SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
one big beautiful bill act
Sanders Probes Trump's Corporate Welfare as Walmart Hits $1 Trillion Market Cap
"Do the right thing: Get off of corporate welfare and pay all of your workers a living wage with good benefits," the democratic socialist senator implored Walmart's multibillionaire owners.
Feb 05, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday launched an investigation into how corporations including Walmart—which hit $1 trillion in market value earlier this week—benefit from tax breaks in Republicans' so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act while many of their workers can't make ends meet.
Sanders (I-Vt.) informed Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon and the heads of Kroger, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree in separate letters that he's probing how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) passed by the GOP-controlled Congress and signed by President Donald Trump last year "has negatively impacted the health and well-being of workers at large corporations... and how it has financially benefited the owners and executives of these multinational conglomerates."
"This legislation made the largest cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in history to pay for $1 trillion in tax breaks to the top 1% and over $900 billion in tax cuts to large corporations," noted Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
"As you know, Walmart is the largest corporation in America with over $680 billion in revenue, $19.4 billion in profits, and more than 2 million workers," Sanders wrote in his letter to McMillon. "Walmart also recently became the first retailer ever to hit $1 trillion in market value. It is owned by one of the wealthiest families in America, the Walton family, which has become over $348 billion richer since 2017 and is now worth more than half a trillion dollars."
"Yet, despite the enormous wealth of the Walton family and these huge corporate profits, Walmart pays wages so low that many of its workers rely on public assistance to survive," the senator said. "At Walmart, tens of thousands of low-wage workers are forced to depend on SNAP to feed their families and Medicaid to get the healthcare they need—all paid for by US taxpayers."
"Walmart pays wages so low that many of its workers rely on public assistance to survive."
Sanders is asking the heads of the companies in his probe to "disclose how much they expect to make from the Republicans’ tax breaks and whether any of these savings will be passed along to workers."
“It has never been acceptable that incredibly profitable companies like Walmart—owned by one of the richest families on Earth—pay their workers starvation wages, forcing many of them to rely on programs like Medicaid and SNAP," Sanders wrote to McMillon. "But it is even more unacceptable when those benefits are being slashed so that corporate executives and billionaires like the Walton family can become even richer.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Senators Demand Answers on Equifax Plan to 'Profiteer' Off GOP 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."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why Federal Food Aid Became Politically Polarizing—and What to Do About It
By focusing on the facts and the program’s broad benefits, Americans can move past partisan divides and recognize the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for the bipartisan, practical tool it truly is.
Feb 02, 2026
On January 31, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson requested that Congress pass federal legislation to make the Food Stamp Program permanent. Up to that point, the program had operated as a pilot in select counties and states, serving about 380,000 participants. The Food Stamp Program expanded dramatically in the ensuing decades, driven largely by a recognition of domestic hunger. It has also undergone many changes—notably 2008 legislation that changed the name to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in part to fight the politicized stigma of receiving food assistance.
Today, the program is without a doubt one of the most effective food assistance programs in reducing food insecurity and poverty across the United States. The US Census Bureau reports that supplemental nutrition assistance lifted nearly 3.6 million people out of poverty in 2024, the most recent year for which full data are available.
What’s more, every dollar in SNAP benefits generates about $1.50 in economic activity, as recipients spend their benefits at grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and small businesses. This ripple effect strengthens communities, keeping businesses open and workers employed.
Looking solely at the data, it would seem the anti-hunger program would be viewed by the vast majority of US voters as a practical solution that helps families put food on the table while also supporting local economies. After all, the vast majority of SNAP recipients are children, seniors, and people with disabilities, not the able-bodied adults who are often misrepresented as the main beneficiaries in political debates. And many rural communities, which tend to vote conservatively, rely heavily on this nutrition assistance, with some of the highest SNAP participation rates found in states that lean Republican.
The politicization of social welfare programs generated long-lasting shifts in voting behavior.
Yet in spite of its broad social and economic benefits, food assistance has been a politically contested issue ever since it was enacted more than five decades ago, often shaped by ideological and racialized narratives. This polarization persists today, exemplified by the massive cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the 2025 Republican budget reconciliation bill (commonly referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) that was passed by the 119th US Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in July 2025.
In new research, I, together with co-authors Troup Howard at the University of Utah and William Mullins at the University of California, San Diego, examine the process through which policy-based polarization emerges and persists over time. Using the historical expansion of the federal Food Stamp Program between 1961 and 1975 as a case study, we provide empirical evidence that the politicization of social welfare programs generated long-lasting shifts in voting behavior. Understanding this history and its persistence is essential to making sense of current debates over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The Rollout of the New Federal Food Stamp Program Amid the Civil Rights Movement
The historical rollout of the Food Stamp Program provides a case study in how social and economic policies become polarized and how those divisions persist across generations. Political views on food assistance are emblematic of the deeply partisan divide over social insurance programs and racial attitudes, which consistently emerge as key fault lines in US politics, reflecting deep-seated ideological and historical divisions.
Even though political polarization is often framed as a natural consequence of personal preferences and ideological sorting, such an interpretation overlooks the strategic role of political parties in shaping public perception for electoral advantage. We find that these behaviors persisted well beyond the first two decades—through 2020, as detailed in our research, and arguably even more so today.
