncle Sam doesn’t necessarily motivate people to start beefing up their resume. Work requirements for SNAP had no effect on employment among recipients, according to a 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper. SNAP work requirements reduced the number of people receiving food subsidies by more than 50%.

Work requirements for SNAP add cumbersome paperwork to the application process that can prevent people from accessing benefits, according to social safety net scholar Jason Cook at the University of Utah. His latest research suggests some people do end up working less for a short time after getting on SNAP, but that’s likely because they’re using that time to search for a better job.

Economist Elena Prager, who co-authored the NBER study, told Morning Brew that people aren’t jobless because they are choosing to freeload off SNAP instead. She blames challenges like “homelessness, undocumented disability, or lack of access to transit” for keeping folks out of the workforce. Prager says there’s evidence that subsidizing the income of low-wage workers could be a better way to nudge more people to work.

Zoom out: The debate over what the government owes jobless Americans goes beyond food. Work requirements for Medicaid and cash assistance for low-income families with kids were also on the table during debt ceiling negotiations.—SK