Twenty-four House Republicans proposed a bill to strengthen work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) last week, continuing a long-running debate over work requirements in safety net programs. In recent years, we have seen a lot of back-and-forth on work requirement policies. For example, President Donald Trump’s administration expanded work requirements in SNAP and Medicaid, only to have the pandemic, the courts, and President Joe Biden’s administration disrupt and eventually end those policies. But work requirements remain a popular policy among conservatives, inviting the question: Do work requirements work?
Policymakers use work requirements to counteract individuals’ tendencies to work less when they receive government assistance, which can impede upward mobility. As part of the welfare reforms of 1996, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program—the country’s cash welfare program—imposed work requirements on participants, but Congress has not applied them routinely to other safety net programs. The evidence supporting TANF’s work requirements came from the welfare-to-work experiments in the early 1990s, which showed that requirements reduced welfare receipt and increased employment. However, critics question whether the evidence remains applicable today and whether it can translate to SNAP and Medicaid.
A new working paper by Jason Falk at the Congressional Budget Office provides evidence that work requirements remain effective at offsetting work disincentives in TANF, suggesting that they continue to be a relevant and useful policy tool. Falk studied changes to Alabama’s TANF policy that extended the work requirement to parents of children age 6 to 11 months, which previously had covered only parents of children 12 months or older.
Falk found that the work requirement increased employment by a substantial 11 percentage points (29 percent) among mothers receiving TANF, mainly because they sought and found work earlier than mothers did prior to the change. He also found other positive effects, including overall reductions in TANF receipt (because the work requirement hastened TANF exists) and net increases in income (on average) based on projected employment and earnings. Specifically, Falk wrote:
I find that Alabama’s work requirement increases the employment rate by about 12 percentage points over the first year after families enter the program, which elevates average income by boosting earnings and tax credits.
Opponents of work requirements often describe them as punitive, arguing that many low-income families leaving benefit rolls do not go on to find employment. Falk explored this dynamic as well, finding that the exit rate increased 5 percentage points for those subjected to the work requirement. He wrote that this finding could “largely be explained by a rise in expulsions for violations of the work requirement,” although it is also possible that violators left Alabama’s TANF program for employment without revealing their earnings to the TANF agency. Nonetheless, the results provide a good lesson for program administrators—to communicate and administer work requirements well to avoid unnecessary expulsions. Even with more exits, however, Falk estimated that average income increased for the group subjected to the work requirement once he considered earnings and other available benefits, such as tax credits.
Falk’s research is consistent with past evidence from the welfare-to-work experiments. However, the question remains whether we can apply the findings from this study and earlier studies to other safety net programs, such as SNAP and Medicaid. In some ways, TANF recipients might behave differently than SNAP and Medicaid recipients, even though the TANF studies confirm that work disincentives in safety net programs exist and that work requirements can counteract them.
Regrettably, only a handful of studies explore work requirements in SNAP, and those studies focus on childless adults and offer mixed results due to data limitations and methodological challenges. Some studies have found that SNAP work requirements increase employment (here and here), while others find no positive effects on employment (here, here, and here). Even less research exists on work requirements for SNAP parents because states have not routinely applied requirements on them. Additionally, only one study to my knowledge attempted to assess the effects of Medicaid work requirements on employment, but challenges associated with implementing the policy and studying its effects make those results difficult to interpret.
Where does this leave policymakers? Although it is possible that recipients behave differently depending on the program, it is still logical that work requirements would positively change employment behavior in the context of SNAP or Medicaid, just as they do in TANF. This is why policymakers should continue to support work requirements in safety net programs as a way to counteract work disincentives, and to promote upward mobility. Although critics often condemn work requirements for being uncaring toward the poor, policymakers should consider them an effective anti-poverty tool, especially in light of the evidence that they actually increase employment and raise incomes for families.
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