This week at Unbreaking, September 18
This week we’re primarily focused on building out new timelines and pages for new issues — we’re currently breaking down the administration’s actions in eight parts of American life, with much more to come.
We also have updates on two issues: In Medicaid, it’s looking like states will struggle to implement new work-reporting requirements mandated by the budget reconciliation bill, with predictably bad consequences. And after waves of layoffs affecting food safety workers, the administration has also cancelled FDA and USDA union contracts, putting yet more pressure on our already strained food safety system.
Medicaid
The realities of this spring’s massive cuts to Medicaid are coming into view. New work-reporting requirements are scheduled to come into effect at the end of 2026. These new requirements will slash Medicaid spending by kicking millions of people in the target population out of coverage if they can’t submit documentation proving they’ve worked enough hours, or have an acceptable exemption. Earlier this year, we wrote about who these targeted people really are — they’re mostly women, mostly over 40, and mostly living in extreme poverty.
States have been given less than 16 months to build out systems, processes, and policies to let them accept, validate, and act on work documentation from all the people subject to the new requirements. Public policy analysts from Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy warn that many states won’t be able to do it. As a result, state Medicaid programs — many of which are already under intense administrative strain — are likely to get worse for all enrollees, not just those targeted by the new requirements.
Separately, nonabortion care at Planned Parenthood clinics will no longer be reimbursed by Medicaid, following a ruling from the First District Court of Appeals…
Our Medicaid explainer recaps these new updates and breaks down the major attacks on Medicaid by the GOP-led Congress and the Trump Administration.
Food safety
Since January, the Trump administration has laid off or pushed out thousands of federal workers focused on keeping our food supply safe. Earlier this summer, the administration announced that it would terminate union contracts with employees at the USDA and end collective bargaining at the FDA. The chair of the Food Safety and Inspection Service food inspectors’ union predicts that contract cancellations targeting food inspectors will increase workloads, cause the agency to lose inspectors, and make it harder for workers to raise food safety concerns without fear of retaliation.
Meanwhile, legislators and food safety experts are pushing back on administration plans to scatter more than half of all remaining Washington, DC-based USDA workers to “hubs” around the country. Experts describe the reorganization — which includes making relocated workers pay for their own moving expenses and cutting their pay — as yet another way of dismantling USDA functions.
Our Food Safety explainer breaks down the way the administration is cutting jobs, changing rules, and reducing oversight across the federal programs in ways that put the safety or our food supply at risk.
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