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After spending the summer being heckled [ [link removed] ] by constituents who are angry [ [link removed] ] about the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” GOP lawmakers are being advised by the White House to instead focus on the bill’s impacts on “working families.”
No matter how it’s framed, the bill, which slashes Medicaid while giving tax cuts to the rich, won’t help [ [link removed] ] working families. But this new marketing strategy particularly highlights the impact of the bill on people who don’t belong to traditional “working families” in the first place.
The new law requires adults between the ages of 19 and 64 to prove [ [link removed] ] they work at least 80 hours a month to keep Medicaid or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. For SNAP, the requirement isn’t new, but Congress has raised the age limit for eligibility from 54 to 64 and lowered the dependent child cutoff from 19 to 14. Only caregivers with dependent children under 14 are exempt. In practice, this means that the bulk of the new work requirements fall on one group of people: adults below retirement age, without diagnosed disabilities, and without young children in the home.
Policymakers call this group “ABAWDs”—able-bodied adults without dependents. For decades, rules aimed at ABAWDs have made it nearly impossible for them to access the social safety net when they need it, turning a vulnerable population into a convenient political punching bag.
Politicians have long portrayed ABAWDs as lazy and undeserving, using caricature to justify otherwise unpopular cuts [ [link removed] ]. The run-up to July’s reconciliation bill was no exception. As Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said on [ [link removed] ]Meet the Press [ [link removed] ] ahead of the vote: “What is so hard about having a work requirement . . .? We don’t pay people in this country to be lazy.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) went further [ [link removed] ], claiming opponents of Medicaid cuts want “illegal aliens and able-bodied adults playing video games at home to continue stealing resources.”
Attacks like these seem to have worked. A June 2025 KFF poll [ [link removed] ] found that two-thirds of Americans support Medicaid work requirements for ABAWDs. Support jumps to 79 percent when people are told that these changes could help fund Medicaid for other groups like children and the elderly. If you accept the false image of ABAWDs as couch potatoes playing video games, it’s easy to see why the public might support work requirements.
Slightly more than one-third of the US population qualifies [ [link removed] ] as an ABAWD. Roughly one in five live in households under 200 percent of the poverty line, which is close to 28 million people. Contrary to the common image of young single men, 40 percent of these low-income ABAWDs are parents—often of adult children or noncustodial parents of minors. About half are women, and they are disproportionately people of color [ [link removed] ].
But that caricature is wrong on nearly every dimension and has translated into policy that hurts everyone.
So who are ABAWDs, really? In short, they’re far from the narrow stereotype sold to the public. Slightly more than one-third of the US population qualifies [ [link removed] ] as an ABAWD. Roughly one in five live in households under 200 percent of the poverty line, which is close to 28 million people. Contrary to the common image of young single men, 40 percent of these low-income ABAWDs are parents—often of adult children or noncustodial parents of minors. About half are women, and they are disproportionately people of color [ [link removed] ].
Many in this group without legal dependents are in fact caregivers to elderly or disabled individuals. Around 14 percent [ [link removed] ] live with someone over the age of 65. And the label “able-bodied” completely ignores millions who report [ [link removed] ] suffering from disabilities or health conditions that make steady work difficult.
This is because the term refers strictly to those without a recognized disability that would qualify them for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Left behind are those who have short-term disabilities, are waiting for a disability determination (which now averages about eight months [ [link removed] ] or longer), are not “disabled enough” to meet federal requirements, and countless others who fall through the cracks.
Moreover, most low-income ABAWDs work. Snapshot data [ [link removed] ] shows that about half are working at any given time, but that undercounts those cycling in and out of jobs, or in volatile [ [link removed] ] occupations with high turnover and frequent layoffs.
In fact, excluding those who are disabled but not on SSI or SSDI, and accounting for those who worked 80 hours in other months, but not the current month, over 70 percent of ABAWDs are working [ [link removed] ]. The rest are mostly students, or those who can’t find a job [ [link removed] ] despite looking.
And in a given month, less than 2 percent [ [link removed] ] of unemployed ABAWDs report having no desire to work—the so-called population we are “paying to be lazy.” As we’ll discuss in a follow-up piece, the red tape caused by work requirements will inevitably cut benefits for ABAWDs who are working, along with the ones who aren’t. Regardless of which category they fall into, they need food and health care, like everyone else.
In short, ABAWDs as a whole are nothing like the caricature of young, childless white men that politicians regularly invoke to sell their cuts to the safety net. When people are told [ [link removed] ] that most adults with Medicaid already work, and could lose their coverage due to the administrative burden of proving it, support for the new work requirements drops by half.
We’ve seen this story before. The Clinton-era welfare reform bill [ [link removed] ] set a three-month time limit on SNAP benefits for ABAWDs unless they could prove steady work, cutting off one of the only supports available. Even the Earned Income Tax Credit (which some argue is the natural fallback for this population) leaves them out. For instance, in 2020, childless adults represented [ [link removed] ] 29 percent of EITC filers, but received only 4 percent of benefits. The average benefit was only $295 a year, less than one-tenth of what families with children received.
The current GOP attempt to “market” their bill as a win for working families is built on a lie. And as we’ll discuss in our next piece, work requirements won’t just hurt ABAWDs—they’ll hurt everyone else in the process.
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