The Great Abandonment gains steam

Work requirements and Medicaid purges build on an alarming trend

Welcome to a Monday edition of Progress Report.

Tonight, we’re talking about the biggest ongoing story in Washington, how it fits into a larger trend disconcerting trend, and what it means for the people actually impacted by these policies.

By the way, tomorrow is my birthday, so if anybody is interested in helping me purchase a sixth-tier English soccer team and provide some relief to working class fans that have been put through the ringer over the past decade, now’s the time to get in touch. Here’s a small primer on the situation, but it’s far juicier than this!

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President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this weekend struck a final agreement on a deal to increase the government debt ceiling, bringing a manufactured crisis one step closer to an unsatisfactory conclusion.

Like any critical spending bill, the Biden-McCarthy deal is chockfull of small and mostly unrelated clauses, giveaways, favors, and technicalities. What I’m most interested in are the pieces that directly impact working people and income inequality, and for the purposes of this story, one in particular: Imposing work requirements on some recipients of food stamps and cash assistance.

Given the initial scorched earth bill passed by House Republicans and the bloodthirsty rhetoric they’d been employing for the past month, some reporters and Democratic-leaning pundits have characterized this deal and concessions that were somewhat less punitive than expected as a win for the White House. Within that narrow framework, the agreement certainly isn’t as bad for Democrats as it could have been, but it’s that narrow framework that leads to bipartisan deals that rip away meager public assistance from low-income Americans in the first place.

In ruling out executive action and instead engaging with Republicans on the debt ceiling, Biden legitimized and rewarded the GOP’s decision to hold the global economy hostage. He also signaled his willingness to strip essential benefits from some of the most vulnerable people in the United States; the only question, once he sat down with McCarthy at the White House, would be how many people would be sacrificed at the altar of bipartisanship and government norms.

The answer is at least 300,000 Americans, the estimated number of people who will lose their SNAP benefits due to agreed upon changes in the Biden-McCarthy agreement. The deal will require non-disabled, childless adults between the ages of 49 and 54 to work 80 hours per month to receive what amounts to just over $9 a day. Should they fail to find and keep work, they’ll be eligible for just three months of that measly benefit over the course of three years.

“This policy will increase hunger and poverty among that group, runs contrary to our nation’s values, and should be rejected,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in a statement on Sunday. “These policies are steeped in racism and unfounded stereotypes about people with low incomes. They ignore the reality that most people who can work do work and that many people receiving assistance are working, are between jobs, or have reasons — like health or caregiving — they aren’t able to work, at least temporarily.”

It is becoming increasingly difficult for older adults to get hired and keep their jobs. In fact, adults in their 40s, 50s, and 60s make up more than half of Americans who experience long-term unemployment, which is officially six months or more without a job. A 2018 study found that workers 45+ were less likely to find a job after a year of unemployment than workers aged 30-44.

There are a number of factors that fuel this quietly escalating crisis. Ageism, which exists on its own, is compounded by a growing tech skills gap, while corporate downsizing often leaves people overqualified for roles that generally go to younger and cheaper workers. Many people in the 49-54 cohort who experience economic hardship have struggled with addiction issues related to alcohol and/or the opioid crisis, and health issues often make more physically demanding jobs hard to sustain. Taking care of older family members can also take people in that demographic out of the workforce for months at a time.

The work requirements will be phased in over the next two years and will then expire in 2030. The deal will also make it harder for families to qualify for TANF, or cash assistance for the poorest Americans, by tightening work requirements for people with children and incentivizing states to really crack down.

Imposing a half-decade of additional restrictions on critical government social programs is a philosophical triumph for conservatives, who overcame Biden’s initial public refusal to even entertain the notion of adding new work requirements to SNAP to accepting them as a necessary evil.

The result is further proof to Republicans that social safety net programs are no longer a third rail in negotiations with Democrats, whose leaders have actually been quite cooperative in dismantling popular government benefits.

The Great Abandonment

I’ve been working on a larger piece about this concept for a little while now, but the timing of this debt ceiling deal compels me to introduce it now.

