BACKSTORY 55.2 - Making the Budget Bill Work Requires Work

Written by Wade Rathke

The Big, Beautiful Budget Bill has passed the House, but has not made it through the Senate.  Something will get done there, one way or another, and then the conference between both Houses will try to make the sausage, so that Trump and the rich can live with it, no matter the debt or disaster wracked on the American people.  For them to be happy, means, regardless of the gaslighting from the Speaker and the President, lower income and working people will pay the freight with reduced and difficult access to Medicaid, food stamps, and what is left of the safety net.

The reduction in entitlements will be achieved in two ways.  First, there will be new work requirements.  All able-bodied will have to establish that 80-hours a month they were either working, going to school, or volunteering for a nonprofit.  What eligible beneficiaries are not blocked by this barrier, the government intends to pushout bureaucratically through paperwork requirements and deadlines.  In the Arkansas trial on similar requirements, 18,000 were quickly denied Medicaid coverage because they lacked access to computers to comply or missed deadlines.  Squeeze people in this double-sided vise, and 14 million are expected to lose coverage over a decade.

First, a disclosure of sorts.  I first drew a paycheck as an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization in the late 1960s, before founding ACORN, initially as an affiliate of NWRO.  I know a bit about organizing recipients to win their rights to benefits.  I can’t help but keep up with this.  In the same way that I rue the loss of density for union members in organized labor, I also am horrified at how difficult it has become in many states for eligible people to access the increasingly miserly benefits provided by state welfare systems.  All of which had me trying to read whatever fine print existed for this latest assault against lower income workers and their families.

With that admission, here’s a wild, radical bundle of ideas for how take this disaster and make it a tool for change and progress.  We create a benefit rights organization that will provide assignments for recipients to do volunteer to continue to qualify.  This formation would also collect records of hours spent so they are available to state authorities.  Just as we trained welfare recipients to be something akin to jailhouse lawyers who were well-versed in every section of the welfare manual, whether in Massachusetts or Arkansas, so that they could help people apply and represent people in hearing appeals, some of these mass numbers of volunteers would be deployed to offices and front door stalls and tables to help offset the paper cuts denying eligible people of their benefits. 

Yes, this organization would have to be buttoned up tight, because some states, thwarting the requirements and determined to deny recipients their rights to these entitlements, will begin investigations and more to disqualify the volunteer hours and the organization’s ability to coordinate them.  Yes, the tasks would be enormous to daily provide work for thousands or tens of thousands of recipients and to then keep up with their timecards.  Yes, at the same time these work volunteers could add capacity to an almost infinite number of nonprofits and their missions in service to communities.  Yes, they could also hit the doors and deliver flyers to hundreds of thousands daily in order to get this program to scale. 

And, yes, it would take money – a lot of money -- to get this altogether so it was ready for primetime, when the requirements are set to begin January 1, 2027.  It would take millions in fact to start even a pilot in five states or so, and many more millions to get to scale once the model is proven and in the field.  Yes, we would need some of the pro bono legal time that Trump is trying to monopolize to pushback against the state and federal attacks once these bureaucracies realize that the cutbacks they planned for these entitlements were being stymied and repurposed.

I could go on, but let me finish with one comment and one question. 

The comment is simple:  we could do this.  It is in fact what we know how to do.  It’s part of the muscle memory of not just welfare rights organizing, but any rights organizing that looks for handles and then uses them to build mass organization.

The question is equally simple:  I’m serious, so who is with me?