A New Era of Punitive Social Policy
A New Era of Punitive Social Policy
Red state governors and legislators are parroting Trump’s every move, promising to slash spending, and looking to tear down federal standards or guardrails that get in their way.
It is unclear how the full policy agenda of the new presidential administration—combining both petty vindictiveness and the conservative fever dreams of Project 2025—will unfold. But three weeks of nakedly authoritarian executive orders, broadsides against the civil service, and Elon Musk and his minions ransacking federal agencies and their payment systems is less than encouraging. Congressional budget hawks, meanwhile, are promising permanent tax cuts and deep programmatic and budget cuts to pay for them.
At the state level, activists and progressive legislators will try to sustain progress made in the last four years and protect us from the worst of Trump 2.0, especially on labor, environmental, and immigration policy. At the same time, red state governors and legislators are parroting Trump’s every move, promising to slash spending, and looking to tear down federal standards or guardrails that get in their way.
Consider social policy. In some respects, there is not much more damage that a second Trump administration can do. By design and by neglect, federal policy has already ceded program eligibility and benefit determinations to states and local control. Some social assistance programs still show their Jim Crow roots, with their reach and generosity stunted by deference to state and local labor markets. That fragmentation was an effect of the “end of welfare as we know it” in 1996.
As a result, rates and levels of coverage are dismal: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) reaches just 13 percent of poor families in the median state, with an annual benefit of just over $5,000; unemployment insurance (UI) reaches just one in three of unemployed people at the median, with an annual benefit just under $5,000. No less troubling is the yawning variation across the states: in the bottom five, only 4 percent of poor families receive TANF, with an annual stipend of only $2,400, while one in five unemployed workers collects UI, at an annual benefit of barely $3,000.
Deference to the states, in other words, is an enduring laboratory of inequality. Robust social citizenship requires universality, equity, and autonomy. Instead, we get uneven coverage based on categorical eligibility (age, income, parenthood, veteran status), meager benefits calibrated to low-wage labor markets, and a litany of paternalist and often punitive behavioral conditions.
By all indications, the new administration will double down on all of this. Tax and budgetary policies are likely to include deep cuts to social programs. Congress and the White House will undoubtedly return to the key social policy premises of the first Trump presidency, including the conviction that “welfare,” in any form, “delayed economic independence, perpetuated poverty, and weakened family bonds,” and that state and local governments should be cut loose to “tailor their public assistance programs to the unique needs of their communities.”
For the new administration, and for red state legislators champing at the bit, two issues exemplify this latest crackdown: work requirements for Medicaid recipients and the loosening of federal guidelines for food assistance.
Working for Health
We are almost certain to see—through state action, federal policy, legal decisions, or some combination of the three—a resurrection of the horrible idea of imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Russell Vought, Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, trumpeted work requirements during his confirmation hearing. Already in recent weeks, several states, including Iowa, South Carolina, and Ohio, have introduced or resurrected work requirement proposals.
Medicaid is a joint state and federal program that provides health insurance to low-income individuals. Federal standards require state plans to cover a limited range of means-tested or categorically eligible groups, but otherwise allow substantial discretion over who gets coverage and what that coverage includes. That discretion yields wide variations in the income limits for covered groups, as well as the enduring divide between states that accepted the Affordable Care Act’s option to extend coverage to all low-income adults and those that refused.
That discretion does not, however, give states leeway to change the underlying federal standards, including the imposition of work requirements. To do that, states must seek a federal Section 1115 waiver for “experimental, pilot, or demonstration projects . . . likely to assist in promoting the objectives of the Medicaid program.”
Red states have sought to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients for years. The Obama administration routinely denied waivers to this effect, but in a 2018 letter to governors, the first Trump administration announced its enthusiasm for “meritorious innovations that build on the human dignity that comes with training, employment and independence.” Over the next two years, such waivers were granted to thirteen states.
