Dems railing against Trump budget bill’s Medicaid reforms have backed work requirements themselves

One of congressional Democrats’ main charges against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is that millions will lose Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits due to new work requirements.

But despite their complaints, many top Democrats championed similar work requirement measures for entitlement programs in the past.

“We are too familiar with the stories of welfare mothers driving luxury cars and leading lifestyles that mirror the rich and famous,” then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) wrote in a 1988 piece for his home state’s Newark Post.

“We have an obligation to help society’s less fortunate receive the education, training and transitional services they need to work their way out of poverty. In return, we expect a commitment from them to do all they can to succeed in becoming productive members of their communities.”

By the mid-1990s, Biden regularly implored Congress to “require all welfare recipients to sign a contract in which they agree to work in exchange for their benefits.”

The future 46th president later endorsed the bipartisan Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which overhauled the existing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program that guaranteed financial support to low-income families.

That welfare reform bill replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which features block grants to states and requires beneficiaries to engage in a limited number of “work activity” hours.

There are exemptions to that rule — including for individuals with disabilities — and states help determine what counts as “work activity.”

Several Democrats in Congress who were around during consideration of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 have strongly denounced the Trump legislation.

During Clinton-era deliberations over welfare reform, then-Rep. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), now Senate Minority Whip, declared that “the welfare system in America is a failure.”

“My political party, the Democrats, should not be so proud that they do not concede that fact as well,” he said at the time. “We have got to take people off of welfare and put them to work.”

Durbin recently ripped the OBBB for withholding “health care for eligible patients until they meet overly complex paperwork requirements.”

“In the states that have tried these so-called ‘work requirements,’ there has been no increase in employment,” the retiring 80-year-old said last month. “The only impact has been patients who are ruled ineligible kicked off Medicaid because they were drowning in paperwork.”

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who served as the No. 2 House Democrat for two decades until 2023, championed an effort in 1988 to overhaul the welfare system.

“Everybody in this House believes that the welfare system needs to be reformed to build in incentives to get off welfare, to get the kind of self-respect that having a job and providing one’s own income for oneself and for one’s family gives to an individual,” Hoyer said at the time.

But Hoyer has also blasted the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, arguing that it is “one big backbreaking burden on working Americans.”

Reps. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Richard Neal (D-Mass.) also backed the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, officially known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, despite being fiercely critical of the Medicaid and SNAP reforms in the current GOP measure.

“President Clinton’s reforms to social services came in the context of bipartisan negotiation and collaboration that required leaders of both parties to compromise in search of the Big Middle. I was part of that effort toward genuine bipartisan compromise,” Kaptur explained to The Post.

“There was no attempt for bipartisan compromise in this GOP move,” she added, arguing the Medicaid and SNAP reforms were made “just to underwrite tax breaks for Billionaires and raise energy costs at the behest of the fossil fuel industry.”

Pallone agreed that there was a significant distinction between the bipartisan Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and the GOP megabill.

“This is a distraction from the fact that millions of Americans are about to lose their health care and food assistance so Republicans can give giant tax breaks to the rich and large corporate interests,” the New Jersey Democrat said.

“The reality is the overwhelming majority of people on Medicaid already work or are caretakers for loved ones. This isn’t about work, it’s about burying people in so much monthly paperwork that they miss a filing deadline and lose their health care and food assistance.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act implements an 80 hour-per-month work requirement to access Medicaid for able-bodied adults who are younger than 65 and have children age 15 and older.

There are also other savings from Medicaid, including a rollback of the reimbursement rate to states that opted into the Affordable Care Act’s expansion.

Republicans also slapped a similar work requirement onto SNAP, requiring able-bodied adults younger than 65 to work 80 hours a month if they have children age 10 and older.

More than 7.8 million people could lose Medicaid insurance and 2.9 million could lose SNAP benefits as a result of those changes, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.