Eligibility for federal safety net programs like Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, and Kids Care requires that applicants establish that they financially qualify.
In order to do the means-testing we need to be able to compare a family’s income to a benchmark to make sure they really need and qualify for a benefit like Medicaid, SNAP or WIC. That benchmark is called the ‘federal poverty level’ (FPL).
For several decades, the federal government has had a small crew of objective and apolitical statisticians who specialize in using economic data to set up the FPL.
The team takes Census Bureau poverty-line figures, adjusts them for inflation, and creates the FPL for the country each year (Alaska and Hawaii have a different FPL than the rest of the US).
This week Secretary Kennedy fired all the staff who do the rigorous and unbiased calculation of the FPL this week. Well, actually, he put them on administrative leave until June 1, at which point they’ll all be canned.
HHS will still need to develop an FPL annually – but they’ll no longer have the staff to do it.
Perhaps one of the DOGE bros will take a few minutes and make one up from now on.
There’s a good chance that the mass firing was done so Kennedy/Musk can set their own (arbitrarily low) FPL next year to kick millions of people off safety net programs like Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, and marketplace cost sharing subsidies.
Time will tell – but these guys are good at finding where the hinge points are so they can cause as much damage as possible with the least possible effort.
