By Ashley Burnside and Isha Weerasinghe
Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently aired an ad about launching work requirements in the state to receive public benefits. The ad relied on tired and classist stereotypes that benefit recipients are lazy and unmotivated to find work and played on the narrative that working taxpayers are supporting those who receive public dollars. This narrative is not new, but because the subject was a white man, the ad caused a backlash among conservative followers. This anger, rooted in deeply racist and sexist beliefs about benefit recipients, distracts from the harm that work requirements are causing in Arkansas and throughout the nation. We believe that frustration needs to be centered around these new policies going into effect, not the subject of the ad.
Work requirements exist in many public benefit programs to varying degrees, mandating that recipients work a certain number of hours per month or risk having their benefits cut or losing them altogether. Typically, the work requirements include exemptions for certain populations who face significant barriers to employment, such as people with disabilities or parents of newborns, but it can be difficult for recipients to prove their eligibility for these exemptions. Under ARHOME, Arkansas’s Medicaid plan, pregnant and postpartum women, disabled veterans, caregivers, and people with special medical needs are exempted from the requirements.
To prove they are meeting work requirements, public benefit recipients must report their hourly work to the state—a time-consuming, complicated, and stigmatizing process that creates administrative burden for both the recipient and the state agency workers. This time and energy could be better spent providing individualized support to the recipients.
Work requirement policies are rooted in the stereotype that public benefit recipients will only work if forced to. This stereotype is especially projected onto Black recipients thanks to the decades-old myth of a “welfare queen” “frauding” the government. This assumption is not only incorrect but also racist, paternalistic, and stigmatizing. Yet it has influenced policy decisions for decades.
Black people have been forced to work for labor and profit in the U.S. since the despicable time of slavery, under the racist ideology that Black people were “lesser than” and therefore needed to be controlled. Even after slavery was outlawed, institutions like sharecropping, vagrancy laws, and incarceration meant Black people were still forced into unequal and punitive jobs. In the 1900s, some Southern states had “farm policies” that lowered or eliminated cash assistance benefits during harvesting seasons to ensure Black parents continued working in the agriculture industry rather than receive government support. But today, lawmakers continue implementing policies to mandate work among benefit recipients under the assumption they won’t work otherwise—replicating the same racist idea.
Most public benefit recipients who can work are already working, from 89 percent of people in Medicaid expansion states to 90 percent in non-Medicaid expansion states. Those who aren’t typically face barriers to employment, such as being elderly or having a disability that limits work. But often, the jobs that recipients have do not pay a living wage, provide consistent hours, or offer health insurance or comprehensive family and medical leave, leaving workers to live in poverty. Individuals may also face systemic barriers to maintaining employment, including high regional unemployment rates, a lack of reliable public transportation, not having access to consistent child care, an inability to get adequate health care and treatment, and more.
Work requirements are not effective at connecting recipients to high-paying jobs or reducing poverty. However, they do kick families off public benefits due to complex paperwork burdens, leaving families worse off financially. Evidence from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash assistance program demonstrates this.
H.R.1, which passed in the summer of 2025, made significant changes to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that created stricter work requirements in both programs. The law added mandatory work requirements into the Medicaid program; Arkansas has already started doing a “soft check” to see if recipients meet work requirements. By January 1, 2027, all Medicaid expansion states must implement a policy requiring people to prove at least 80 hours of work or other community engagement when they apply and reapply for coverage. People may instead submit proof that they are exempt from the policy. This policy will be devastating for individual health and public health outcomes.
In Arkansas, recipients of ARHOME must prove they are working at least 80 hours per month or face losing their health insurance beginning on January 1, 2027. Once in effect, recipients will have thirty days to show their compliance with the work rules before their Medicaid coverage is suspended. These policies will hurt food and health access for up to 25 percent of Arkansans. In 2018, the first Trump Administration gave Arkansas permission to be the first state to try Medicaid work requirements. The result was a disaster: more than 18,000 Arkansans (about 25 percent of those subject to the new rules) lost their coverage, often not because they weren’t eligible but because they couldn’t navigate the new, complex system. Eventually Arkansas was ordered by a federal court to stop their work requirement for Medicaid because it was unlawful.
Rather than condition access to public benefits on meeting work reporting requirements, benefits should address the barriers families are facing to secure a living wage. Families should have access to health insurance and food no matter what. The hype around the ad in Arkansas distracted from the reality that work requirements will kick families off their health insurance and food benefits.
Throughout the history of the United States, impacts of colonialization, patriarchy, and white supremacy have influenced our public policies. Exclusionary laws aiming to bar people of certain races or genders from living full lives provide us with the most obvious example. However, we can find many examples of laws written with the stated purpose of supporting the public that enable access to benefits only if you live life in a specific way deemed appropriate by policymakers.
In 1996, Congress and President Bill Clinton passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which made significant changes to our nation’s public benefits system. The legislation came on the heels of the “welfare queen” narrative promoted in the 1980s, intended to fuel resentment toward people living in poverty by falsely painting them as “lazy” and “fraudulent.” PRWORA adopted this narrative by implementing new requirements to access public benefits that ultimately deem whether recipients are “deserving” based on behaviors, immigration status, and work status.
The Public Benefits Justice Team at CLASP, with support from a few of our colleagues and partners, has created a blog series to explore the ways that behavioral control within policies have shaped public benefits. We hope that the series provokes some thought and ideas of how we can work together to reenvision public benefits to truly ensure everyone can thrive.
By Ashley Burnside | October 26, 2026
By Ashley Burnside
Note: this blog is part of our Denying Autonomy to Benefit Recipients series, which you can see here.
Prevailing racist and paternalistic narratives about people living in poverty has inspired policies rooted in behavioral control within public benefit programs. These policies require people to behave in a certain way or have a specific family configuration to be eligible to receive certain public benefits. For example, cash assistance is often tied to specific requirements such as that a parent must engage in work activities for a certain number of hours per week for the family to receive cash. The current benefit structures are reflective of decades of controlling policies implemented in response to sexist and racist assumptions that Black mothers applied for welfare at higher rates to avoid working and instead rely on government benefits for their livelihood.
These policies are rooted in a history of behavioral requirements to receive cash aid. Under Aid to Dependent Children (a predecessor to today’s cash assistance program), some states implemented home searches and midnight raids to determine if a man was in the household of a woman receiving monthly cash assistance. The assumption behind these practices was that such a man should be financially supporting the household, rather than the government. If a mother receiving cash assistance lived with a man who was not the father of her children, her benefits could be cut under state “man in the house” laws. Between the 1940s and 1960s, some states passed “suitable home” laws that allowed caseworkers to deny cash benefits to families if they were deemed unfit due to moral or health determinations. For many Southern states, simply being an unmarried mother was enough to be deemed “unsuitable.”
In 1996, Congress and President Bill Clinton passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which made significant changes to our nation’s public benefits system. The legislation came on the heels of the “welfare queen” narrative promoted in the 1980s, intended to fuel resentment toward people living in poverty by falsely painting them as “lazy” and “fraudulent.” PRWORA adopted this narrative by implementing new requirements for accessing public benefits that ultimately deemed whether recipients are “deserving” based on behaviors and work status. One of the biggest changes PRWORA made was ending the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) cash assistance program and replacing it with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
While AFDC was an entitlement program that supported families with children living in poverty, TANF is a block grant provided to states that has remained frozen over the past three decades. PRWORA implemented work participation rate measures that states must meet to receive their annual TANF funding and added time limits for receiving cash assistance, creating more paperwork burden for state agencies as well as for recipients. PRWORA gave states a great deal of control in how they administered their cash assistance programs.
Over the decades, TANF caseloads have declined dramatically. In 1996, when the program was created, TANF reached an estimated 68 out of 100 families living in poverty; in 2023, the program only reached 21 out of 100 families. Despite claims to the contrary, this caseload decline is not because families are financially stable and no longer need cash support. Rather, this decline is largely driven by families who are eligible for cash assistance no longer receiving it. Complicated paperwork requirements, time limits, restrictive work reporting requirements, small monthly benefits, and stigma all contribute to this phenomenon.
In addition to establishing the work participation rate and time limits, PRWORA also implemented new and continued existing policies to control how parents formed their families and financially supported their children. Such policies are rooted in paternalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia and include, but are not limited to:
Once the child support payment is made, instead of going to the custodial parent and child, it goes to the federal and state governments to reimburse them for the TANF payment going to the family. This is backwards and means fewer dollars are ultimately going toward the child. Some states have implemented child support passthrough policies that pass a certain amount of the child support payment (often between $50-$200 per month) directly to the custodial parent. Research has found that there are positive benefits for families when they receive child support payments, and has also concluded that when child support payments are passed on to the children, more noncustodial parents pay support, and they pay higher amounts.
