Thinner safety net, smaller government to run it

New work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP arrived at the same time as deep staffing cuts across the federal agencies that administer them, a combination that shows up as longer waits and lost benefits regardless of which piece anyone blames.

The 2025 federal budget law added work requirements to two of the country's largest safety-net programs at once. Most Medicaid enrollees covered through the ACA expansion group must now document at least 80 hours a month of work, education, or community service to keep coverage; the Congressional Budget Office projects millions will lose it, largely to paperwork rather than ineligibility. The same law raised the SNAP work-requirement age from 54 to 64 and removed exemptions that had protected veterans, homeless individuals, and former foster youth. States followed with their own versions: Kentucky made a work-requirement waiver mandatory over the governor's veto, and Idaho sought a federal waiver to bar SNAP recipients from buying candy or soda, affecting 130,000 people without adding any new food benefit in exchange.

The programs that survived got harder to reach. During the 43-day government shutdown that began in October 2025, USDA announced it would not issue November SNAP benefits at all, the first lapse in the program's 60-year history, leaving roughly 42 million recipients with missed or partial payments until a federal court in Rhode Island ordered full funding restored. At the Social Security Administration, staffing cuts announced in February 2025 produced the agency's largest one-year workforce decline on record, more than 8,000 positions by April 2026, with longer phone waits and appointment backlogs for survivors and disability claimants that followed. The agency stopped publishing detailed service metrics partway through.

The workforce cuts reached almost every corner of government. The VA cut nearly 30,000 positions, about 6 percent of its staff, through a hiring freeze and deferred resignations. An executive order stripped roughly 40 federal agencies of collective bargaining rights for their unionized workforces. A January 2025 email offered deferred resignation to about 2 million federal employees, and roughly 75,000 accepted. Together with a Schedule F order making tens of thousands of career civil servants reclassifiable to at-will status, the changes reach into the agencies that process the very benefits described above, which is why a work-requirement law and a staffing cut at the office that verifies it tend to produce the same result: fewer people covered.