The Path Ahead for Welfare Reform — the third of a series by Angela Rachidi and Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute, published in National Review on August 22, 2026 — argues that the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act remains the foundational achievement of American social policy, and that last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act only extended a fraction of what that law made possible. Read on its own terms, the argument has the force of a sound doctrine. AFDC was an open-ended federal entitlement that rewarded the states for growing their welfare rolls and trapped generations of single mothers in dependency. The 1996 law replaced it with the TANF block grant: fixed federal funding, mandatory work requirements, time limits, and a deliberate shift of incentive away from caseload growth and toward employment and marriage. The empirical results were immediate: cash welfare rolls collapsed, single-parent poverty declined and single-mother labor-force participation rose, and a generation of mothers entered the workforce. That record is real.
The Rachidi-Weidinger argument builds from that foundation. Today’s safety net, they write, is “a leviathan of more than 90 means-tested federal benefit programs,” most of them — Medicaid, SNAP, housing assistance — lacking the 1996 law’s core principles. OBBBA begins the repair. It curtailed states’ ability to waive SNAP’s work requirement, applied a community-engagement requirement to Medicaid for the first time, increased the frequency of Medicaid eligibility redeterminations, and began penalizing states for high improper-payment rates. The authors would push further: consolidate the remaining safety-net programs into state-administered block grants, extend work requirements to every program serving work-capable adults, eliminate marriage penalties in the EITC and Child Tax Credit, and hold states financially accountable for outcomes — employment, wage gains, educational attainment, upward mobility. The conceptual grammar is stewardship — the redirection of public resources from open-ended dependency to opportunity, from idle consumption to productive work, from the dissolution of household to its reinforcement. The 1996 law, they remind us, was not called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act for nothing. The legacy should advance.
This is the proper framework of an old and legitimate doctrine. Scripture and the common-law tradition have always read stewardship as the visible test of standing. The able-bodied adult who will not work, who will not sustain a household, who makes himself a perpetual charge upon his neighbor’s industry — such a man is not within the order of the commonweal. He has chosen, by his improvidence and his idle dependence, to stand outside the covenant of reciprocal obligation that holds the household and the polity together. The 1996 law, properly understood, was the republic applying a long-standing moral principle through a federal statute: it distinguished the truly needy — the widow, the orphan, the aged, the genuinely disabled — from those whose distress was the fruit of choices the law could rightly address. OBBBA’s extension of work requirements and accelerated redetermination to SNAP and Medicaid is the same distinction, carried forward. To call a man able-bodied when he is in fact able to work is accuracy. To expect a household to support itself through labor is Providential order. The fraud-and-waste provisions, the marriage-promotion provisions, the block-grant accountability provisions — these are the State acting in its proper office: naming the standing of its members, rewarding stewardship, and withdrawing subsidy from improvidence. That is good policy, and it is sound doctrine.
While good AEI scholars delivered the case for the safety net’s reform in Washington, Dale Pruitt sat on the porch of his sister’s house in Hazard, Kentucky, and tried to remember which day the medication had run out.
Dale was fifty-six. He had worked twenty-two years in the mines before the layoff in 2014, and eight more in intermittent warehouse and construction jobs after that — the cash-and-carry sort, the kind the receipt books do not record. He had hypertension. He had the start of a lung that did not always fill. In 2014, when Kentucky expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, Dale Pruitt became eligible and enrolled. The blood-pressure pills came to him through a card he kept in his wallet. They cost, without that card, roughly a hundred and twenty dollars a month — a sum he did not have, for a year of work he could not document. He took them. His pressure stayed down. He sat on the porch. He watched the creek.
In the spring of 2026, OBBBA’s community-engagement requirement reached him. Dale was, by the statute’s definition, an “able-bodied” work-capable adult. To keep his coverage, he had to show eighty hours a month of work, training, or community service — documented, verifiable, on the form the local office handed him. His warehouse work was irregular. The odd jobs his sister paid him for in cash left no record. He did not know what “community engagement” meant in the agency’s vocabulary. He brought back a folder half full. The redetermination was processed. The State of Kentucky, doing what the law now requires, found him ineligible. On the first of June, 2026, the State of Kentucky terminated Dale Pruitt’s Medicaid coverage.
Without the medication, his blood pressure climbed. He told his sister his head hurt. He told her he had a doctor’s appointment “next month.” He had no doctor’s appointment. He was rationing the remaining pills, taking one every third day, and calling it careful. On the morning of August 14, 2026, Dale Pruitt collapsed on the porch steps. The stroke was massive. His sister found him at lunchtime, on his side, half in the gravel. He was carried to the Hazard Appalachian Regional Medical Center, where a CT scan showed the bleed. He was airlifted to UK Chandler in Lexington. He died there on August 17, 2026, four days after the stroke. The death certificate listed the cause: intracerebral hemorrhage due to chronic hypertension. The Medicaid coverage that had kept his pressure controlled had been terminated nine weeks before, under a work requirement his irregular labor could not satisfy.
Across the expansion states, the redetermination cycle OBBBA set in motion has now been administered to work-capable adults by the thousands. The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund, in their review of state mortality analyses, have documented the scope of the order’s discernment. The instrument names what the expansion did not require it to name — improvident work-capable adults outside the household of reciprocal obligation, without gainful labor or marriage. In Arkansas in 2018, the same instrument reached eighteen thousand work-capable adults before a court intervened, and the standing pattern the order discerned then — unbonded, improvident, outside marriage — was visible at that scale as it is visible now. The Goldin, Hart, and Huntley study in the New England Journal of Medicine documented the converse of the mechanism OBBBA has set in motion: that expansion had bound a measure of life to coverage among the near-elderly, the subsidy itself prolonging the breath. The community-engagement requirement and the accelerated redetermination are the order’s instruments for unbinding subsidy from standing. The discernment the doctrine describes is operating as the law provides, and the standing it discerns is the standing Scripture has always named.
Dale Pruitt’s death flowed from the order’s operation as the doctrine intends. A man outside the covenant of reciprocal obligation, who would not or could not provide for his own household through the regular labor the law requires, was sorted from the rolls of those the safety net is bound to keep. The State named his standing. The fraud-and-waste inquiry, the redetermination, the work-hour threshold, the community-engagement form — these are instruments of discernment. A man whose life is improvident, whose work is irregular, whose household has dissolved into the porch of his sister’s house, has no claim on the commonweal’s subsidy. The standing required of those who draw on the common fund is the standing of stewardship: labor, marriage, self-rule. Dale Pruitt did not meet that standing. The visible verdict of his circumstances — the cash job, the unfinished form, the rationed pills — disclosed where he had always stood in the order of Providential sorting. His death reads forward as proof of the diagnosis.
The widow, the orphan, the aged, the genuinely disabled: these are the standing categories the law carves out from its work requirement. They are the household the commonweal is bound to support. Dale Pruitt was none of these. He was an able-bodied man outside the household of gainful work, outside the marriage that the authors rightly identify as “a key but increasingly threatened bulwark against poverty.” His improvidence was visible. The order named it. The blood-pressure pill was a subsidy of his improvidence; the redetermination withdrew it. The husbandman who will not till his field shall not eat of his field. The man who will not work shall not be fed by his neighbor’s labor. That is the verdict the safety net rendered. That is the verdict Scripture and the common law have always rendered on the improvident. The widow and the orphan are within the household of the commonweal. Dale Pruitt was not within that household, and the safety net, doing what it has always done, named his place.