This requirement operates under an assumption that the government knows what payment arrangement is best for parents, rather than giving them the agency to determine their own contribution amount and schedule. This policy can leave parents feeling disrespected. Parents must report personal and financial details about the noncustodial parent when applying for their TANF benefits, as well as when they believe they got pregnant with their child. Some parents have reported hesitation about disclosing the name of their child’s noncustodial parent out of fear that it will get them in financial and criminal trouble. Whether families participate in the child support program should be their choice, not a requirement to get financial support.
All states should end TANF family cap policies and implement child-support passthroughs to allow families to keep their child support payments to invest in their children. At the federal level, lawmakers should change the purposes of the TANF program to focus on reducing poverty and promoting child well-being, rather than promoting two-parent marriage rates and reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Federal lawmakers should also remove the child support cooperation requirement and the cost recovery process in the TANF program.
Instead of conditioning cash assistance on conforming to specific household types or engaging in certain behaviors around reproduction and family financial contributions, public benefits should be rooted in the unique needs of recipients. Benefit administration should be centered in principles of autonomy, respect, and dignity, not policing behavior.
By Joshua Eneji
Renting has become a long-term reality for millions of Americans, yet federal housing policy overlooks renters’ economic security. Historical discrimination leaves renters of color especially disadvantaged. Expanding affordable housing is necessary, but universal rental assistance and stronger tenant protections are also essential to reduce rent burdens and racial inequities.
CLASP submitted a comment opposing the United States Department of Treasury’s proposed rule change to reinterpret certain refundable tax credits as “federal public benefits” under the 1996 Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The proposed rule change would restrict access to the refundable portions of the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and the Adoption Tax Credit for those who do not meet the qualified immigrant definition under the PRWORA law. To claim these refundable tax credits, all tax filers would need to attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are a United States citizen, U.S. national, or a qualified immigrant under the PRWORA definition.
This proposed rule would threaten immigrant families’ financial well-being by revoking critical tax credits that lift millions of families out of poverty each year. It would create administrative complexity for all tax filers by mandating tax filers to attest they are a “qualified” immigrant under PRWORA under penalty of perjury. Finally, the change would cause administrative confusion for states that provide state tax credits tied to federal credit eligibility rules.
By Tyler Hicks
Excerpt:
Kaelin Rapport, a policy analyst for racial equity at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), calls this a “sharpening of the edges of inequality.” His colleague Isha Weerasinghe, director of CLASP’s Public Benefits Justice team, points out that higher prices are just one of many variables — including the loss of Medicaid benefits and food assistance cuts from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — deeply impacting Americans’ wallets right now.
“People who are living in poverty or who don’t have high wages or are unable to work are being hit from all sides,” she says. “They already have less purchasing power because of inflation caused by economic circumstances, and then on top of that, they do not have the safety net to be able to support them.”
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Rapport and Weerasinghe, the colleagues at CLASP, share similar concerns about people in the US. Just as the fighting over the Strait of Hormuz contributed to price increases in various goods all over the world, so, too, could the shockwaves of this war affect Americans’ long-term financial and mental well-being.
A recent piece the pair wrote for CLASP points out that, according to the American Psychiatric Association, financial stability is a key determinant of mental health. They also note that HR 1 — the legislation commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill — will ultimately lead to more than $1 trillion in cuts to healthcare funding over the next decade, as well as $186 billion in cuts to food assistance programs.
“There’s billions of dollars being put into rounding up people instead of being put into the social safety net,” says Rapport. “The average person who lives in the United States, who makes less than $100,000 a year, isn’t going to be able to eat more ICE jails or a prolonged conflict in Iran, but they’re going to feel that in their checkbooks.”
On September 23, Jesse Fairbanks was a panelist at the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s Summer of IDEAS series event titled, “From Foster Care to Homelessness: A Film & Conversation on the Fight for Stability,”
By Wendy Chun-Hoon
Excerpt from op-ed:
Earlier this month, the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual report on the nation’s poverty rate. At first glance, the announcement tells a rosy story: Real median household income is up, and the official poverty rate fell a half a percentage point. What the 2025 numbers reflect, however, is the status quo ante before President Donald Trump re-entered the White House. What the “official” numbers omit are the catastrophic impacts of his administration’s policies on low-income families, and immigrant households in particular.
Wendy Chun-Hoon appeared on MomsRising Radio to discuss the affordability crisis. She used the 2025 poverty data from the U.S. Census Bureau to describe how bad public policy decisions created this crisis — and how good decisions could address it.
Listen to her appearance here:
By Kaelin Rapport, Ph.D. and Elyse Shaw
Note: this post originally appeared on Medium.
