WASHINGTON – An unexpected name kept coming up as House Republicans crafted their multi-trillion-dollar legislative package slashing taxes for the wealthy and Medicaid: Bill Clinton.
On the House floor, during committee hearings and in hallway interviews, several Republicans have justified their Medicaid cuts by pointing to the Democrat who served as the 42nd president of the United States.
“We are reintroducing Clinton-era work requirements,” Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.) said in a floor speech last week. “One of the most popular things Bill Clinton achieved in his presidency, and he worked with Congress to get it done, was bringing common-sense work requirements to social welfare programs.”
Work requirements — better understood as benefit limits for the unemployed — are the centerpiece of Medicaid and food benefit cuts Republicans are using to offset part of the cost of tax cuts at the heart of their so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. Work requirements were the core of a 1996 welfare reform bill that Clinton signed into law.
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There is, however, little evidence work requirements actually encourage unemployed Medicaid or SNAP recipients to find jobs and lots of evidence they bombard aid recipients with paperwork, causing even some employed people to lose benefits when they can’t keep up. Their return is one of several bitter pills Democrats are swallowing as the GOP advances a bill amounting to a massive redistribution of wealth from poor to rich.
Just a few years ago, Democrats seemed to be escaping the 1990s politics of welfare, in which the government can help poor people only after a state-federal bureaucracy has vetted their deservingness. Now, they’re watching Republicans repeatedly invoke a Democrat to justify health care coverage cuts that will result in millions of people losing health insurance and food benefits.
“I think work is really important in America, and Democrats need to stand up for the value of work, and we should be encouraging work,” Robert Gordon, a former Clinton White House aide who is now a fellow at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, told HuffPost. “But taking away people’s health care and food benefits is not the way to do it, and it’s a completely different animal from what was debated 30 years ago.”
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Republicans originally wanted the Medicaid work requirements to start in 2029 as part of a package of changes saving nearly $700 billion over a decade. Hardliners demanded the start date be moved up to December 2026, a key concession that helped the bill pass Thursday morning.
Even though the work requirements will obviously cut federal spending, Republicans say they don’t count as cuts, and therefore that they are fulfilling Trump’s pledge not to touch Medicaid. Under their logic, people will make their own deliberate decisions to disenroll from Medicaid because they would simply rather not document 20 hours per week of “community engagement.” The paperwork hassle and availability of suitable work aren’t part of the equation.
“Bill Clinton proposed work requirements. This isn’t like some crazy conservative idea,” Rep. Nick Lalota (R-N.Y.), a moderate who vocally opposed Medicaid cuts, told HuffPost on the Capitol steps earlier this month. (All the moderates wound up voting for the bill except for another New York Republican, Rep. Andrew Garbarino, who missed the vote because he fell asleep.)
“We’re restoring Medicaid for the people who rely on it, putting in requirements for people to work that can work,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) told HuffPost after the bill passed the House. “That’s what the Democrats used to be, right? It’s kind of sad that they’re so extreme. They don’t want people to work.”
Moreno and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) are MAGA populists insistent that the Big Beautiful Bill not cut Medicaid. Even for them, work requirements don’t count as cuts.
“If you can work and you’re not working, you should be working. We don’t want to pay people not to work,” Hawley said.
The law Clinton signed rebranded the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, capping its federal costs, imposing time limits on benefits and encouraging states to shrink enrollment through a system of work requirements. Participation plummeted, and so did child poverty, prompting Clinton and others to declare the reforms a success.
In later years, much of the employment gains among single mothers and poverty reduction have been attributed to the strong economy of the late 1990s. When the Great Recession came around, TANF enrollment stayed low, and scholars noted there had been a rise in cashless poverty among people who should have been eligible for assistance, but got none. Fewer than 1 million families receive TANF benefits today, making it one of the federal government’s least helpful social programs.
At a committee meeting last week, Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) entered into the record an article describing the apparent early success of the Clinton welfare reforms.
“The welfare-to-work side under Bill Clinton was a success, and we believe that this one will be as well,” Scott said.
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For a brief time, it seemed like welfare politics had changed. During the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans and Democrats agreed that everybody should get stimulus checks, regardless of whether they proved their deservingness through work. In 2021, Democrats seized the momentum and enacted a near-universal child benefit. For six months that year, most American parents received as much as $300 per child. Child poverty fell as the U.S. joined peer nations in recognizing the economic disadvantages facing parents.
Democrats failed to make the policy permanent, however, after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) refused to vote for it because he feared voters would see the money going to “crackheads,” i.e., the undeserving poor.
One irony of the Bill Clinton name-dropping is that while Republicans may like him as a mascot for work requirements, when it comes to the federal budget, they’re not following Clinton’s example. In the late 1990s, a strong economy, combined with restrained spending and a higher top marginal tax rate, converted federal budget deficits into annual surpluses. Even with its $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and nutrition assistance, Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill would add an extra $2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
In a speech on Thursday before the bill passed, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called out the Clinton surplus and widening deficits under Republican presidents.
“My colleagues have the nerve to talk about fiscal responsibility,” he said.
Gordon, the former White House aide from the Clinton administration, noted that the welfare reform law sought to boost workforce participation by providing flexible funds states could use to offer child care, transportation assistance and subsidized jobs. He also pointed out that the welfare reform law sought to mitigate the supposed evil of cash assistance — not in-kind benefits like health care.
“We’re not talking about people saying, ‘Oh, I’m not going to earn cash because I am getting it already.’ Instead, it’s, ‘I’m not going to earn cash because I have health insurance.’ It’s a much weaker theory of the case, and there’s a lot of evidence it is wrong,” Gordon said.
Clinton, for his part, vetoed two welfare reform bills sent to his desk by a Republican Congress that he considered overly harsh on Medicaid and food stamps, as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program used to be called. Later, the former president told the journalist Jason DeParle, “I thought there ought to be a national guarantee of health care and nutrition.”