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Senators Demand Answers on Equifax Plan to 'Profiteer' Off GOP's Medicaid Work Requirements
"Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer," said one advocate.
Feb 05, 2026
Three of the US Senate's top critics of corporate greed and anticompetitive behavior are investigating a scheme by credit report firm Equifax that they say will allow the company to profit from Republican policies that are set to rip away healthcare coverage and food assistance from millions of Americans.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote to Equifax CEO Mark Begor on Tuesday with several questions about the company's anticipated profits from provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that imposed work requirements on recipients of Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Begor told investors last summer that the policy presented a "massive" business opportunity for Equifax, as a product owned by the company called the Work Number is used by many states to instantly verify the wages and work hours of Medicaid applicants.
At least 99 million workers across the country are covered by Equifax's database, which the company has filled with data through exclusive contracts with employers and payroll firms. Equifax has frequently imposed steep price hikes on the product and has been accused of having a monopoly on providing income data to state agencies.
North Carolina's Medicaid program was hit with a 24% price increase in 2022 and a 36% hike in 2024.
"We have very little leverage and recourse to back out," state Medicaid director Jay Ludlam told the New York Times in November.
Luke Farrell, a former employee of the US Digital Service under the Biden administration, told the Times that Equifax owns "a product that has become a core piece of the safety net. I’ve never seen another vendor do such price hikes across public benefits.”
With the new work requirements set to go into effect in January 2027, states will be required to check the database more frequently.
The OBBBA's $1 trillion in cuts to SNAP and Medicaid are projected to cause "over 5 million people to lose their health insurance and over 3 million people to pay higher grocery prices within the next few years," wrote the senators this week.
"But for Equifax, these new threats to Americans’ food assistance and health insurance coverage 'represent the chance to become a lot richer,'" they wrote, quoting the Times' article from November about Equifax's plan to price-gouge states.
The senators continued:
Because Equifax is already dominant in this market, the law’s new red tape requirements allow the company to consolidate power even further, using extractive contracts to price-gouge states, squeeze competitors, and drive up profits. In fact, Equifax is laying the groundwork to cash in by proactively building out a platform called “TotalVerify,” which is specifically marketed as a tool to help “Prepare Your Agency For H.R.1.” Equifax also pitched the platform as a “single-source” for states and government agencies to be able to verify employment, income, incarceration status, consumer address, and phone number history and claims to “help state and government agencies manage the complexities of SNAP and Medicaid programs.” Given that Equifax’s tight grip on this business has “border[ed] on a monopoly,” Equifax stands to gain even more as OBBBA’s red-tape requirements take effect nationwide.
The lawmakers noted that judging from history, the work requirements are unlikely to "be effective at anything but increasing red tape," as the vast majority of Medicaid and SNAP recipients who are eligible to work already do and states have already run "failed" experiments with Medicaid work requirements.
In 2018, Arkansas' program resulted in 18,000 low-income people losing coverage in under a year, with people who had no home internet access and those who qualified for an exemption from the work requirement most likely to lose their benefits.
"Now, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have expanded this policy in a move that will ensure more Americans get tangled up in red tape and lose essential healthcare coverage and food assistance as a result," wrote Warren, Wyden, and Sanders. "That these requirements could allow Equifax to profiteer off of this ‘solution’ [makes] them even more egregious."
Adam Gaffney, former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, summarized the senators' objections to Equifax's price-gouging practices: "Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer. Meanwhile taxpayers will fund the bureaucratic lard."
The senators demanded to know Equifax's per-query costs for each state contract for the Work Number, the number of OBBBA-related contracts it expects to bid for in 2026 and 2027, the company's lobbying expenditures over the past five years for federal, state, and local governments, and whether Equifax plans to retain a clause in its contracts that allows it the “categorical right” to change prices with 30 days’ notice.
"Equifax’s long history of anti-competitive behavior," said the senators, "raises serious concerns about the company’s potential moves to price gouge states and taxpayers."
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'This Is a Wake-Up Call': Critics Disgusted as Billionaire Bezos Guts Washington Post
"Oligarchs are not the benevolent saviors media have long depicted them to be."
Feb 04, 2026
The Washington Post announced massive cuts to its newsroom staff on Wednesday, unleashing a wave of disgust directed toward its owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
As reported by Semafor reporter Maxwell Tani, Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray told staffers at the paper that it would be closing its sports department "in its current form," and would also be "killing its book section, suspending its Post Reports podcast, restructuring its metro section, and shrinking its international footprint."
With hundreds of journalists expected to lose their jobs, Murray told Post employees that the cuts were needed to help the paper "become more essential to people's lives" in "what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles to do that."
Many critics, however, scoffed at claims that cuts at the paper were needed to make it profitable, suggesting the real motivation came from Bezos' desire to take an ax to the US free press.
Brian Phillips, senior writer at The Ringer, rejected the notion that one of the richest men in the world couldn't afford to keep what was once a revered newspaper fully staffed.
"Bezos isn't destroying the Washington Post because it isn't profitable," he wrote in a social media post. "He's destroying the Washington Post because he's calculated that a robust free press threatens the ability of his class to warp society around their interests."
Phillips also implored other journalists to not report on the Post layoffs as "a straightforward business story," but rather "a story about coercive social transformation being imposed by people so rich they've ceased to see the rest of us as legitimate stakeholders in our own lives."
