Food aid doesn’t make people loafers – research shows government benefits help low-income people find jobs

Millie Morales believes in hard work.

“I feel that as an American citizen, we all have a great opportunity to be able to improve our life,” the 58-year-old woman explained in an interview I conducted with her in 2025. “Are you willing to put in the work, or are you not?”

Morales, whose name I changed to protect her privacy, was a stay-at-home mom devoted to caring for her large family. After her divorce, she worked at social service agencies and enrolled at a local college. Then her ex-husband stopped paying for child support, and she and her eight children faced eviction.

She said she is very grateful for the government benefits she received for the first time, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps low-income Americans buy groceries.

Those benefits made it possible for her to keep putting food on the table and remain housed until she earned a college degree and obtained jobs that could pay those bills. Now she assists families dealing with difficult medical decisions, a job that makes her feel she is able to help others through hard times in their lives.

Learning how people think about work

Morales is one of more than 100 Americans I have interviewed for my research on how people think about work and about government assistance. Currently, I am updating the research on how Americans think about government assistance, which is how I met Morales. Not all of the participants in these projects received SNAP benefits before or after these interviews.

But among those who had, I found her experience typical: SNAP provided a crucial source of support while they looked for work. With the exception of a few in their late 50s and 60s who faced age discrimination and eventually retired, all persisted until they found another job.

My research highlights that most of the people who get benefits through SNAP and other government programs want to work. And SNAP supports their work ethic.

Many Americans need jobs and benefits

A study co-authored by a group of people who got SNAP benefits and an academic research team found that most of the people with benefits would have preferred not to have to turn to the government for help. They get benefits only because their jobs tended to be precarious and pay too little to meet their basic needs.

The average SNAP benefits, which many people refer to as food stamps, as of 2025 are US$188 per person per month, which comes to about $6 a day. About 42 million low-income Americans receive them.

It’s worth noting that 58% of the people who get SNAP benefits are either under 18 or 60 and up. Many of the rest have disabilities of their own or are caring for young children or someone with disabilities – or fall into a combination of those three categories.

SNAP cuts are on the way

Morales was able to obtain the help she needed, but I also spoke with others who needed help and whose applications were denied. Now the holes in the safety net are growing.

Some provisions in the large tax and budget bill that Congress passed in July 2025 could jeopardize the SNAP benefits for millions of Americans.

For example, it expanded the number of people who will be subjected to a three-month limit on SNAP benefits.

And for the first time, the federal government will no longer cover the full cost of benefits; this will start with the 2028 fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1, 2027. The big 2025 tax and budget package will also halve the federal government’s share of states’ administrative costs, starting Oct. 1, 2026.

Many states may have no choice but to reduce or eliminate benefits, threatening support for millions of Americans.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose department oversees SNAP, has said the new rules will “reflect the importance of work and responsibility.”

In other words, the new rules presume that SNAP benefits undermine recipients’ work ethic. There are exceptions, of course, but my research and that of others shows that presumption is wrong for most people who receive those benefits.

How SNAP affects a willingness to work

The government first imposed work requirements for most working-age adults to receive food stamps in the 1970s. It has set time limits for most “able-bodied adults without dependents” since 1996, making some exceptions during severe recessions.

Among families that include children and working-age adults without disabilities who receive SNAP benefits, more than 9 in 10 include someone with a job.

These requirements can become counterproductive when people who get SNAP benefits have to miss work, for example, to provide proof of their employment track record because their caseworkers have lost their paperwork.

A real-world SNAP experiment

Economists Jason B. Cook and Chloe N. East noted in a study originally published in 2023 and revised in 2025 that the caseworker an applicant is assigned can affect whether someone’s SNAP application gets approved.

Caseworkers don’t make the approval decisions, but they vary in their diligence in ensuring that applicants answer all the required questions. Applicants who are unlucky in the caseworker they are assigned are less likely to provide all the relevant information, leading to a denial.

Comparing applicants who were randomly assigned to more helpful or less helpful caseworkers, the economists followed what happened to nearly 200,000 SNAP applicants in one state, tracking their employment and earnings for three years whether or not they received SNAP benefits.

If Secretary Rollins is right that SNAP benefits undermine a work ethic, someone who doesn’t receive benefits should be working more than someone who is the same in other ways but does receive benefits. But that’s not what Cook and East found.

The economists found that for people who had previously held steady jobs, those who received SNAP benefits were far more likely to be working again two and three years later than the ones who were denied benefits.

And they were earning more money as well.

They also found that for SNAP applicants who had not worked steadily before applying for benefits, receiving benefits made no difference to their future employment.

In other words, SNAP benefits and similar programs that help people facing economic hardship can make someone more likely to earn income rather than less so. They do this by providing some of the money low-income people need to put food on the table so they can focus on finding a good job.

As Millie Morales put it, “If I don’t have a decent place to eat and sleep and shower and take care of myself, how am I then supposed to go look for a job, or go to a job, or go to school?”

Claudia Strauss has received funding from NSF and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. No current funding.