The panic and uncertainty of the first few months of the Covid pandemic produced a rare moment of moral clarity: Unemployment was soaring, the economy was on the brink of total collapse, Americans were dying in record numbers. and it was incumbent upon the government to step into the breach. 

Over the next 12 months, lawmakers patched together an emergency social safety net that included the broadest expansion of government health care coverage since LBJ’s Great Society; substantially expanded unemployment benefits; the monthly child tax credit; enhanced food assistance; suspension of student debt payments; and a moratorium on home evictions.

Taken together, it was a New Deal for an airborne Great Depression, unprecedented in its size and scope and unrivaled in its positive impact on working and middle class Americans. Child poverty was slashed in half, most people without insurance could access affordable medical care, and many people were able to save money for the first times in their lives.

But instead of taking root as a new standard for the United States, it began unraveling almost as quickly as it came together. Now, just over three years later, all that remains of that revolution are some subsidies for private health care coverage, while even long-standing programs like SNAP and TANF are being further hobbled. This is actually the second blow this year to food stamp recipients, who in March stopped receiving the modest increase to their monthly benefit that’d been provided by federal Covid relief funds.

Talking points sent out by the White House this weekend led off with the fact that Biden successfully prevented work requirements from being imposed on Medicaid recipients, a boast that sounded a bit like someone proudly declaring that they wouldn’t charge people money to access the fire escapes of their burning building.

The Medicaid Tragedy

After three years of a federal moratorium on removing beneficiaries from the low-income health insurance plan, state governments were granted permission to start doing so again in April. Experts estimate that upwards of 17 million people could lose their health care during the year-long unwinding process, many states are moving deliberately to minimize the damage.

Of the handful of states that began right away, most are run by conservatives who have never shown reluctance to throw working people under the bus.

Leading the way, naturally, is Ron DeSantis’s Free State of Florida, where more than 250,000 people lost their coverage in April. Even more egregiously, 205,000 of the newly unenrolled lost their benefits because they were unable to promptly respond to a state request for information — no surprise considering a recent poll found that 65% of Medicaid recipients were unaware of the impending unwinding process.

That Florida is one of a dozen states that have refused to expand Medicaid all but confirms that the Florida Department of Children and Families is kicking the state’s poorest residents to the curb without grace or recourse. Up to 1.75 million Floridians could be kicked off Medicaid, though tireless nonprofits will try to mitigate some of that damage.

Last fall, one out of every five adult Arkansans was enrolled in Medicaid, while 50% of kids were covered by Medicaid or CHIP. Of the more than 62,000 people removed from the program last month, around 55,500 of them — or 88% — got kicked off for not providing a fast or satisfactory answer to the state’s Department of Human Services.

DeSantis has conveniently avoided mentioning his government’s mass health care culling while out on the campaign trail, choosing instead to talk up his cure for the woke mind virus. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on the other hand, has had no such hesitation over bragging about her administration’s aggressive pursuit of making it cost-prohibitive for poor people in her state to see a doctor or fill a prescription.

“Eventually, every other state will have to go through the same process, but they will do it a lot slower than Arkansas,” Huckabee-Sanders crowed in a guest column in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

The numbers out of several other conservative-run states are equally distressing. In Indiana, of the nearly 53,000 people who lost Medicaid in April, an astounding 47,000 of them were kicked off due to the same kind of procedural problems. More than 57,000 Arizonans lost their coverage in April, though there’s no breakdown of why they were unenrolled. The same goes for the 21,000 people who lost Medicaid coverage in Virginia.

There is no evidence to show that work requirements lead to steady employment — it’s the opposite, in fact — and they will have almost zero impact on the federal budget. Kicking people off of Medicaid is equally as ineffective for cost containment at the state level, and it ultimately drains the life out of local and nonprofit hospitals, which are disappearing at record speed.

None of this was about the deficit. Republicans were just seeking permission to inflict pain on as many people as possible, and by framing policy negotiations as mere partisan political battles, the damage they cause becomes inevitable. Nobody should go hungry or lose medical care for the sake of bipartisanship. If the damage caused by these policies were given the same attention as the whispers and rumors being planted around DC, working people’s lives wouldn’t be on the line quite so often.

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