Republicans are defending changes to work requirements for recipients of food stamps included in a legislative deal hashed out by GOP leadership and the White House to raise the debt limit, challenging estimates that show the push could ultimately lead to more spending for the program.

As part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, both sides have agreed to tighten work requirements by raising the age threshold for recipients subject to the rules, as well as some exemptions for certain groups, including veterans and those experiencing homelessness.

Work requirements for federal assistance programs do not, well, work.

“Stable employment among recipients subject to work requirements proved the exception, not the norm,” according to a 2016 review of the evidence on work requirements for safety-net programs by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The large majority of individuals subject to work requirements remained poor, and some became poorer.”

Homelessness has been rising in America's West Coast cities for more than a decade. Entire blocks of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland are occupied by tent encampments plagued by violence, drug overdoses, and disease.

Republicans and Democrats have been tripping over each other to tell voters how committed they are to making zero changes to Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees just confirmed yet again that within 10 years the programs' funds will be insolvent.

The ending of the Covid-19 public-health emergency means a reset for the country’s food stamps program, which aids more than 41 million Americans, as lawmakers weigh whether to make more far-reaching changes as part of the next farm bill. 

An extra boost in the food assistance for low-income households that Congress authorized at the start of the pandemic will wind down this month, and additional leeway afforded to states around some of the program’s rules will end in May. 

Conservative TV and radio host Larry Elder on Thursday took aim at a new proposal by San Francisco’s reparations committee to pay each Black longtime residents $5 million – while warning that the movement in support of reparations is growing as young people are being "indoctrinated" into its supporting narrative.

"I think the movement is growing," Elder told Fox News Digital in an interview. "Young woke people are being indoctrinated into believing that systemic racism, structural racism, historical racism is why black people are underachieving."

Former President Bill Clinton took a shot at House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on Wednesday, telling New York voters that McCarthy wants to cut Social Security and Medicare if given the opportunity.

Speaking at a campaign event for Democratic House candidate Josh Riley, Clinton said that Riley's opponent, Republican Marc Molinaro, wants to help McCarthy become House Speaker. He then made his claim about what McCarthy has planned.

In 2017, San Francisco’s top officials announced an audacious goal: Cut the city’s chronic homelessness number in half over the next five years.

A few months earlier, the city had received a gift to help reach that goal — $100 million in private donations from a nonprofit to supplement the city’s more than $250 million annual homelessness budget.

“This is going to be huge,” then-Mayor Ed Lee told The Chronicle at the time about the donation from nonprofit Tipping Point. “I do believe we’ll be able to cut chronic homelessness in half with this help.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday reiterated his call for the Biden administration to prohibit all union-busting corporations from receiving federal contracts, citing the National Labor Relations Board's fresh complaints against Starbucks and Amazon over their attempts to crush worker organizing.

Advocates for an expanded child tax credit (CTC) did not expect to be in this situation.

A year ago, when Congress passed an expanded version of the policy that’s been around with bipartisan backing since 1997, some 35 million parents across the US began to see hundreds of dollars land in their bank accounts every month — money that they could spend however they saw fit.