On Monday, the New York Times published a long article illustrating the real-world impact of the changes congressional Republicans and the Trump administration have made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. It’s harrowing and maddening, and it shows something important about the way Republicans make policy: Not only do they seek to cut the amount of money spent on social programs, they’re also very creative at finding ways to weaponize bureaucracy against the people they don’t like, especially poor people.
The party that complains constantly about “burdensome regulations” and “red tape” is very adept at making regulations more burdensome and weaving miles of new red tape, so long as the right people are made to suffer. But weaponized bureaucracy is both a public and private problem, and there is a more hopeful story to be told: At least one politician, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is showing how needless bureaucracy in government and the private sector can be attacked in ways that not only improve people’s lives but yield political benefit.
Let’s start with the horror being unleashed on SNAP recipients. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the package of upper-income tax breaks and social service cuts Republicans passed last year, enables the administration to deploy new tools to combat “fraud” in SNAP, i.e. people getting benefits who aren’t eligible. This is a genuine problem, but rather than try to solve it without immiserating those who are already struggling, the Republican answer is to multiply the bureaucratic hurdles everyone has to jump through, including by threatening states (which administer the program) with such draconian punishments that the states feel they have no choice to do it themselves.
Which is what has happened in Arizona, where the Times article focuses:
To avoid errors and the resulting penalties, Arizona quickly demanded proof of information it had generally accepted without documentation unless there was reason to doubt it. Previously, applicants could simply declare who was part of the household. Now many had to get signed letters from neighbors or friends. Caseworkers mostly stopped taking wage data from employers by phone.
Connor Erickson, who manages a Phoenix SNAP office, said the quest for audit-proof verification reached an extreme in the case of panhandling income, when the office asked for records of donated cash it knew most applicants could not get. In the end, it accepted their best-guess estimates, but “we had to make them go through these hurdles.”
“Yes, it’s ridiculous,” he said.
Processing the paperwork was especially hard since Arizona had just laid off a third of its caseworkers after losing a federal grant, and its computer technology is antiquated. At a Phoenix office last month, screens announced that wait times for clients had reached five hours.
I recommend reading the whole article (here’s a gift link) to hear the heartbreaking stories of the people who are finding it difficult or impossible to feed their families under these new policies. As Don Moynihan and Pamela Herd point out, it’s the most vulnerable people — those in poor health, or with the fewest resources — who struggle most to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles being placed between them and the food they need to survive.
To be clear, subjecting people to so much hassle that they find it impossible to obtain what they’re entitled to isn’t some kind of unintended consequence of weaponized systems like these, it’s the whole point. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, over 4.5 million Americans have lost SNAP benefits since the OBBA was passed, including 1.5 million children. Republicans consider this a cause for celebration.
This is just a preview of what’s to come, because the OBBA also imposed “work requirements” on Medicaid recipients — a longtime goal of Republicans — but those don’t take effect until after the midterm elections. When they do, it will be an absolute bloodbath, with millions of people losing their health coverage not because they aren’t working but because they are unable to satisfy the new bureaucratic requirements.
There’s a deeper conversation to be had about the way Americans’ valorize “hard work” and want to deny fundamental things like health care to those who are judged to be insufficiently industrious, but for now we can just focus on the fact that this is one more effort to punish people for being poor, or even lower-middle class. Not only is almost everyone on Medicaid either already doing paid work or has a legitimate reason not to (i.e. they’re in school or they’re a caregiver to a family member), research shows that requiring people to document their work hours or lose coverage has no effect on how many of them are working.
That’s because work requirements are actually paperwork requirements, and like other forms of weaponized bureaucracy they fall hardest on those who have less money, education, and resources and are thus least capable of navigating the obstacle course necessary to retain their benefits.
And it isn’t just a matter of the time and effort required to traverse that obstacle course. There’s another factor too, which is that weaponized bureaucracy is its own punishment, delivered by those in power upon those without it. Like drug tests for welfare recipients — who are actually less likely to use drugs than the average American — the point is to humiliate them and impose a time tax on them. The message is clear: Maybe you can have SNAP or Medicaid, but we’re going to make it as hard and unpleasant to obtain as possible, so you feel the appropriate shame for being poor.
When he was an unknown state representative with dreams of becoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani starting posting videos to social media, including this one about how city bureaucracy imposed enormous costs on food truck owners, driving up the price everyone has to pay for an order of chicken and rice:
The price of a halal plate hasn’t come down to $8 yet (they’re working on it), but Mamdani is making the elimination of bureaucracy, especially in the form of a cumbersome permitting process, one of the centerpieces of his effort to show that he’s attacking seemingly small but meaningful problems:
Remember “Click to Cancel”? It was a regulation passed under the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission to crack down on companies that make it almost impossible to cancel a subscription or membership once you have it. If you’ve ever tried to cancel a gym membership, which can require you to appear in person and present a certified letter while standing on one foot and flawlessly reciting the first three pages of Remembrance of Things Passed in both French and English from memory, you know why this is needed. The rule required those kinds of services to be no more complicated to cancel than they are to sign up for. Unfortunately, an appeals court panel made up of two judges appointed by Trump and one by George H.W. Bush struck down the regulation last year, which is just fine with the Trump administration.
Mamdani is on that too: He just announced the first municipal Click to Cancel rule in the country, as well as a rule requiring transparency in junk fees, to attack that thing we’ve all experienced when you see one price advertised, but then before you click “Complete Order” it turns out you’re being charged a Processing Fee and a Convenience Fee and a Gotcha, Sucker Fee. He’s not the only one doing this: A number of Democratic-run states, including Connecticut, California, New York, and Colorado, have passed some version of Click to Cancel rules.
The lesson here is that SNAP paperwork rules, Medicaid work requirements, the impossibility of cancelling a subscription, and junk fees are all part of the same problem: Those with power weaponizing bureaucracy to screw people over. Showing voters that your party is the one that wants to make life less exasperating and difficult for everyone is just good politics.
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