In mid-June, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a memo calling for states to ignore the integration mandates embedded in Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Olmstead case. These policies and cases are bound together by a desire to end the history of discrimination experienced by individuals with disabilities because of their condition and to provide access to in-home and community-based health services and educational accommodations. However, the crux of the DOJ’s memo is an attempt to undermine the needs of individuals with disabilities by reinterpreting the responsibilities of federal and local governments when administering accessible services in an ‘integrated’ setting.
Wide adoption of the memo’s provisions would be especially devastating for students with disabilities. Elyse Shaw’s experiences accessing and maintaining care for her child demonstrates how the system in place already fails to meet the needs of many students and their families.
The millions of children who qualify for and receive accommodations through section 504, from kindergarten to grade 12, are entitled to a “504 plan,” which includes accommodations such as extra time for testing and assignments, and access to sensory breaks and fidgets. Through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, students may also qualify for anindividual education program, or IEP, which has additional accommodations like one-on-one support or an aide, and comes with more stringent reporting requirements for schools. Both plans are tailored around an individual’s unique needs and ensure integration in the school and curriculum. But 504 and IEP plans are often aspirational. The shortfalls are generally not the fault of the teachers and staff who work tirelessly to provide these services, but the result of administrative obstacles and public school budget cuts that result in staffing shortages and reduced oversight on plan implementation.
When she tried to get an assessment for her child through the public school system, Elyse was told to expect a six- to eight-month wait. She could get a private assessment sooner, but that would cost more than $3,000 out-of-pocket if her health insurance plan didn’t cover the cost. Even with health insurance and private assessments, it still took a year and half to get an accurate diagnosis, which was just the first step in getting a 504 plan.
Even with a 504 plan in place, Elyse still spends countless hours on emails and meetings every year to make certain her child is getting the services she needs.
The accommodations her child receives, even with the system’s flaws, enable her to continue learning and progressing at grade level alongside her peers. The plan ensures that there is at least one paid professional at the school — even though it is understaffed and under-resourced — who works alongside parents to make sure children’s accommodations change and grow with them.
Without the 504 plan and a job with the flexibility to take time to address these care needs, it’s likely that Elyse’s child would be in a specialized school, segregated and isolated, with no accountability measures to make sure she is protected, safe, and given the same rights as her non-disabled peers.
Creating the Conditions for Re-Institutionalization
Many are not so lucky. Almost half of the students with disabilities that require accommodations go without, and a significant portion of those students feel that they need more support.
Without the assistance needed to thrive, they are punished more consistently than their peers. Children with disabilities comprise roughly a quarter of the children given an out-of-school suspension. The consequences of this access gap are further accelerated by race; non-white students, and Black students in particular, suffer harsh disciplinary actions in schools at disproportionate rates and are more likely to have their 504 or IEP accommodations mishandled.
At best, the DOJ’s move to reduce states’ responsibility to facilitate integration for individuals with disabilities could lay the groundwork for school segregation. At worst, the reinterpretation of the integration mandate will channel students with disabilities into the school-to-prison pipeline. The majority of children already swept into the juvenile detention system have disabilities that make them eligible for special education services, and yet only 37 percent received those services while in school.
To understand the Trump Administration’s likely solution to the integration problem, we can look to the proposed plan of building a forced treatment camp in Utah for individuals dealing with mental health challenges. Rather than provide services for individuals with disabilities in a home or community-based setting, they could be forced to go without their accessibility and health care needs met or isolate themselves within a presumably better resourced institution–if they can afford transportation and tuition.
What Is to Be Done?
Weaponizing the ambiguity surrounding state responsibility to accommodate the needs of people with disabilities is the latest in a series of attacks launched by the administration to shrink the federal government’s social safety net. This time, the consequences facilitate the conditions for segregation and mass institutionalization.
To protect children and students with disabilities, we must intentionally reckon with the past in ways that put students with disabilities first and include them in decision-making processes. That will require the commitment of states and education systems to building the infrastructure necessary for resourced, community-based care systems. We also need these systems to holistically define and expand the integration mandate.
Doing this will require states and school districts to hire more specialized staff for all schools, especially staff with the training and expertise to provide assessments, diagnosis, and tailored social, emotional, and academic support. Additional training for all teachers on how to properly adhere to and implement 504s and IEPs is also needed.
Finally, we recommend that codes of conduct and training be developed and disseminated for the implementation of 504 and IEP plans that acknowledge racial stereotypes and their impact on how individual school administrators, teachers, and support staff interact with and discipline students. Without these provisions, the most vulnerable of our students will be shut out or left behind, just like their predecessors.