The GOP should substitute Clinton’s welfare rules for the weak requirements in its reconciliation bill.
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Have Republicans gone weak on work?
In 1996 a Republican Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, a bipartisan bill imposing a work requirement of 30 hours a week for households with at least one working-age parent and 35 hours a week for households with two parents as a condition for receiving benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Today, inflation-adjusted federal welfare spending is 2.7 times its 1996 level, the budget deficit is nine times as high, and the federal debt is four times as large. Polling data show unprecedented support for work requirements. Yet the welfare reform in the House reconciliation bill, which is now pending in the Senate, merely requires 20 hours a week as a condition for able-bodied working-age adults with no dependents to receive Medicaid and expands the current 30-hour requirement of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to more beneficiaries. Why are these GOP work requirements weaker than those a Democratic president backed?
Though almost 80% of 2024 Trump voters support more work requirements for childless, able-bodied adult Medicaid recipients, GOP representatives from competitive districts seem to believe that since more low- and moderate-income Americans are voting for their party, Republicans should be generous with benefits. But it seems unlikely that welfare recipients opposed to work requirements would have voted for the GOP in the first place. And there’s no way Republicans can hold on to voters seeking handouts in the long term. Democrats always win a spending race.
The numbers suggest that a vote against work requirements might hurt Republicans with the very voters they need to win swing districts. Excluding Social Security and Medicare, over 75% of all transfer payments go to households in the bottom 40% of the income distribution, with 44% of the total going to the bottom 20%. Only the lowest-income households have large numbers of adults not working. Ninety-nine percent of middle-income households with work-age adults have at least one full-time worker, and 96% of lower-middle income households with a work-age adult have at least one worker. It’s in the bottom 20% of the income distribution that work falls off: Only 36% of households in this bottom quintile with a work-age adult have someone who actually works.
How many of the remaining 64% of households in this quintile do swing-district Republicans think might have voted for them in the last election? Trying to expand their vote among moderate-income voters who work would be a more productive effort. Based on a June 23 Economist/YouGov poll, 44% of Americans with incomes of $50,000 or less support increasing work requirements for Medicaid for able-bodied childless adults. Strong support for work requirements peaks among those in households earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a year.
A better explanation than being politically savvy is that swing-district Republicans are simply squeamish about spending 2026 talking about Medicaid and food stamps. But there’s an easy fix—drop the existing work requirements in the reconciliation bills and substitute those from the Clinton welfare reform.
The biggest hurdle to the GOP welfare reforms with voters is that Republicans have let Democrats and the media distort Americans’ view of the currently proposed work requirements. Americans do, however, already have a favorable impression of the Clinton welfare reforms. It would be far easier for nervous Republicans to explain a vote for work requirements by saying, “I simply voted for the same requirements adopted by a bipartisan Congress and signed by President Clinton” than to get into explaining what the House or Senate actually did. It would also save more money.
With that political cover, it would be easy to achieve additional savings by imposing the Clinton work requirements on every other means-tested program. It is as easy to defend work requirements for housing subsidies or refundable tax credits as it is work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid.
A final, eminently defensible change would be to require that the Census Bureau count all income in calculating household income and poverty. Today the bureau doesn’t count refundable tax credits, food stamps, housing subsidies, Medicaid and some 100 other federal, state and local welfare programs as income to the recipients. The same calculation should be applied to gauging eligibility for welfare. This simple honesty-in-income measure and extending the Clinton work requirements to all means-tested programs would produce large savings and make the Republican reconciliation bill the most dramatic welfare-reform program in U.S. history.
What is fair about taxing working Americans to give money to able-bodied people who refuse to work? Such a policy hurts both groups, trapping the latter in welfare dependency. Work is the ticket to opportunity and advancement.
A vote against controlling welfare spending today is a vote for raising taxes tomorrow. Social Security and Medicare face insolvency within eight years, the public debt is exploding, and the federal government spends roughly 70% of unobligated general revenues—total revenue not counting taxes and fees dedicated for specific purposes and interest payments on the federal debt—on social-welfare programs.
A failure to control welfare spending while Republicans hold Congress and the White House is an invitation for a future Democratic majority and president to make what’s already the world’s most progressive tax system even more so. America redistributes a higher percentage of gross domestic product than any other country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development other than France. If nervous swing-district Republican lawmakers embrace the welfare state, they are entering a bidding war with the Democrats that they and America can never win.
Mr. Gramm, a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Solon is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. John Early contributed to this article.