When the federal government cut off SNAP benefits in November 2025, 40 million people didn’t receive their benefits for over two weeks, with no idea when funding would return. Welfare recipients are familiar with this treatment; they are routinely kicked off their benefits or required to re-certify unexpectedly. Even when they get benefits, it’s not enough. SNAP funds don’t stretch the month, Medicaid insurance doesn’t protect from medical debt, and shoddy and dangerous shelters don’t protect the homeless from harassment from the cops, their neighbors, or the shelter staff. From child services to public housing, these services are the bare minimum, and getting worse. Why are they able to do this? And why do they do this?
Welfare services have never been about the government being kind to us. We’ve only ever gotten improved welfare services when poor people fought for it. During the Great Depression, tens of thousands of people organized in the Unemployed Councils and forced the government to create the first big federal welfare programs. But since the 1980s, poor people have become so disorganized that the government is even able to use the threat of taking welfare away to divide and punish us. We saw this recently when Trump banned Minnesota from federal SNAP funding because the masses in Minneapolis fought back against ICE terror.
We are 40 million people in the US who can’t afford basic necessities. 40 million people who can’t afford food, housing, transportation, healthcare. But more than that, we’re 40 million people who can’t afford to stay disorganized. If only 30 thousand people organized into the Unemployed Councils could force the creation of social security and unemployment insurance, imagine the power 40 million could have.
There’s Plenty of Money, We Just Aren’t Getting It
The federal government claims to be spending more money on solving poverty than ever before, but how that money is spent tells another story. A dollar spent by the federal government on welfare programs is not the same as a poor person getting a dollar. Since President Clinton signed the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act (TANF) in 1996, welfare money from the feds doesn’t go to poor families directly; it goes to states where poor people live, and state politicians decide where it goes and who gets it. Instead of helping poor people, politicians spend most TANF funding on programs to punish and control us, like juvie, and programs meant to keep women subordinate, like anti-abortion centers. And if states don’t spend their TANF money for a year, it goes into a fund that state politicians can spend on anything at all, or just hoard. Republican-run Tennessee, one of the poorest states in the U.S., is sitting on $790 million in unspent TANF funds, followed by Democrat-run Hawaii with $380 million. So instead of spending money to actually help us, they are spending money to control us. And the less money Democrats and Republicans spend helping the poor, the more poor people that state will have, and the more money they will get from the federal government the next year. Both Democrat and Republican politicians abuse this system. But what about poor people?
Not only is there no widespread evidence of poor people committing welfare fraud, but even getting welfare
is intentionally difficult because the government doesn’t want to give it. One way the government keeps people off welfare is by not letting people know when they qualify. Only 25% of families who qualify for TANF apply, and only 48% of old Americans who qualify for food stamps apply. Another way they keep us from getting benefits is by making it so you have to apply many times before getting anything. In the mid 90s about 50% of people who applied for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) got it, compared to only 33% now. Nowadays everyone knows if you want SSDI you need to apply, get rejected, and get a lawyer who keeps 1/4th of the back pay if you win. In 2018 over $1.2 billion went to lawyers for getting disabled poor people SSDI. Then if you qualify, apply, and get it, the benefits you get aren’t enough. Plus these systems cyclically purge people off their roster with recertifications, work requirements, and other bureaucratic baggage.
US politicians, especially Republicans, big media companies, and reactionary social media influencers set taxpayers against welfare recipients, the “hard workers” versus “freeloaders”. In truth, the people who receive benefits usually work for low wages, or are in between jobs, or dealing with a physical or mental illness. Plus people who get benefits pay a huge percentage of their income on sales taxes. If Republican and Democrat politicians really wanted to target freeloaders they’d go after the Wall Street stock traders getting rich by moving money around their computer screens, or the slumlords charging rent while watching their buildings decay. The real goal in spreading these lies about deserving and undeserving people is to keep us divided so we can’t fight back. If poor people think that every other poor person is a freeloader or a welfare queen, we’re never going to be able to unite and defend welfare, let alone fight for something better.
The most egalitarian bunch of programs in the last 50 years were the Trump administration’s Covid stimulus checks that gave about $1200 to every adult citizen. This was also when the masses took the streets, in the millions, to protest against police murdering Black people. This proves that the government can provide enough money for us to live decent lives, they just don’t want to. When we turn the lights off, the roaches come crawling out again, and when we stop standing up, the ruling class goes back on the attack. Now they’re killing Medicaid and SNAP. What are we going to do about it? Rely on non profits and charity?
Non-Profits Are Nonsense
Food banks are notorious for not giving people enough food. After the government cut off food stamps in November 2025, a New York City food bank started giving households a single gallon-sized plastic bag of food, regardless of the size of the household. When a mother of 3 protested, the non-profit called mental health services on her. This shows the role non-profits play in this system; they control us, keep us dependent, and when we get angry they hand us to the cops and the prisons. But since they’re charities and not a part of the government, they want us to be grateful.
Since the 1970s, non-profits, funded by big greedy businessmen looking for tax write-offs, have stepped in to poorly do what the government used to do. They are set up to hide the politicians and billionaires who should be blamed for their lacking and often rude services. All this lets the government side-step confrontations with poor people. Non-profits even lure many radical young people into becoming volunteers and pursuing careers, so that instead of helping poor people fight back, they get absorbed into a system that keeps poor people dependent.
Non profits sometimes allow us to survive, but never thrive. Shelters are usually set up like jails, and food banks give us unhealthy, salty, over-processed food, but we are supposed to be grateful. Democrat candidates paint themselves as sympathetic to the poor, but during the SNAP shutdown they did nothing but throw harsh words at the Trump administration and recommend neighborhood food banks.
By slowly killing welfare, blaming each other, and blaming the poor, Democrats and Republicans are toying with our lives. From Republicans like Ronald Reagan and Trump, to Democrats like Bill Clinton, Obama, and Biden, they have been waging a war on the poor for decades. It’s time we organize ourselves and fight back. This struggle has been fought before, and if we want to win, we need to learn from those who came before us.
Where Did Welfare Services Come From?
We Get Welfare When Our Rulers Are Afraid
The biggest economic crash the US ever had was the Great Depression in the 1920s and 1930s. During its height, there were 15 million unemployed people in the US. This was before welfare existed nationally, and millions of people were suddenly facing homelessness and starvation. To fight back, poor people, with the help of communist activists, formed Unemployed Councils in cities all across the US and drew in tens of thousands of members. The Unemployed Councils had poor women and men from all races working together. They held protests to demand government relief and reversed evictions by moving furniture back into people’s homes. They reversed so many evictions they became experts at reconnecting people’s gas and electricity.
What the US ruling class feared most of all was that the Unemployed Councils could grow from 30,000 people to all of the 15 million unemployed. With these favorable conditions the Unemployed Councils were able to make the US ruling class create Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and Food Stamps. They also created Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was money from the federal government, managed by the states, that went to single mothers so they could take care of their kids without working all the time.
However, in order to divide us up again, all of these programs were only for white people. After these partial victories and the end of the Great Depression, poor white people mostly relied on unions to make sure their lives were alright, while poor Black, Indigenous, and Chicano people endured decades more of brutal suffering and exploitation.
But even when poor people aren’t organized locally, poor people fighting for their rights in other countries affects things here. All through the 1950s and 1960s, worldwide, people carried out revolutions against capitalism and colonialism, and US politicians and big businesses watched fearfully. US rulers tried to stops these movements in other countries, especially in Vietnam where the US killed more than 2 million people.
Some US politicians decided to make things less bad for poor people and minorities in the US before there was a revolution here too. They were right to be afraid, because during the 1960s there were massive riots carried out by poor Black people. The Civil Rights Movement partially satisfied Black people’s demands, but nationwide Black people were still brutally exploited and barred from living in certain areas by racism and economic discrimination. Some welfare concessions that came out of this were the Food Stamps Act of 1964, The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (creating Legal Services, free legal help for poor people), and the Social Security Amendments of 1965, creating Medicaid and Medicare. Following the Civil Rights movement, Black mothers could get money from AFDC.
These wins were much needed, but they didn’t really get rid of poverty. A welfare system in this country can never fundamentally solve poverty, because big business owners need to keep a lot of poor people around so they can make them work bad jobs for bad pay.
The Battle for Welfare Rights
In the mid 1960s welfare was more available than ever before, but it still wasn’t enough, and it was designed to be humiliating. After Black people got access to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), corporate media and politicians started using sexism and racism to try to make everyone hate them. In many states mothers on welfare weren’t allowed to have romantic relationships, because racist politicians blamed and hated Black mothers for having kids while poor. Officials would enter the homes of AFDC recipients at night to look at the furniture, in the fridge, and in their drawers for evidence of wasteful spending. They’d even check if the woman had a man staying there, all so the official could get an excuse to kick the woman and her kids off welfare and into deeper poverty. Officials and caseworkers even sexually harassed mothers receiving their services.
Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, on June 30th, 1966, welfare rights organizations held 25 coordinated actions with over 6000 people demonstrating across the U.S. In 1967 they formed the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) to fight for welfare rights. The NWRO was a group of about 30,000 poor people across the country that used tactics such as occupying welfare offices, protesting outside of politicians’ homes early in the morning, and even shop-ins, where they would fill up shopping carts at department stores and tell the cashiers to charge it to the welfare office. They were able to stop people from being unjustly kicked off welfare, they got bad welfare officials fired, and they got people access to resources they were supposed to be getting from the government but weren’t. They once shut down the Las Vegas Strip and caused a traffic jam all the way to LA. They even got poor people approved for credit cards.
