SNAP Work Requirements Cut Benefits, Not Boost Jobs

The research is unambiguous: SNAP work requirements don’t get people jobs. They get people kicked off food assistance.

That finding comes from The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative available through Brookings, which pulled together years of existing studies on what happens when you attach employment conditions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The conclusion isn’t subtle. “The best evidence shows they do not increase employment,” the analysis found, while producing “a large decrease in participation in SNAP.” For Detroit families already choosing between utilities and groceries, that gap between political promise and documented outcome is the whole story.

Lauren Bauer isn’t hedging.

Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at Brookings and associate director of The Hamilton Project, told Stateline exactly what the data shows. “Everything that we know about work requirements is that they do not increase employment among the groups that are subject to them,” she said. “All they do is make it more likely that they are disenrolled from the program.” She’s watched the research accumulate since 2008, when the last major recession stress-tested these assumptions hard, and her own position shifted as the evidence piled up.

Her argument now is simple: SNAP is an anti-hunger program, not a Workforce development pipeline. Job training, career pathways, employment services, those belong somewhere else, funded differently, administered differently. Folding them into a food assistance program doesn’t build ladders. It builds paperwork. “That’s not an anti hunger program and it shouldn’t be associated with it,” she said.

This isn’t an academic debate. It’s happening right now, on the ground, in counties across Michigan.

Since last fall, households receiving food stamps have been getting notices, formal letters explaining they must meet new work requirements or lose benefits. The changes come directly from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in 2026, which mandated cuts across multiple social programs, including both Medicaid and SNAP. The law shredded exemptions that had previously covered specific populations: older adults, people experiencing homelessness, veterans, and certain rural residents who couldn’t access transportation or local job markets. Those groups now face stricter conditions to keep their food assistance, and many don’t have obvious paths to meet them.

SNAP enrollment is already falling nationally. It’ll keep falling as states work through recertification cycles, according to Bauer, and as caseworkers implement requirements that require documentation many low-income people don’t have easy access to. The Michigan Advance has tracked the policy’s rollout closely, including what it means for Michigan recipients specifically.

Here’s the structural problem that isn’t getting enough attention. SNAP was designed to respond fast when people lose work. Someone gets laid off on a Friday, they can access food assistance within weeks, enough stability to job-search without going hungry. The program was built to flex with economic conditions, contracting when employment is strong and expanding when it isn’t. That’s not a flaw. That’s the point.

Work requirements break that function in the worst possible way. During a downturn, the people who need the program most suddenly face the most conditions, the most documentation, the most bureaucratic friction, right when they can least afford it. They’ve already lost income. They don’t need to also lose food. But the structure of the law doesn’t care about timing. It processes paperwork on a schedule regardless of what the labor market is doing in Detroit or Flint or anywhere else.

Bauer’s point, backed by 10 or more years of documented outcomes across multiple state-level experiments, is that policymakers can’t point to work requirements and claim they’re helping people find jobs. The research won’t support it. What the record shows, consistently, is that participation drops and employment stays flat. Families go hungry. That’s not an outcome that should be dressed up as policy success, and the Brookings analysis doesn’t dress it up. It calls it what it is.

“All they do is make it more likely that they are disenrolled from the program.”