But implementation ground to a halt in the courts. Medicaid recipients in Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Arkansas argued successfully that such waivers failed to “assist in promoting the objectives of the Medicaid program.” In Gresham v. Azar (2020), the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that Medicaid’s statutory objective is to help low-income “families with dependent children” and “aged, blind, or disabled individuals” meet the costs of medical care, so any provision that pared back eligibility was by definition an arbitrary and capricious evasion of that objective.
The controversy stemmed from the right’s insistence that any form of social assistance is “welfare,” said to undermine personal initiative and family stability. In effect, Republicans were applying the expansive and vague goals of TANF (which include “end[ing] the dependence of needy parents on government benefits” and “encourag[ing] the formation and maintenance of two-parent families”) to Medicaid, by proposing a bevy of alternative objectives for the program, such as addressing “behavioral and social factors that influence health outcomes,” or incentivizing recipients “to engage in their own health care and achieve better health outcomes.”
The courts would have none of this nonsense. The Gresham ruling upheld lower court decisions on the Arkansas and Kentucky waivers and concurred that “the text of the statute includes one primary purpose, which is providing health care coverage without any restriction geared to healthy outcomes, financial independence or transition to commercial coverage.” In 2021, the incoming Biden administration withdrew approval of all outstanding and pending waivers that sought to enact work requirements for Medicaid.
For its part, the Supreme Court has punted on the issue. In April 2022 it declined to rule on the legality of work requirements, vacated the cases (including Gresham) that had ruled against them, and sent the issue back to the lower courts.
All of this will now likely turn 180 degrees once again. Both the Republican Study Committee’s 2025 budget proposal and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 call for federal legislation enshrining work requirements. And red states have continued to press the issue: Georgia’s work requirement (the only one still on the books) has evaded legal challenge by attaching the rules to Medicaid expansion—technically increasing coverage, even as it is work-conditioned. Since Georgia instituted its new requirements, a growing list of states have taken steps to constrain or revisit Medicaid expansion along the same lines.
These efforts fly in the face of both Medicaid’s objectives and conservatives’ own convoluted claims. In the short year it was in effect, the Arkansas requirements stripped 18,000 recipients of coverage. “We found no evidence that the policy succeeded in its stated goal of promoting work,” as one assessment bluntly put it, “and instead found substantial evidence of harm to health care coverage and access.”
This is the dirty secret of Medicaid work requirements: they have little to do with the “dignity of work,” and everything to do with paring the rolls of public health insurance. As the Arkansas experience makes clear, the requirements operate not as work incentives but as administrative burdens to disqualify or discourage those in need. If adopted as a national policy, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated recently, such requirements would strip coverage from 36 million Medicaid enrollees.
Beyond the eligibility squeeze of work requirements, red states are looking to dramatically roll back their commitments to Medicaid. Of the states that expanded Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, nine have “trigger” laws that would repeal expansion if federal funding falls below its current 90 percent threshold. Three other states are considering action that would repeal expansion or allow it to expire.
Food Stamp Follies
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides food assistance—an average monthly benefit of just over $400 per household—to one in eight Americans. With the virtual evaporation of cash welfare, SNAP has emerged as the most effective and responsive source of social assistance for low-income families—a fact driven home during the Great Recession and the COVID-19 recession.
The program’s federal rules are administered by the Department of Agriculture and reauthorized by the Farm Bill every few years; these set eligibility and benefits, which are determined and administered by the states. Households with incomes under 130 percent of the poverty level qualify for benefits, whose amount varies according to income and household size. Undocumented immigrants and some documented immigrants are ineligible. Able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) are limited to three months of benefits in any three-year period, unless they meet additional work requirements.
State variations or waivers from these federal rules have generally been used to make SNAP more accessible or more generous. All but a handful of states employ “broad-based categorical eligibility,” which makes recipients of TANF, disability income, or state-level general assistance automatically eligible for SNAP—effectively bypassing asset tests and raising the income threshold to 200 percent of the poverty level. Most states have also received waivers from the ABAWD time limits, allowing them to continue food assistance to this group during periods of high unemployment or in economically distressed areas. During the COVID-19 recession, the USDA suspended eligibility determination altogether, extended maximum benefits to all households, and made eligibility waivers available to all states.
