While the number of working adults who depend on food stamps and Medicaid has ticked up since the start of the pandemic, the number of recipients who work at Amazon and on gig economy platforms has exploded, according to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The number of Amazon workers relying on the federal programs for the poor nearly tripled between February 2020 and September 2025, according to the report published Wednesday. And for the first time, ride-hailing and app-based food delivery companies — Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart — collectively ranked among the top three employers with workers receiving aid.
Walmart topped both lists in 2020, according to a Washington Post analysis of the data, and remains the top employer of Medicaid recipients. But the company’s share of beneficiaries has inched up only slightly over five years, while Amazon’s has soared. (Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Ride-hailing and food-delivery companies, meanwhile, shot past Walmart to collectively rank as the top employer of food stamp users and among the top three for Medicaid users, according to The Post’s analysis. These workers barely registered on GAO lists in 2020.
Walmart is the nation’s largest private employer, followed by Amazon. Other companies with large numbers of employees receiving federal benefits include McDonald’s, FedEx, Dollar Tree and Dollar General, all of which have faced complaints from labor advocates that they pay wages too low to meet basic needs.
“American taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize the starvation wages of large corporations like Walmart and Amazon,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said in a written statement. “It is beyond unacceptable that these corporations, owned by some of the wealthiest people on the planet, are receiving corporate welfare from the federal government.”
The GAO undertook the study at Sanders’s request, reprising a study it first conducted in 2020. The new report draws on September 2025 data from agencies in 11 states that administer Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps.
The report covers Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Washington state, which together have about a fifth of the U.S. population.
Across those states, the GAO found that about 13.8 million working Americans were enrolled in Medicaid in 2024, up from 12 million in 2020, despite many working full-time. Meanwhile, 10.6 million mostly full-time workers relied on SNAP for groceries, up from 9 million in 2020.
Amazon spokesperson Rachael Lighty challenged the GAO’s conclusions. “Amazon is one of the largest job creators in the country, so looking at raw numbers instead of percentages is misleading,” she said. She added that “employers that offer part-time options for those who want them, like we do, are likely to have more people who are eligible” for SNAP and Medicaid.
Walmart, McDonald’s, Dollar General, FedEx, Lyft, Grubhub and Instacart did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Dollar Tree said the company continually “enhance[s employee] pay and benefits to meet their evolving needs.”
A DoorDash spokesman pointed to a 2025 in-house survey that found that a third of workers said they did deliveries to avoid signing up for government benefits. Uber referred questions to Flex, an industry group for large ride-hailing and delivery apps.
“This work is intentionally accessible so people can begin earning quickly when they need additional income,” Flex CEO Kristin Sharp said in a statement. “It increases the likelihood of reemployment after a job loss, cushions income shocks when hours get cut, and helps workers build financial security over time. People who might otherwise fully rely on unemployment insurance or other public assistance can instead turn to flexible work to bridge the gap.”
SNAP, a $100 billion program administered by the Agriculture Department, served about 42 million Americans a month last year, providing food assistance worth about $190 per person or $350 per household. Its ranks have soared since the early days of the pandemic — about 35.7 million people received food stamps in 2019.
To qualify, a household must earn less than 130 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $35,000 a year for a family of three. Late last year, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill tightened eligibility and pushed states to do more screening, knocking millions from the program.
Medicaid, which will cost the federal government roughly $700 billion this year, also grew between 2019 and 2025, to about 71 million beneficiaries from 65 million. The income eligibility for Medicaid is capped at 138 percent of the federal poverty limit, or about $21,000 per year for a single adult. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill, many states are set in January to impose work requirements on the program.
While the programs cover people with a variety of needs — including children, the elderly and the disabled — many recipients are already working or looking for work. The GAO report focuses on non-elderly, nondisabled working adults; their ranks in Medicaid grew by 18 percent across six states in the study, the report found, while their numbers on SNAP increased by 7 percent across nine states.
In part, the spike in recipients working for Amazon and the gig-economy apps can be explained by a surge in hiring during the pandemic, when warehousing and transportation companies expanded rapidly to meet the demands of American consumers sheltered at home.
Amazon’s overall headcount nearly doubled between the end of 2019 and the end of 2025, as the pandemic forced shoppers online. Low-wage workers with few work-from-home options flooded into warehouse jobs, where many remain today.
Lighty, the Amazon spokesperson, argued that the sheer number of new hires is driving Amazon’s ranking in the GAO lists. In general, a new Amazon warehouse raises wages and shrinks the number of Medicaid recipients in the surrounding area within five years, she said, citing an Oxford Economics study.
“Amazon pay is among the best in the industry, regular full-time employees have access to health care from their first day … and 74% of our regular full-time employees are enrolled in an Amazon health insurance plan, well above the 65% private sector take-up rate for full-time workers,” Lighty said via email.
The online platforms also expanded dramatically, more than doubling their number of workers in a phenomenon that has persisted post-covid. The Federal Reserve found that in 2024, 9 percent of Americans earned money through some sort of short-term task, including food delivery, driving and odd jobs.
In most parts of the United States, the platforms do not guarantee work availability or pay, do not reimburse for the costs of gas and vehicle maintenance, and do not provide health insurance. Many drivers have a hard time making ends meet, said Nicole Moore, president of Rideshare Drivers United, an organization of drivers based in California.
“This is poverty wages,” she said. “This is absolutely precarious income.”
Duane Mitchell, an Uber and Lyft driver in Boston, said he signed up for food stamps a few years ago because he couldn’t predict his income, which rounds out to about $17 an hour after the cost of gas and upkeep on his car.
“This work is like fishing. There are some good days and some bad days,” said Mitchell, who receives about $300 a month in food stamps and is also enrolled in Massachusetts’s fuel assistance program to heat his home in the winter. Receiving food assistance “has sure made things easier, taking some pressure off.”
While the apps make it easier to earn a paycheck, that income is far less reliable than other low-income employment, said Erin Hatton, a sociology professor at the University at Buffalo.
“It’s not new that taxpayers have subsidized low-wage employers,” Hatton said. “But there is this new generation of low-wage employers that pay their workers as little as possible. And now there are new methods of doing so.”
Many aid recipients who work for Amazon and in gig jobs may not work full-time, undercutting their ability to earn a living wage, said Angela Rachidi, a federal safety net expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
“Certainly part-time work for a fully work-capable person is not going to make ends meet,” Rachidi said. “That begs the question of why are they not working full-time and are they using benefits to kind of supplement part-time work.”
But not everyone who wants a full-time job can find one: According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the number of people working part-time has risen from pre-pandemic levels. And only 19 percent of part-time workers receive employer-sponsored health insurance, according to the health research group KFF.
While big companies are responsible for the largest share of aid recipients, Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, said smaller firms in the same industries often have the same wage models.
Wherever they work, “people at very low incomes have a tougher time affording the premiums and the out-of-pocket cost of health care,” said Gideon Lukens, a senior fellow on the health policy team at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They are also “less likely to be offered employer coverage in the first place.”
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