However, over time, more and more US politicians and media companies felt secure in attacking the NWRO. One reason this was possible was because worldwide there were less revolutions happening, so they became less afraid of poor people in the US. They attacked the NWRO in the media and blamed poor women for crime and poverty. They attacked their lawyers by getting rid of Legal Services, which had been a program where poor people got free legal aid. They attacked their budget by having the IRS investigate their biggest donors. Worst of all, they attacked the NWRO membership by changing the rules of how welfare worked. The government did this by guaranteeing people less help, and by getting rid of people’s right to a hearing when they kicked people off welfare.
The NWRO wasn’t able to find a way to counter this repression, or to find strong allies to rely on. During the Great Depression the government was scared of 15 million unemployed people working with the 30,000 people organized in the Unemployed Councils, but this was different. There was a total of about 2 million AFDC recipients in the entire country. If other sections of poor people, such as homeless people and immigrants, had also been organized, then they could have all worked together, but the NWRO was the only national organization of poor people around at the time. So when politicians and the corporate media started spreading the lie that lazy welfare mothers were ruining the economy, and when more and more people were getting kicked off welfare, NWRO members felt like everybody hated them and their struggle was hopeless. Another problem was that the NWRO thought some Democrat politicians cared about poor people and could be trusted, and when those Democrats betrayed them, their membership was even more demoralized . The National Welfare Rights Organization ended in 1975.
Bienvenidos al Hospital del Pueblo – Welcome to the People’s Hospital
Around the same time in New York City, the Young Lords, a revolutionary organization of Puerto Rican youths, were getting ready to occupy Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. Lincoln Hospital was the only hospital serving the South Bronx and Harlem, and it was suffering from a funding cut after a semi-privitization reform in 1959. In the South Bronx in the 60s tuberculosis was running rampant, but because of the cuts, the hospital’s facilities were completely rundown. There was no air conditioning in the surgery rooms, and there were frequent power outages. On top of all that, municipal hospitals across the city were facing more severe budget cuts in 1970.
Recognizing this crisis as a deadly attack on poor Black and Latino people in New York, the Young Lords launched a campaign to demand better funding and medical services. Unlike the NWRO, the Young Lords knew that politicians could be pressured but never trusted, so they didn’t waste any time asking local or federal politicians for help. The services that we need to live shouldn’t be run for profit by investors, they should serve us. But to make that happen takes audacity, and it takes the will to fight against the people at the top who are preventing things from being better.
Over the course of several months, the Young Lords manned a complaint table in the emergency room. After just one month they documented 2000 complaints. When people told them their problems, the Young Lords went with them to confront the administration. Over time the Young Lords put together a plan on how the hospital could run better, and how they could temporarily seize control of the hospital for 12 hours, with the goal to turn the hospital into an issue that the city’s politicians couldn’t ignore.
The Young Lords timed their July occupation with the 1970 budget cuts, publishing in their newspaper Palante, “Lincoln Hospital will be the victim of the greedy businessmen who make money from the illnesses of the people of the South Bronx.” Early in the morning about 200 Young Lords seized control of the hospital, all without disrupting the hospital’s functioning. Their demands included that Lincoln Hospital should create at-home testing and care for anemia, lead poisoning, iron deficiency, tuberculosis and drug addiction, which were all conditions tied to the abysmal living conditions in the South Bronx and Harlem. They created a daycare and political education space, properly establishing a “hospital for the people.” Key to the Young Lord’s success was the reputation they had built for themselves over years of class struggle.
After the Young Lords left, politicians and the media were suddenly very interested in talking about the horrible conditions of Lincoln Hospital. But due to the secretive nature of the takeover, the Young Lords didn’t involve the masses in the takeover itself, so without continued pressure their demands weren’t met. However, their bravery in standing with the people should be an inspiration to us all.
The defunding that happened in the Bronx is happening now nationwide. The recent Medicaid cuts will leave small rural hospitals, elderly homes, and childcare centers underfunded and dysfunctional. We must build a movement of poor people not only to fight the cuts, but to create a healthcare system that truly serves the masses.
This War Needs Two Sides
The War on the Poor is being waged by many forces: by businesses, non-profits, Democrats, and Republicans. What unites them all is the target they all share: poor people. So far in this war we’ve been getting massacred. It’s high time we stand together and fight back.
Like the Unemployed Councils we need to unite poor people from all races and genders to confront the system that is tormenting us and rely on one another to solve the problems this system causes.
Like the National Welfare Rights Organization we need to use small wins to recruit people. We should turn every unjust ruling and every attack on poor people into an opportunity to fight back.
And like the Young Lords we need to take matters into our own hands in the most audacious ways possible.
If this resonates with you, then on June 12-14 come to the 2026 Dare to Struggle National Conference in Albuquerque, NM, and help rebuild poor people’s collective fighting power. At the very least, hit us up. It’s only when we dare to struggle that we dare to win.
Further Reading
The Battle for Welfare Rights by Felicia Kornbluh
The War on Welfare by Marisa Chappell
The Young Lords by Johanna Fernandez
Dare to Struggle 