As with Medicaid, the baseline of SNAP benefits is threatened both by potential changes in federal law and by federal willingness to unleash state-level mischief. The first Trump administration sought steep cuts to SNAP by slashing its budget, ending the state option of broad-based categorical eligibility, and curtailing state waivers for ABAWDs. The last proposal would have ended eligibility for over 700,000 people and exposed nearly twice that number to time limits on benefits.
We managed to duck most of this damage. While congressional Republicans have increasingly targeted SNAP, they are fierce defenders of other USDA programs, leading to a partisan standoff over the reauthorization of the Farm Bill (which comes around every five years) and blunting the damage to SNAP. The courts blocked Trump’s effort to restrict ABAWD waivers as “arbitrary and capricious.” And all the proposed changes to SNAP eligibility were suspended by the Biden administration when it took office in 2021.
As with Medicaid restrictions, almost all these plans stand to be recycled. Project 2025 announces a full assault on SNAP, including ending broad-based categorical eligibility and ABAWD waivers and moving the program from the Department of Agriculture to the much more vulnerable budget line of the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, red states clamoring for tighter program restrictions are looking to the new administration for new rules or waivers to dramatically change the ways in which SNAP is distributed. Iowa, for example, has engaged in a multifaceted war on SNAP in recent years. In 2023, the GOP-controlled state legislature proposed rigid new eligibility thresholds and restrictions on SNAP purchases to those goods (juice, milk, cereal, eggs, canned fish, beans, and peanut butter) allowed under the state’s Woman and Infant Children program. The new eligibility rules are now in effect, though the restrictions on purchases were beaten back by public outcry and the state’s powerful food lobbies.
Last summer (as I traced in these pages), Iowa bailed on participation in a supplemental summer SNAP program for school-age children, on the dubious grounds that it would contribute to childhood obesity. Facing backlash, Governor Kim Reynolds requested a waiver allowing the state to rejoin the program in 2025, but using federal SNAP dollars to distribute food boxes instead of direct assistance. USDA summarily rejected the request last October but, with a second Trump administration in office, Reynolds has promised to try again.
The legal basis for such a request are unclear. The USDA was unambiguous in its initial rejection, citing the summer program’s documented track record with regard to both food insecurity and improved nutrition. But everything suggests that the new administration will be receptive to requests like Iowa’s. In its 2018 budget proposal, the first Trump administration likewise advocated converting much of SNAP’s near-cash benefit to government-provided “harvest boxes” of non-perishable goods, whose composition and distribution would be left to state discretion.
The “let them eat commodities” argument is deeply rooted in food politics, animated by the fierce and fanciful conviction that SNAP is at best a taxpayer subsidy for the soda industry and at worst, in the words of one National Review contributor, a “federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency.” Republican state legislators are already reliably trotting out bills that would allow them to pare down the range of products that can be purchased with SNAP.
Trumpism in the States
The policies of the first Trump administration, the Project 2025 blueprint, and the roster of MAGA loyalists in the cabinet all suggest that we are in for a rough four years. For social policy, that trepidation is magnified by the discretion afforded state governments, twenty-three of which (41 percent of the U.S. population) are now controlled by Republican trifectas.
In most cases, state discretion is exercised within federal guardrails that sustain basic (if often minimal) standards for program eligibility, access, and benefits. But those guardrails have little effect if the federal government is not committed to maintaining them, or if federal agencies invite and incentivize state programs to evade them. The recent history of Medicaid and SNAP suggest a troubling new pattern, in which social-policy conservatism in the states and in Washington feed off each other.
As the Iowa experience shows, red state legislators dismantled pandemic-era generosity as quickly as they could but have been frustrated by their inability to make deeper cuts. Now they can expect a much better reception in Washington. The Trump administration is likely to narrow state options to broaden federal SNAP or Medicaid eligibility and benefits, while encouraging state experiments in lean, mean, and punitive social policy.
Colin Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Iowa and the author, most recently, of Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality.
