Republicans and Democrats have reached a debt-ceiling deal. Republicans will agree not to blow up the global economy if Democrats trim federal spending over the next two years, claw back money from the Internal Revenue Service, speed up the country’s energy-permitting process, and impose new work requirements on the food-stamp and welfare programs, among other changes.

Perhaps this is the best deal the two sides could have reached. Perhaps it is not that big a deal at all. But Congress got the deal by selling out some of America’s poorest and most vulnerable families. And it did so by expanding the use of a policy mechanism so janky, ineffective, and cruel that it should not exist. No work requirements in any program, for anyone, for any reason: This should be the policy goal going forward.

The deal, which is pending a vote in the House later today, requires “able-bodied” people ages 18 to 54 without dependents in the home to work at least 20 hours a week in order to get food stamps for more than three months every three years; previously, people only had to do so up to the age of 50. (The deal does expand access to the program for veterans and kids leaving foster care.) It also hinders states’ ability to exempt families on welfare from the program’s onerous work requirements.

Work requirements have a decent-enough theory behind them: If you are on the dole and you are an able-bodied adult, you should be working or trying to find a job. It’s good for people to work, and the government should not send citizens the message that it is fine not to.

The theory runs into problems in theory long before it runs into problems in practice. The point of Temporary Aid to Needy Families, the cash-welfare program, is to eliminate deep poverty among children. The point of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is to end hunger. The point of Medicaid—to which Republicans are desperate to add work requirements, which thank goodness failed in these talks—is to ensure that everyone has health coverage.

[James Surowiecki: The GOP’s unworkable work requirements]

Should infants and kids remain in poverty because their parents can’t hold down a job? Should people go hungry if they can’t work? Should they lose their health insurance if they won’t? The answer is no—of course not, no.

Then, there are the problems in practice. Work requirements impose grievous costs for limited (or possibly nonexistent) benefits. For one, determining who is “able-bodied” is difficult and invasive. Having a disability or a disabling condition is not enough. A person needs to have a specific kind of disability, certified in a Kafkaesque, months-long process. “It is notoriously difficult,” Pamela Herd, a Georgetown professor and an expert on administrative burdens, wrote in a blog post this week. “Not only does it require reams of paperwork and documentation, it requires effectively navigating a complex medical diagnostic process to verify one’s eligibility.” Each year, she noted, about 10,000 people die while waiting for their application to be processed.

It is worth pausing here for a moment to appreciate the cruelty. Imagine you have long COVID. Or incontinence due to pelvic-floor trauma from childbirth. Or an undiagnosed psychiatric condition. You’re having trouble coming up with enough money for groceries, so you decide to apply for SNAP. But you realize you need a disability exemption from the work requirement. You wait months to offer up intimate details about your body to a civil servant, and face a one-in-three chance of getting denied.

Then comes getting SNAP itself. Applying is quick and easy in some states, for some people. It is long and arduous for other people in other places. Half of the New Yorkers applying for SNAP in December failed to get their benefits within a month, as required by federal law; pervasive delays have spurred a class-action lawsuit against the state. If and when people do get approved, they must comply with their state’s work requirements, really two interlocking sets of work requirements. (Don’t get confused!) Folks have to document their hours and log them on buggy online systems. If they’re looking for work, they have to search in certain ways in certain locations. It’s annoying. It’s finicky.

Again, it is worth appreciating the cruelty of it all. Years ago, I spoke with a Texan on food stamps. She had been exempted from her state’s work requirement because she was pregnant. But she suffered a late miscarriage. Did she have to call her caseworker to tell them she had lost her baby? Would the state come after her for not informing them, clawing her food stamps back? Was there some kind of bereavement policy? Did she need to start complying with the work requirement there and then? Another person I spoke with, in Maine, struggled to use a computer or phone and did not have reliable transportation to bring her paperwork to her caseworker in person. What was she supposed to do?

You might argue that such policies are worth it, if they get people to work. But they don’t. Most adults using safety-net programs who are capable of working are working. They just earn too little. And many adults who aren’t working can’t work, because of illness, a lack of transportation, or some other reason. As a result, work requirements at best lead to modest increases in employment, ones that fade over time. In some cases, they do nothing to bolster it. Yet work requirements have a catastrophic impact on the people who will not or cannot comply with them. Those people become more likely to live in poverty, get evicted, and end up incarcerated or homeless.

