On the first Monday morning in June, Jocelyn Walker waited for her car clock to tick 9 a.m., then scrolled her cellphone call history for a number she dials often. She had 30 minutes to spare before seeing her first client of the day at Revived Styles, the natural hair business she runs in a suburb of Detroit.
“Usually I call early in the morning,” Ms. Walker told me. She learned her lesson a couple of years ago, when a paperwork error canceled the food stamps and Medicaid that she and her now 8-year-old son rely on.
She had waited until 9:30 a.m. to call Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services and was 162nd in line. She then missed the return call that came at 4 p.m. It took another day to get a person on the phone — and two months to get their health care and food assistance back.
“I’m traumatized. I’m not going to lie,” she said. Last week, when she was calling to confirm that the state was processing her proof of income, there were 33 callers ahead of her.
If President Trump’s budget bill reaches his desk with its proposed cuts and rule changes intact, Ms. Walker will most likely have to make many similar calls. The bill, passed by the House in late May, would slash nearly $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP and food stamps, between this year and 2034.
The program provides low-income Americans an average of $6 a day per person for food. Its money would be reduced to pay for tax cuts that would give the nation’s 0.1 percent wealthiest households — those earning at least $4.3 million — an extra $390,070, on average, next year alone.
Proponents have justified spending less on food assistance by decrying dependency and touting the expansion of work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid. For food stamps, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the new requirements would save $92 billion by 2034. Researchers estimate that the change could put 11 million people at risk of losing their food assistance — roughly a quarter of current recipients. Four million of them are children. Trump administration officials have argued that food assistance programs create dependency, and they laud self-sufficiency. They have landed on work requirements as the clearest path between the two.
But work requirements do not work. Almost anyone who relies on public benefits can tell you that. So can those people who study these programs in good faith. Research consistently shows that work requirements do not increase employment. In 2023, roughly 80 percent of SNAP households with at least one working-age, non-disabled adult and no children already included someone who had worked in the past year. In similar households with children, it was around 90 percent. For the people who use it, SNAP is often one of two things: a temporary bridge through a rough patch or a supplement to wages that do not cover the basic costs of living.
Research also shows that work requirements often kick people like Ms. Walker off SNAP by forcing them to make call after call and submit document after document, all to prove they have followed bureaucratic rules to the letter. As Ms. Walker knows well, when a hiccup occurs, benefits get cut off.
In one of the wealthiest countries in the history of the world, a missed call means cupboards begin to empty. A typo in an email address means stomachs start to growl.
Americans need SNAP because their jobs often don’t pay enough to cover basic living expenses. That is a problem of wages, not dependency. I know this as a journalist who has covered this safety net for nearly 30 years. And I also know this because I have depended on SNAP while working, too.
When I was writing a book during the Great Recession, my income was too little to cover my rent and health insurance. I spent a full work day collecting documentation and filling out the paperwork for food stamps. In return, I got $4 a week in benefits for six months. On the resulting budget, my diet became so heavy on beets that my urine turned pink. When it was time to renew my benefits, a new caseworker accepted a letter from my book agent explaining the situation: I was working, I was just not being paid well. My benefits rose to $50 a week for the next six months.
Ms. Walker would need to earn $77,000 a year — about $6,400 a month — to cover basic expenses for herself and a child in the Detroit metropolitan area, according to the Living Wage Institute at M.I.T. That sum sounds near impossible to her.
“Whether you’re working for a company or if you’re self-employed, the wages don’t outweigh the expenses,” she said. Her income currently hovers around $800 a month after covering her business expenses and taxes. That puts her family of two well below the net income limit of $1,704 a month for SNAP.
“We do depend on our benefits,” said Ms. Walker, who tries to economize as best she can. She and her parents purchased a chest freezer, so she can stock up on chicken, fish and frozen vegetables during sales. She also keeps a stash of ramen for the end of the month, when benefits run out. She’s familiar with two food pantries that can tide her over when there are paperwork snags. During her morning call last week, Ms. Walker wanted to ensure her next benefit deposit would arrive on time — or ready herself to “stretch a meal” if it would not.
Ms. Walker opened Revived Styles in 2022, and it has offered precious flexibility to her as a single parent with an autistic child. With her parents helping with child care, Ms. Walker has been able to forgo formal care that she estimates would cost around $20 an hour, which is more than she has ever earned. In its best months, her salon brings in less than her top earnings in her past jobs: $14 an hour at a local clothing store where she worked 32 hours a week. To give up the business, she figures she’d need to earn $20 or $25 an hour — pay that’s hard to come by.
Proponents of work requirements, tellingly, rarely discuss wages. Instead, they talk about welfare and dependency. The former term calls up a shameful history of opponents of public spending using racist stereotypes of Black, urban welfare queens to justify cuts — and maintain political support for those cuts. The charge of “dependency” broadens derision to all poor people regardless of race.
Neither term is an honest appraisal of the facts on the ground: Most of the incredibly diverse mix of Americans on SNAP are either working, like Ms. Walker, or are too old, too young or too disabled to be in the work force. They are also racially diverse, with roughly one-quarter Black, two-fifths white, and the rest spread among other groups.
Ms. Walker said that as a Black woman she knows that when politicians raise the specter of welfare dependency, they are talking about her — even if they don’t say it outright. “I do think that it is more so targeted toward Black people; that is an underlying thing that nobody’s actually saying, but everybody thinks,” she said. “I try not to dwell on it.” Besides, said Ms. Walker, whether someone is “orange, black or blue, if somebody’s getting these benefits, it’s because they need them.”
If the Trump administration honestly wanted to end the dependency, it would raise wages. According to a 2016 study from the Economic Policy Institute, for every $1 increase to the wages of low-income workers, spending on government programs, including SNAP, would most likely drop by at least $5.2 billion a year. The same study found that raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 would have reduced spending on government assistance each year by $17 billion (around $23 billion today). Those figures suggest that, even today, raising wages would save more money than SNAP work requirements do.
America doesn’t gain much by ending welfare as we know it without ending low wages. The Clinton administration showed that in 1996, and the Trump administration is trying the same approach in 2025. People like Ms. Walker do not need to be told to work. They do not need to be run through endless paperwork to prove that they are working. They need jobs that pay enough to cover their grocery bill, and they’d get there a lot faster if America would make work pay.
Tracie McMillan is an editor at Capital & Main. Her second book is “The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America.”
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