David Sirota, founder of The Lever, said the layoffs should end journalists' fantasies that billionaire owners will rescue journalism in an era of mass consolidation by corporate conglomerates, slashed newsroom budgets, and wave after wave of layoffs.
"The media world’s stunned/shocked reaction to the awful WaPo layoffs shows that even now, so many in journalism still can’t believe billionaires aren’t going to rescue them," he wrote. "This is a wake-up call: Oligarchs are not the benevolent saviors media have long depicted them to be."
Adam Serwer of the Atlantic also raised concerns about the power of wealthy oligarchs to buy and destroy historic media institutions.
"I personally do not think some rich man should be able to buy an institution like this like a toy and then break it when he doesn’t want to play with it anymore," he wrote. "Bezos fucked the paper and instead of fixing it he’s destroying it despite the fact that he could spend the money to make things right without even noticing its absence."
Jonathan Cohn, political director for Progressive Mass, noted that the Post isn't the only media organization that's being gutted by a billionaire owner, referencing billionaire Larry Ellison, a major donor to President Donald Trump, who recently acquired CBS News alongside other media properties.
"What we are seeing with WaPo and with CBS News is that the mega-rich see real financial value for themselves in destroying journalism," he wrote. "Let that sink in."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in a post written before the Post layoffs were announced, drew attention to billionaire control over not just traditional media, but social media as well.
"When we talk about authoritarianism, it’s not just Donald Trump," wrote Sanders. "[Elon] Musk owns X. Bezos owns Twitch. [Mark] Zuckerberg owns Instagram and Facebook. Larry Ellison controls TikTok. Billionaires increasingly control what we see, hear and read."
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Senate GOP Rejects Sanders Amendment to Give ICE's Extra $75 Billion to Medicaid
"Instead of funding a domestic army which breaks the Constitution every day, we should be putting that money to help the people of our country get the healthcare that they need," said the progressive senator.
Jan 30, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders' amendment to repeal a $75 billion funding boost for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and direct that money toward Medicaid "to prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from losing the healthcare they desperately need" was rejected by a slim majority of his colleagues on Friday.
The amendment—which failed 49-51—is one of seven Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) agreed to allow votes on before senators moved to an appropriations bill to avert another full-blown federal government shutdown, which passed 71-29. Although the White House is preparing for a shutdown because funding lapses at midnight, the House of Representatives is expected to send the spending bill to President Donald Trump's desk on Monday.
Sanders' (I-Vt.) amendment targeted $75 billion in ICE funding included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the budget package that congressional Republicans and Trump imposed last summer. In addition to giving a bunch of extra money to an agency that's violently raiding US cities as part of the president's mass deportation agenda, the OBBBA gave more tax cuts to the ultrarich while slashing social safety net programs such as Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low-income Americans.
"This country, under President Trump, every single day, is moving closer and closer toward an authoritarian society where we have a reckless and unbalanced president who wants more and more power in his own hands," Sanders said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, citing the Republican leader's contempt for Congress, the courts, the media, and more.
"And now, on top of all of that, what we are seeing is that one our great American cities—Minneapolis, Minnesota—is essentially being occupied by ICE," he continued. "What's going on in Minneapolis and has gone on in other cities is not what this country is about."
Sanders argued that "we do not want or need, and must never allow, federal agents—people paid by federal tax dollars—with masks on their face, knocking down doors; ignoring the Constitution; grabbing people; putting them into unmarked vans; taking 5-year-olds away from their parents; putting them in detention centers; shooting American citizens in cold blood."
In Minneapolis in recent weeks, ICE officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good; an immigration agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan man named Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg; and two members of Customs and Border Protection fatally shot Alex Pretti. Meanwhile, Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy abducted by immigration agents in the city and sent with his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, is now in poor health, according to his family.
ICE's actions in Minnesota and beyond have fueled calls for Congress to cut funding for or even abolish the agency—and the debate over Department of Homeland Security appropriations has delayed the broader spending package, leading to the looming but seemingly short-term government shutdown.
"What ICE has become is not an agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, what it has become is Trump's domestic army," Sanders said. "And I would hope that my conservative friends—people who year after year get up here and say: 'We believe in small government. Get the government off our backs. Let local communities make their own decision.'—finally stand up and say that in America, we do not need a domestic army terrorizing communities throughout this country."
"Instead of funding a domestic army which breaks the Constitution every day, we should be putting that money to help the people of our country get the healthcare that they need," declared the senator, a leading advocate of Medicare for All.
While the vote on Sanders' amendment was mostly along party lines—only Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) sided with the chamber's Democrats and both Independents—many Democrats joined most of the GOP in voting for the broader appropriations bills.
Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, was among the two dozen Democratic senators and four Republicans who voted against the package. He said that "I could not, in good conscience, vote for the federal funding deal," noting that "I promised the people of Vermont that I would not support another penny for ICE unless there were fundamental reforms to how that agency operates."
"While I voted against this bill because of the disastrous situation with ICE, it does include a number of important provisions that I successfully fought for," he highlighted. "As the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in the Senate, I am proud that this legislation includes the largest increase in mandatory funding for community health centers in a decade, begins to address the massive shortage of doctors in America, takes on the greed of pharmacy benefit managers, makes it easier for the American people to receive low-cost generic drugs and expands pediatric cancer research."
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