History Teaches . . . GOP Policy In the Shadow of the Poorhouse
"Work Requirements" to make money available for guns aimed at ourselves
In the early morning of May 22, by just 1 vote, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a huge bill that is now before the U.S. Senate. The bill is a grab bag of tax and budget changes that will, if passed by the upper chamber and signed by the President, shift government resources dramatically toward the White House’s priorities and toward those of a far-right-wing caucus in the House that exacted a short list of demands in the 11th hour. These include more money for the very rich, less for the poor, less for potentially lifesaving alternatives to fossil fuels, and more for the already robustly funded “threat economy” (as economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis once called it), including the U.S. military and militarized immigration enforcement.
The proposed legislation does the administration’s bidding directly and as it were through the front door, whereas White House officials have thus far pushed their agenda largely through backdoor maneuvers of dubious legality. Federal court judges and the hard-working legal advocates who have argued before them have asserted many times since January 20 that the administration — especially through the actions of an informally constituted so-called Department of Government Efficiency that failed to spend or re-routed the resources of officially constituted agencies — was usurping powers the U.S. Constitution grants to Congress and not to the executive. If Congress asserts its power, signally its power of the “purse,” to do everything the White House wants it to do, then the legal argument dissipates. Of course, the deeper problem, the political problem of a swaggering and unchecked President and the constitutional problem that our whole system of government was designed to create something other than this (power checked and balanced, a weak national state capacity with multiple alternate centers of authority), remains.
As an historian of poverty and social policy (and gender and law), I am particularly interested in the expansion in the bill of “work requirements” for recipients of both Medicaid health insurance and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), the program known once upon a time as Food Stamps. Work requirements, to which no national Democrat I saw in the news objected in a general or philosophical way, are the oldest trick in the book to make poor people experience poverty as their own fault, and to allow people who are not poor to experience themselves as basically generous and OK, despite even making anti-poverty supports miserly and impossible for a huge portion of impoverished people to access.
What is particularly notable and grotesque about the GOP bill and its reception is that the work requirements were expanded — again, with barely a bleat of dissent — on the understanding that their purpose was to force people from the recipient rolls and therefore cut the costs the U.S. incurs in fulfilling its important responsibility to avoid the worst consequences in health and hunger of its distorted and unequal economic system. The Republicans seemed not even to try hiding the fact that the point was to make more money available for very rich people’s tax cuts and more expensive threats - more weaponry pointed at our neighbors and ourselves, more armed guards visited upon us on the night, more contracts with repressive potentates in El Salvador, South Sudan, and points beyond.
This contrasts with an admittedly disingenuous (or mostly disingenuous?) tradition of claims in England and the United States that work requirements were morally improving and not merely a way for wealthy people to save resources by making it too difficult or horrible for poor people to access the assistance a self-satisfied society seemed to promise them. With the help of a popular, anti-populist, Protestantism, rich people used to at least try persuading newspaper editorial writers and perhaps themselves that conditioning aid on “work” was a moral good.
This moralistic and moralizing tradition runs right through the major “welfare reform” of 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, a bill informed by Bill Clinton’s campaign promise in 1992 to “End Welfare As We Know It” and a majority-Republican congressional initiative that Clinton felt obliged to sign. Political scientist Gwendolyn Mink and I wrote a book about the history of that bill and its effects, especially for low-income women, titled Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective (2018), which chronicles, among other things, the ways in which both the “New Democrat,” Clinton, and the Republicans under the right-wing demagogic leadership of Newt Gingrich, claimed the work requirements in the 1996 bill would provide opportunity and a species of liberation to impoverished parents. What really happened was that people lost access to benefits, the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (replacing the old entitlement program for poor parents and children that had existed since 1935) shrank and shrank, and people came to rely ever more on SNAP and Medicaid as anti-poverty supports.
The roots of work requirements lie in the establishment of Workhouses, or Almshouses/Poorhouses with a work component, under Elizabethan Poor Law in Early Modern England and then in the English colonies of North America. The idea - then as now, and as always - was that no one in the society except the truly work-disabled or truly deserving, concepts subject to many diverse definitions over time, should be exempt from “productive” labor.
