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(CNN)The Biden administration took steps Friday to reverse one of the most controversial health care moves of President Donald Trump: Allowing states to require Medicaid recipients to work in order to receive coverage... ...The Trump administration contended that requiring people to work will better their health and is therefore in keeping with Medicaid's mission. The approvals were one of its most high-profile efforts to inject conservative ideals into the Medicaid program, which provides coverage to nearly one in five Americans.... ...The Supreme Court agreed to take the Arizona and New Hampshire cases in December, with oral arguments scheduled for March...

It takes a lot of courage for a president to target almost a quarter of the federal budget for reform in an election year. But this is exactly what President Trump is doing with his executive order, "Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility." We're now spending more than $700 billion per year on low-income assistance, which is more than we are spending on our national defense. And there are plenty of reasons to believe this spending is inefficient, wasteful and counterproductive. Over the last half-century, some $22 trillion has been spent on anti-poverty programs and yet...

Nancy Godinez ... lost her job... her unemployment checks had run out and her job search had proved fruitless. One thing she still had was health insurance... But unless she finds a new job, Godinez, 55, could be at risk of losing her insurance, too. ... Republican governors hoping to impose a work requirement on Medicaid recipients... believe that extending Medicaid to millions of low-income adults without disabilities... gave them an incentive not to work. ...Medicaid has grown to ... 74 million people... work requirements and changes in how it is paid for, could make Medicaid much more limited, with...

New federal grants will help 10 states test programs to help food stamp recipients find jobs, from using career coaches to quicker training courses to mental health assistance. The grants, announced Friday in Georgia by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, come as the Republican Congress is exploring ways to cut the program, which cost $74 billion last year—twice its cost in 2008.Some in the GOP have proposed stricter work requirements as a way to do that. But the Obama administration sees better worker training as an alternative to cuts or stricter work requirements. Vilsack said the grants will help USDA identify...

Changes to welfare could increase Americans’ dependency on the U.S. government immediately prior to the elections, posits a recent Romney campaign ad. The attack ad by the Romney campaign states that the Obama Administration plans to quietly gut the work requirements out of welfare reform, leaving only the welfare that was there before 1996. A July Heritage Foundation blog entry by Heritage authors is referenced in the Romney video. “The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the foundation of the reform law,” maintain authors Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley in their July 12 blog entry at Heritage’s...

Just as more families are turning to the government for help, Oregon leaders are considering budget cuts that would dismantle the state's welfare-to-work program. To find billions to balance the next two-year budget, state leaders are considering cuts, including: eliminating cash assistance to families with two parents at home; reducing or eliminating state-paid day care while parents look for a job or start work; reducing payments that help people transition from welfare to full-time employment; and reducing or eliminating training and life skills programs designed to help people get and keep a job. Here's a sample of possible cuts to...

Pregnant women in their third trimester, mothers with children older than 1, and about 5,600 disabled people are among the additional 14,000 welfare recipients who would have to work under welfare changes Governor Mitt Romney will propose later this week. Overall, Romney's plan would more than double the number of welfare recipients who have to work, from roughly 12,700 to about 26,700. A total of 49,000 recipients are currently on the state's welfare rolls. The governor's proposal would also ratchet up the hours per week that some recipients must work, and would establish a five-year lifetime limit for receiving benefits.

WASHINGTON, March 6 — Poor children suffer no psychological damage when their mothers move from welfare to work, as millions of women have in recent years, a major new study says. Among adolescents in such families, the researchers say, mental health may actually have improved. The research, financed by the National Institutes of Health and being published on Friday in the journal Science, provides the most extensive evidence yet to answer questions that have been swirling around one of the biggest experiments in American social policy in the last half-century. The study suggests that the 1996 welfare overhaul does not...