[Derek Thompson: Why Americans care about work so much]

At a more philosophical level, work requirements cement the narrative that poverty is the fault of the poor rather than the fault of a society with inadequate social services, unchecked corporate concentration, an overgrown carceral system, low wages, and massive discrimination against Black and Latino workers. They bolster the theory that a lack of personal responsibility and cultural rot are the reasons that deprivation persists. They are a way for the state to bully the poor.

Perhaps the best argument for work requirements is that they make safety-net programs palatable to higher-income folks. But the truth is that few people have any kind of granular understanding of these policies; not a lot of people vote on the basis of the fine print in the TANF program.

Republicans worried about poor people working should start supporting policies proven to boost employment, like universal child care and effective job training. Democrats should feel ashamed for ever having supported work requirements. They should feel even more ashamed for offering them as a policy concession to Republicans now, when we have so much evidence of how little they help and how much they hurt.

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Over the weekend, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed on a bill to raise the debt ceiling. If the bill passes the House Rules Committee vote today, then House Republicans will vote on it later this week. As we wait to find out the future of the legislation ahead of next week’s default deadline, we’re spending today’s newsletter thinking about how these negotiations fit into the larger cultural battles being waged across the country.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

AI is an insult now. The aspects of manifestation we shouldn’t discount The blue-strawberry problem The most compelling female character on television

A Struggle for Control

Over the past decade, America’s debt-limit negotiations have turned from an institutional formality into a polarized political debate. And in 2023, these negotiations have also taken on elements of the nation’s culture wars. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein noted last week, the budget cuts that House Republicans have argued for are focused on “the relatively small slice of the federal budget that funds most of the government’s investments in children and young adults, who are the most racially diverse generations in American history.” Programs that benefit America’s young people, such as Head Start or Pell Grants, bear the burden of House Republicans’ desired cuts, while Social Security and Medicare are exempt from budget cuts (unlike in previous GOP debt-reduction plans).

“The budget fight, in many ways, represents the fiscal equivalent to the battle over cultural issues raging through Republican-controlled states across the country,” Ron wrote. This debate is a new front, Ron argues, in “the struggle for control of the nation’s direction.” What’s ostensibly a fiscal feud is also a clash between the interests of the older, predominantly white voters who make up the GOP base and the younger, more diverse Americans who Democrats are coming to rely on.

I checked in with Ron by email this afternoon to see how the bipartisan agreement of this past weekend affected the prognosis for programs that serve America’s young people. Ron reminded me that because the deal calls for overall caps rather than cuts to individual programs, anticipating what the specific cuts might be is difficult, until Congress passes its appropriations bills for those programs later this year. And GOP lawmakers did not end up with the 10 years of spending caps they had initially called for: Instead, the agreed-upon legislation includes just two years of caps and then switches to targets that are not legally binding. But even though the country will not ultimately see the full extent of House Republicans’ initial desired cuts, the proposal itself is notable for what it says about the voters the party hopes to reach. As Ron aptly put it:

Looming over these [spending] choices is the intertwined generational and racial re-sorting of the two parties’ electoral coalitions … The GOP has become more dependent on older white people who are either eligible for the federal retirement programs or nearing eligibility.

For the Democrats’ part, Biden’s own budget proposal sought to increase taxes for top-earning Americans (who also tend to be older) in order to preserve spending that benefits young people. This proposal did not make it into the weekend’s agreement, however.

As we keep our eye on the developments of the next few days, Ron’s conclusion offers a helpful reminder of the stakes of these negotiations:

In 2024, Millennials and Gen Z may, for the first time, cast as many ballots as the Baby Boomers and older generations; by 2028, they will almost certainly surpass the older groups. In the fight over the federal budget and debt ceiling—just as in the struggles over cultural issues unfolding in the states—Republicans appear to be racing to lock into law policies that favor their older, white base before the rising generations acquire the electoral clout to force a different direction.

Related:

Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers Why Biden caved

Today’s News

A drone attack hit Moscow, damaging residential buildings in civilian areas. Ukraine has denied “direct” involvement. Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison to begin serving her sentence of more than 11 years. Nine people were injured in a mass shooting at Florida’s Hollywood Beach Broadwalk on Memorial Day.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Bettmann / Getty

Read. Cynthia Ozick’s new short story, “Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All,” about the seduction of radio. Then read this new Atlantic interview about her writing process.

Listen. The latest episode of our How to Talk to People podcast covers the infrastructure of community—and how the design of physical spaces can either encourage or discourage relationships.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.