Image: Two dozen white-presenting women and girls in clean but plain cotton dresses, sitting around a scarred and bare wood floor, at least one woman with face shielded by hand and at least one child in wheelchair. Tagged as “Women and Children in St. Louis Poor House, 1904,” from City of St. Louis Water Department - http://collections.slpl.org/cdm/ref/collection/water_dept/id/51 via Wikipedia essay, “Poorhouse,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poorhouse
Image: A squat and fairly nondescript 18th-century-style building with one possible pauper figure standing outside. This is a 19th-century depiction of the first almshouse in New York City (1736-1797), on the grounds of what is now City Hall. Source: The New York Cemetery Project, https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2019/05/07/almshouse-burial-grounds/
The Common Council in 1734 judged the “‘Number and Continual Increase of the Poor . . . very great and Exceeding burthensome to the Inhabitants thereof’,” and so built an “almshouse,” which “served as a shelter for the poor who were unable to work due to old age or illness and a workhouse/house of corrections for impoverished people considered able to work but ‘living Idly and unimployed’, as well as ‘all disorderly persons, parents of Bastard Children, Beggars, Servants running away or otherwise misbehaving themselves, Trespassers, Rogues, [and] Vagabonds’.”
The proposed GOP bill seeks to bring down the cost of Medicaid (admittedly high: people have health care needs, a universal system would be way more efficient than the current patchwork) primarily through what Margot Sanger-Katz, Andrew Duehren, Brad Plumer, Tony Romm, and Catie Edmondson of the New York Times call a “strict work requirement for childless adults without disabilities, which would require beneficiaries to document 80 hours of monthly work, or prove they qualified for an exception, or else risk losing their benefits. Those new rules would have to take effect by the end of 2026, after the next midterm election, though states could opt to adopt them sooner.” The Times reporters also note that House Republicans had originally planned to phase in these work requirements in 2029, after the presidential election, but moved it to next year “at the behest of fiscal hawks who demanded larger cuts.”
Moreover, “the legislation would make it easier for states to cancel people’s coverage by allowing them to increase paperwork requirements and drop those who don’t respond to requests to verify their income or residency.” [See also the analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/5-19-25health-bythenumbers.pdf]
Just to be clear — neither the “work requirement” nor these other changes purports to do anything to make people’s lives better or even to add more useful output to the economy. The whole point, even as advertised, is to save money from the program budget; the only bit that’s unsaid is that the way money will be saved is simply by driving people away from seeking assistance, or by making it impossible for them to meet the requirements. (Note that although the stated aims were moral and improving and perhaps economically productive, work requirements for institutionalized poor people have most commonly served to pay the costs of the institutions in which they were incarcerated. In other cases, such as in the Charity Organization Society of New York, whose records I read for my undergraduate thesis, impoverished potential recipients of aid were simply given a “work test” to judge their moral worthiness, with no sense that the “work” was in itself useful; sometimes, impoverished widows and mothers were asked simply to carry bricks from one location to another.)
In addition to the work requirement driving people away, it also serves as a form of what scholars call bureaucratic disentitlement. The increased paperwork requirements that the bill allows states to impose are an even clearer example of this kind of disentitlement: Without openly saying that Medicaid will no longer be an entitlement (available to all who meet the stated financial criteria), the state and national governments make it so difficult for people to prove that they qualify, and to do so ongoingly, that people who are fully qualified and in need will never receive assistance — so kids will go without health insurance because their parents can’t prove that they worked 80 hours last month, even if they did in fact work that much, or because their parents can’t take time off from work to wait in the welfare office for a re-eligibility appointment every six months.
The Medicaid cuts also deliver more toward the administration’s nativist, sexist, binary-gendered agenda. It would cut federal Medicaid funds to states that voluntary use their own tax dollars to provide health insurance for low-income people who lack immigration documentation (despite the fact that no federal Medicaid dollars are involved). Similarly, although Planned Parenthood uses no federal dollars to provide abortion care, the bill would deprive Planned Parenthood health clinics, which serve millions of people, mostly female-identified and largely low-income, of all Medicaid health insurance dollars. And it would apply the logic of the “Hyde Amendment,” which forbids federal Medicaid dollars for abortion care, to gender-affirming care, and make trans and nonbinary people who seek that care unable to use their Medicaid health insurance for it.
As in decades and centuries past, these potential cuts and cruelties were not passed without dissent — most notably from disabled people who disrupted the House deliberations. Nobody wants to live in the shadow of the poorhouse.
Image: 3 wheelchair users, two Black women and one white, raise arms in protest during congressional hearing on Medicaid cuts. One of the protesters has a sign reading, “Hands off our Medicaid” and another wears a t-shirt from the activist disability group ADAPT. Four other spectators at the hearing, and two Capitol Policemen (in the process of removing at least one protester) are also visible. From Jessica Corbett, “‘You Will Kill Me’: Dozens Arrested Protesing GOP Medicaid Cuts at U.S. Capitol,” Common Dreams, May 13, 2025, [https://www.commondreams.org/news/republican-bill-to-cut-medicaid]
So interesting to connect attitudes toward poor to Victorian times and before, how little has changed.