The Food Stamp Program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, has played a critical role in the network of US social programs for more than half a century. After state- and federal-level experimentation, the program was rolled out nationwide between 1964 and 1975 to combat food insecurity and improve nutrition among low-income Americans. The program currently supports 42 million people, including nearly 1 in 5 American children. Research consistently demonstrates its effectiveness in reducing poverty, stabilizing household food consumption, and improving long-term health and economic outcomes.
The initial rollout of the Food Stamp Program coincided with a period of intense legal and political transformation, marked by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the broader dismantling of Jim Crow laws that legally discriminated against Black Americans across the South. In this context, the introduction of a federal food assistance program was not merely a policy shift but also became a political flash point.
Our analysis provides, to the best of our knowledge, the first causal estimates on the racial politicization of social programs. Using individual-level voting data, we find three key results:
- The introduction of the Food Stamp Program heightened racial polarization in voting behavior.
- This effect was strongest among individuals who were adults at the time of the rollout of the Food Stamp Program.
- The resulting political divide persists in voter registration patterns and electoral outcomes today, more than a half a century later.
How the Food Stamp Program Generated Decades-Long Political Polarization
When a government program is first implemented, voters are often uncertain about its long-term effects. This initial ambiguity provides political parties with an opportunity to shape public perception through strategic political moves, particularly in the early stages of a policy’s rollout. Politicians can change the narrative framing surrounding discussions about the program. Or they can steer political resources away from the program and bring into focus other politically polarizing issues. Or they can set agendas that cater to specific groups of voters in an effort to offset any political advantages the opposing party might be accruing from public discussion about the policy.
These are classic partisan political strategies, and we show in our research that political parties, recognizing the potential to consolidate their voter base, have incentives to selectively target different demographic groups with distinct messaging. Even when a policy itself does not explicitly favor one group over another, partisan political moves can amplify political divisions and solidify long-term realignments in voter preferences.
To implement our analysis, we used a comprehensive dataset covering the universe of US voters as of 2020. We then compared the voting behavior between individuals who were adults when the Food Stamp Program was introduced in their county and those who were younger at the time. This methodology, which incorporates a rich set of fixed effects and demographic controls, including age, race, and gender, ensures that our findings are not driven by geographic variation, cohort effects, or broader shifts in political attitudes between 1960 and 2020.
SNAP is often misunderstood or misrepresented, but at its core, it is a practical program that helps families meet basic nutritional needs.
The results reveal the lasting impact of the Food Stamp Program on partisan affiliations. White voters who lived through the Food Stamp rollout as adults were significantly more likely to be registered as Republicans—and less likely to be Democrats—in 2020, compared with White voters who were younger, especially those who were born in a world where the Food Stamp Program was already an established feature of US social programs.
In contrast, Black and Hispanic voters who lived through the Food Stamp rollout as adults were significantly more likely to be registered as Democrats or Independents than Black and Hispanic voters who were younger. Racial polarization in partisan affiliations is an order of magnitude larger than electorate-wide effects, underscoring the extent to which food assistance became a racialized political issue.
Further analysis of voting behavior conditional on party affiliation reveals additional layers of polarization. Exposure to the rollout of the program increased the likelihood of white Republicans turning out to vote while simultaneously boosting turnout among Black and Hispanic Democrats. This divergence suggests that the politicization of food assistance not only influenced party registration but also reinforced voting engagement along racial and ideological lines.
Moreover, when focusing on individuals who registered to vote before the age of 25—a group likely to be more politically engaged—we observe even stronger effects, highlighting the formative role of early political experiences in shaping long-term partisan identity.
Taken together, these findings illustrate how social policy can serve as a catalyst for enduring political realignments. The case of the Food Stamp Program suggests that initial framing and partisan efforts can have consequences that extend well beyond the policy itself, shaping voting behavior for generations.
The program’s name shift in 2008 to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and its catchy acronym SNAP was intended to partially address this polarization that had developed over many decades. Beyond reducing the stigma associated with “food stamps,” the rebranding sought to counter the racialized and partisan narratives that had taken root during the program’s early rollout by emphasizing nutrition, work, and temporary assistance. By reframing food assistance as a modern, employment-adjacent social support rather than a form of welfare, policymakers aimed to make the program more politically durable amid persistent partisan scrutiny—even as the underlying political divisions documented in our analysis continued to shape debates over the program’s scope and funding.
How to Bridge the Partisan Divide over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
As contemporary debates over social programs continue—not just about SNAP benefits but also in the context of the expansion of Medicaid in the Affordable Care Act of 2010 and the recent cuts to Medicaid in 2025—understanding the historical roots of this polarization is critical. The long-run political consequences of early policy framing should be a central consideration in both policymaking and electoral strategy. And the long-run economic fallout if partisan politics are successful in further diminishing social insurance programs could include substantial contractions in local economic activity as federal SNAP dollars are withdrawn from communities.
To make discussions about SNAP benefits less partisan, it is important that views about the program become decoupled from partisan politics. Yet separating the program from political narratives and stereotypes can be challenging. SNAP is often misunderstood or misrepresented, but at its core, it is a practical program that helps families meet basic nutritional needs.
By focusing on the facts and the program’s broad benefits, as documented in this issue brief, Americans can move past partisan divides and recognize the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for what it truly is—a bipartisan investment in food security, economic stability, and the well-being of US families.
This piece was first published by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular