Republicans want Joe Biden to lean on ‘job requirements’

WASHINGTON — Having agreed among themselves on a bill to increase the “work requirements” on federal safety net programs, House Republicans now hope they can get President Joe Biden to agree to them.

He Home approved the work rules Wednesday as part of a broader Republican plan to cut federal spending and allow the government to continue borrowing money to cover its costs. The passage of the bill in the House represented a symbolic victory: If House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) wants to sign it into law, he will need the cooperation of Biden and Senate Democrats.

Work requirements, which would reduce benefits for unemployed childless adults, contribute just 2.5% of the bill’s total. $4.8 billion in savings – but they have been a major part of Republican talking points.

When asked to provide the basics of the legislation Wednesday night on Fox News, McCarthy mentioned the bill’s overall savings, rescinding unspent pandemic funds and its crackdown on the jobless.

“We put in job requirements to help people get jobs to get ahead,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy and his colleagues have frequently pointed out that as a senator, Biden voted for job requirements as part of the Personal Responsibility and Employment Opportunity Act, the 1996 law that almost abolished cash welfare in the U.S.

“He’s probably forgotten this, but he’s historically said, you know, people should work,” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), chairman of the influential Republican Study Committee, told HuffPost this week. “It’s one of the areas that Joe Biden will have a hard time going back on.”

Another senior Oklahoma Republican, House Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole, said Biden still has a history of bipartisan cooperation, even if he may have adopted a more progressive economic agenda in recent years.

“They don’t have control of the House, so you’re going to have to sit down and talk to the speaker, the other party,” Cole said. “It’s not a position that’s unusual for him.”

In recent months, Biden has done a few things, including backing a rollback of Washington, DC’s penal code and approving a huge oil-drilling project, prompting some commentators speculate that the president was turning to the center. And in 2021, Biden agree with the republicans that additional unemployment benefits should be phased out.

But Biden and the White House have been relentlessly critical of Republican debt ceiling proposals and the idea of ​​demanding spending cuts in exchange for an increase in the federal government’s borrowing limit. If Congress doesn’t allow the Treasury Department to borrow more money, sometime this summer the government could stop paying bondholders, potentially destabilizing the financial system, which uses Treasury securities as a benchmark for mortgages and other debt.

“Happy to meet with McCarthy,” Biden said Wednesday. “But not on whether or not the debt limit is extended. That’s not negotiable.”

As for job requirements, White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa said the president “has made it clear that he will oppose policies that push Americans into poverty or lose them health care.”

“That’s why he opposes President McCarthy’s proposal to take away food assistance and Medicaid from millions of Americans,” Kikukawa said in a statement to HuffPost. “MAGA House Republicans would rather make it difficult for people to feed their families and get the health care they need than make the super-rich pay their fair share.”

The safety net provisions of McCarthy’s Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023 are intended for adults without disabilities, without dependents, ages 18-55, and require them to work or volunteer at least 20 hours per week to continue being eligible to receive assistance from the federal government. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides 20 million households with a monthly stipend for food at grocery stores, already has a similar work requirement, though it is slightly less stringent and is often waived by states.

He Congressional Budget Office estimate The Republican proposal, if enacted, would subject 15 million Medicaid recipients to work requirements, forcing them to work or volunteer 20 hours a week, and 1.5 million would lose federal coverage, though states would choose to continue covering benefits. health costs for a significant part of those. Overall, Medicaid pays for health care for more than 85 million low-income Americans.

Strengthening existing work requirements in SNAP would put 275,000 people out of work a month, the CBO said.

in a important report last year In reviewing the literature on the subject, the CBO concluded that “work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid have reduced benefits more than they have increased people’s incomes,” which means that benefit cuts do not necessarily stimulate people to seek gainful employment as much as the Republicans say.

Some Democrats have suggested Biden should drop his opposition to negotiating with McCarthy on a debt limit bill. For the most part, though, Democrats have stuck together, and rank-and-file lawmakers seem unconcerned about Biden striking a labor requirements deal with Republicans.

“I am confident that the president will stand where we are at this time,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.). “We are just going to keep pounding the pavement over the fact that they are holding the financial stability of many of our most vulnerable communities at stake for political reasons.”

Echoing Biden, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) didn’t even speculate on what an eventual deal would look like.

“What the Republicans are doing is taking our economy and the world economy hostage,” he said. “I think there is time to have budget negotiations and to have those conversations, but they should not be tied to raising the debt ceiling.”

The Republicans themselves were not unanimous on the job requirements in their bill. Some lawmakers, like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of four Republicans who voted against the bill, thought the proposal didn’t go far enough. Some thought the work requirement provisions went too far, but voted for the bill anyway.

“I think the bottom line is that they won’t be in the final product,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) told HuffPost, noting that Senate Democrats and Biden would not agree to the job requirements. The debt ceiling deadlock, he said, “is going to end with a bipartisan solution at the last minute.”