New Article: Andrew Hammond, Litigating Welfare Rights: Medicaid, SNAP, and the Legacy of the New Property, 115 Northwestern L. Rev. (2020).
In 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress was poised to make deep cuts to the nation’s two largest anti-poverty programs: Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as “food stamps.” Yet, despite a unified, GOP-led federal government for the first time in over a decade, those efforts failed. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration and its allies in state government continue to pursue different strategies to roll back entitlements to medical and food assistance. As public interest lawyers challenge these agency actions in federal court, roughly five million Americans’ health insurance and food assistance hang in the balance. This Article asks why Medicaid and SNAP have proven so resilient. The answer lies in the fiscal federalism that governs them and the federal litigation that reinforces them.
Poverty Law 