WASHINGTON — Republican Representative Marc Molinaro, a former mayor who flipped an open seat in the Hudson Valley last year and helped the G.O.P. take back the House, frequently tells the story of how his mother relied on food stamps and subsidized school lunches to keep him fed as a child.
Now, as the Republican leaders press to tighten work requirements for food stamps and other government assistance programs as a way to slash federal spending, Mr. Molinaro finds himself in a politically uncomfortable spot.
“I grew up on food stamps; my mom worked and worked hard, but she’s a single mom,” he said recently during a brief interview at the Capitol. “That is a red line for me. We’re not going to be touching or diminishing services or support for single moms.”
Mr. Molinaro’s reservations help explain why Republican leaders have had such a difficult time coalescing around a budget blueprint that could achieve the kind of deep spending cuts the party is seeking in exchange for raising the debt ceiling to avert a default as early as this summer.
Any cuts Republicans suggest will instantly become a line of attack for Democrats, leaving the party toiling to cobble together a budget plan that can win the support of both mainstream Republicans in competitive districts like Mr. Molinaro and right-wing hard-liners who are pushing for the largest cuts possible.
With a razor-thin majority and Democrats solidly opposed to spending cuts on the scale that they are demanding, Republicans can afford no more than a few defections in their own ranks if they hope to pass a fiscal plan. They have already ruled out reductions to Medicare or Social Security, determined to insulate themselves and their most politically vulnerable members from accusations that they support slashing benefits for older Americans.
But even the seemingly easier steps, such as cuts in food assistance programs, could make for a politically fraught vote.
Just months into his first term, Mr. Molinaro is already fielding pointed questions at town halls in his Hudson Valley district, where voters have elected two Republicans and two Democrats over the past eight years, about whether he intends to curtail access to federal nutrition programs.
“Those who are most vulnerable have to be protected,” Mr. Molinaro said in the interview. “We’ve always had work requirements. I’m going to focus my time on convincing my colleagues to focus on fraud, waste and abuse,” where “there’s a lot of savings to be had.”
Top House Republicans have made increasing work requirements for participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, one of the central elements of whatever spending blueprint they will ultimately release. It is a key tenet of conservative orthodoxy, and Republicans have framed it as a straightforward way to curtail what they believe is the nation’s out-of-control spending, arguing that it would also lift Americans out of poverty.
Republicans may soon be forced to put the matter to a vote. Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters last week that House Republicans could soon move on legislation modeled on a letter he sent to President Biden last month outlining spending cuts his conference would seek, including “strengthening work requirements for those without dependents who can work.”
Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, a favorite of Republican leadership, earlier this year introduced legislation that would make able-bodied adults without dependents subject to work requirements until they are 65 years old, raising the current age from 49. It would also make it more difficult to obtain work requirement waivers, taking away the ability that states have to request that the mandate be relaxed if there are not enough jobs to provide recipients employment.
Proponents of an overhaul argue that states abuse the waivers, seeking them even when jobs are readily available, and the government is too lax about granting them.
“What most Republicans that I’m talking to are most interested in is eliminating a loophole that states are really egregiously using to ignore work requirements,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. “Keeping in mind — and I think this has been misreported — no pregnant woman is subject to these requirements, nobody with young dependents at home is subject; nobody in areas of high unemployment.”
Mr. Johnson, who also grew up on food stamps and is now chairman of the Republican Main Street Caucus, is considered one of the most influential mainstream conservatives in the House. But most of the lawmakers who have co-sponsored the legislation so far are either members of the hard-right Freedom Caucus or lawmakers from safe seats. Of the 38 Republicans who have signed on, only three represent competitive districts.
“We want them back to work,” Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who flipped a seat in central Oregon in November, told The Oregonian. Oregon is one of 19 states operating under a waiver that Mr. Johnson’s legislation seeks to eliminate.
It could be a particularly tough vote for lawmakers in politically competitive districts in states that routinely apply for such waivers, including New York and California. Representative David Valadao, whose seat is the most Democratic district to be held by a Republican, previously bucked party leadership in 2013 when he voted against legislation cutting $40 billion in funding for food stamps.
“I do not believe in making drastic changes to this program during a time of such great economic uncertainty without giving states flexibility enforcing proposed requirements,” Mr. Valadao said then. “It is unfair to the American people for Congress to implement policies containing work requirements when our national economy is severely suffering.”
Asked if he would support toughening work requirements for food stamps, Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican who ousted House Democrats’ campaign chairman in November when he swept to victory in the Hudson Valley, demurred.
“All of these ideas are obviously being worked through,” Mr. Lawler said in a brief interview. “There’s nothing concrete yet.”
In the meantime, Democrats are already readying their attack advertisements. CJ Warnke, the communications director for House Democrats’ political action committee, accused Republicans of “continuing their extremist assault on families and children.”
“MAGA House Republicans are threatening to default and not pay their own bills, while simultaneously attacking SNAP benefits,” Mr. Warnke said, adding that Republicans were declaring that millions of Americans “should not have food on their tables.”
Republicans are well aware of the political peril that comes with the proposal. In 2018, when they controlled the House, the Senate and the White House, Republicans led by President Donald J. Trump tried repeatedly to add similar work requirements for food stamp recipients. The efforts failed, after a bipartisan group of lawmakers negotiating the twice-a-decade legislation deemed the move too politically toxic.
Five years later, the issue is just as charged.
Representative Glenn Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican and the chairman of the Agriculture Committee who is responsible for shepherding the farm bill this year, has sounded more ambivalent than many of his colleagues about the urgency of stiffening work requirements.
Any dispute over the food stamp program could derail the farm bill, considered critical legislation to both political parties because it has huge implications for both low-income families who rely on federal food assistance programs and the agriculture industry.
Mr. Thompson told reporters that he didn’t believe there was much fraud within the food stamp program.
“Principle one, quite frankly, is we have a responsibility to help people, families who are struggling financially to reach the next rung in the ladder of opportunity,” Mr. Thompson said. “Some folks actually don’t recognize that we have work requirements.”
Still, Mr. Thompson conceded that there were “probably some improvements out there that we can make” to the program and said it wasn’t “helpful” for lawmakers to suggest that the program go entirely unmodified.
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, suggested it was a battle the party should be willing to wage.
“If you’re going to live off the taxpayers and some kind of SNAP program and government resources, there should be a work requirement,” Mr. Jordan said. “This will be a big fight when we get to the farm bill.”
Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
