By Ashley Burnside and Isha Weerasinghe

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently aired an ad about launching work requirements in the state to receive public benefits. The ad relied on tired and classist stereotypes that benefit recipients are lazy and unmotivated to find work and played on the narrative that working taxpayers are supporting those who receive public dollars. This narrative is not new, but because the subject was a white man, the ad caused a backlash among conservative followers. This anger, rooted in deeply racist and sexist beliefs about benefit recipients, distracts from the harm that work requirements are causing in Arkansas and throughout the nation. We believe that frustration needs to be centered around these new policies going into effect, not the subject of the ad.

Work requirements exist in many public benefit programs to varying degrees, mandating that recipients work a certain number of hours per month or risk having their benefits cut or losing them altogether. Typically, the work requirements include exemptions for certain populations who face significant barriers to employment, such as people with disabilities or parents of newborns, but it can be difficult for recipients to prove their eligibility for these exemptions. Under ARHOME, Arkansas’s Medicaid plan, pregnant and postpartum women, disabled veterans, caregivers, and people with special medical needs are exempted from the requirements.

To prove they are meeting work requirements, public benefit recipients must report their hourly work to the state—a time-consuming, complicated, and stigmatizing process that creates administrative burden for both the recipient and the state agency workers. This time and energy could be better spent providing individualized support to the recipients.

Work requirement policies are rooted in the stereotype that public benefit recipients will only work if forced to. This stereotype is especially projected onto Black recipients thanks to the decades-old myth of a “welfare queen” “frauding” the government. This assumption is not only incorrect but also racist, paternalistic, and stigmatizing. Yet it has influenced policy decisions for decades.

Black people have been forced to work for labor and profit in the U.S. since the despicable time of slavery, under the racist ideology that Black people were “lesser than” and therefore needed to be controlled. Even after slavery was outlawed, institutions like sharecropping, vagrancy laws, and incarceration meant Black people were still forced into unequal and punitive jobs. In the 1900s, some Southern states had “farm policies” that lowered or eliminated cash assistance benefits during harvesting seasons to ensure Black parents continued working in the agriculture industry rather than receive government support. But today, lawmakers continue implementing policies to mandate work among benefit recipients under the assumption they won’t work otherwise—replicating the same racist idea.

Most public benefit recipients who can work are already working, from 89 percent of people in Medicaid expansion states to 90 percent in non-Medicaid expansion states. Those who aren’t typically face barriers to employment, such as being elderly or having a disability that limits work. But often, the jobs that recipients have do not pay a living wage, provide consistent hours, or offer health insurance or comprehensive family and medical leave, leaving workers to live in poverty. Individuals may also face systemic barriers to maintaining employment, including high regional unemployment rates, a lack of reliable public transportation, not having access to consistent child care, an inability to get adequate health care and treatment, and more.

Work requirements are not effective at connecting recipients to high-paying jobs or reducing poverty. However, they do kick families off public benefits due to complex paperwork burdens, leaving families worse off financially. Evidence from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash assistance program demonstrates this.

H.R.1, which passed in the summer of 2025, made significant changes to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that created stricter work requirements in both programs. The law added mandatory work requirements into the Medicaid program; Arkansas has already started doing a “soft check” to see if recipients meet work requirements. By January 1, 2027, all Medicaid expansion states must implement a policy requiring people to prove at least 80 hours of work or other community engagement when they apply and reapply for coverage. People may instead submit proof that they are exempt from the policy. This policy will be devastating for individual health and public health outcomes.

In Arkansas, recipients of ARHOME must prove they are working at least 80 hours per month or face losing their health insurance beginning on January 1, 2027. Once in effect, recipients will have thirty days to show their compliance with the work rules before their Medicaid coverage is suspended. These policies will hurt food and health access for up to 25 percent of Arkansans. In 2018, the first Trump Administration gave Arkansas permission to be the first state to try Medicaid work requirements. The result was a disaster: more than 18,000 Arkansans (about 25 percent of those subject to the new rules) lost their coverage, often not because they weren’t eligible but because they couldn’t navigate the new, complex system. Eventually Arkansas was ordered by a federal court to stop their work requirement for Medicaid because it was unlawful.

Rather than condition access to public benefits on meeting work reporting requirements, benefits should address the barriers families are facing to secure a living wage. Families should have access to health insurance and food no matter what. The hype around the ad in Arkansas distracted from the reality that work requirements will kick families off their health insurance and food benefits.