Want Food Assistance? GOP Says Sell Everything You Own First | Opinion

In their quest for a scalp, any scalp, in the debt ceiling fight, House Republicans have fallen back on an old hobbyhorse from the pre-Trump GOP: work requirements for things like food assistance and Medicaid. One proposal, for example, would require adults under the age of 55 to work at least 20 hours a week to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food aid. Despite their superficial appeal, these requirements are as pointless and counter-productive as they ever were, and Democrats should hold the line against them.

Imposing work requirements on desperate people is one of those Beltway ploys that appeals to Americans' well-developed sense of fairness. Especially to working people on the margins of society, the idea that some people could sit around doing nothing and get paid by the government for doing so is abhorrent. That's why 63 percent of respondents in a recent Axios/Ipsos survey said they supported work requirements.

But just because something polls well doesn't make it good policy. And there are many practical reasons why work requirements are nothing more than wasteful punishment for people who are already down on their luck. The first is the gargantuan, expensive chore that policymakers have foisted on civil servants tasked with carrying out the rules. For work requirements, that means providing a chain of proof and communication between employers and the bureaucrats who have to sign off on the benefits. That takes time, money and resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

Adding layers of bureaucracy serves two purposes for Republicans obsessed with work requirements. One is that it discourages people from bothering to apply for these benefits at all. Take, for example, this application for food stamps, which forces individuals to list all of the things they own that are worth more than $500 and to prove that they have less $2,500 in assets. If the federal government won't help you until you have sold off every last piece of jewelry to the pawn shop, lots of people will simply pass.

In their book Administrative Burden: Policymaking By Other Means, Georgetown University researchers Donald Moynihan and Pamela Herd, show that the toll of this practice, called "means-testing," can cost as much as 15 cents to 40 cents in administrative costs for every dollar spent actually helping people. They argue that "if those programs bury people in paperwork and fill them with frustration, it undermines not only policy outcomes, but also people's faith in the capacity of government to do anything right."

Making people prove that they are working is also just another way of driving away potential beneficiaries or forcing them into making impossible choices. What, for example, about someone doing part-time, under-the-table care work, like nannies or health aides? What about single parents for whom leaving the house to work a minimum-wage job would cost more in child care expenses than the job itself would bring in? What social goal is being achieved by taking that parent out of the house and sending them to a cashier gig at Target for 20 hours a week?

Meanwhile, the onerous paperwork and Big Brother hoops and hurdles you have to jump through turn even those who stand to gain from assistance against social spending programs and indeed against the very idea of government—not because social spending is inherently wasteful, but because it has been made to be that way by self-interested politicians pursuing an agenda that has nothing to do with the welfare of the citizenry. It's how you keep impoverished voters home on election day instead of mobilizing them to protect the programs they rely on.

If none of that is convincing, there is also the more brass-tacks problem that work requirements are ineffective at achieving even their ostensible goals. A 2016 report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found that most people subject to such rules did not find stable jobs, and that these policies did not reduce poverty. Other studies have shown that work requirements do not raise levels of employment for those subject to them. That's because they "rest on the assumption that disadvantaged individuals will work only if they're forced to do so," which is rarely the core problem for the unemployed. On the contrary, most people want stable employment but either can't find it or don't have the resources to attain it.

Instead of work requirements for a mythical class of lazy moochers, Congress should be addressing the real problems that keep people out of the workforce—things like lack of access to childcare and eldercare, which would free millions of people bogged down with grueling domestic labor to join the workforce if they so desire. They could address structural problems like housing instability and affordability, which make it nearly impossible for some people to seek out good-paying jobs, let alone hold them down.

That's not happening because our laws are written largely by people who have never struggled or experienced the terror and grind of actual poverty. As Linda Tirado wrote in Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, "downward mobility is like quicksand." And all Republicans are trying to do here is to give the poor yet another kick down into the muck rather than a helping hand.

David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated a researcher's name. It is Donald Moynihan. We regret the error.