The idea is to nudge poor Americans to work; just one in 20 people who works full-time is impoverished, after all. Yet study after study has shown that most of the participants in these programs are working if they can. Work requirements do little to aid individuals who would be working anyway, and nothing to aid individuals unfit for the labor force because of trauma, health issues, problems finding child care and so on. Take the work requirements that the Clinton administration added to T.A.N.F. in 1996. Research has shown that they had no effect on employment rates after five years, and that they increased the country’s extreme poverty rate.

If the Trump White House’s effort goes forward, economists anticipate similar results on a much larger scale. Millions of adults will lose their health coverage — coverage that tends, ironically, to increase work participation rates. Millions more face nutritional insecurity, eviction and other miseries that stem from earning too little.

Republicans would render the safety net threadbare, providing aid with significant conditions to groups of Americans in more and more specific circumstances. Such efforts have little to do with work. They have nothing to do with poverty alleviation. They have everything to do with stigma. They have everything to do with discipline and control. They have everything to do with race and racism. They convey, and not so tacitly, that the poor are poor because they choose to be.

Indeed, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who recently took a tour of Puerto Rico, Alabama and West Virginia, among other places, has argued that the country is seeking to “stigmatize” those in need of help and undertaking a “systematic assault” on the safety net.

What should the country be doing instead? Providing more to low-income families and requiring less of them, making programs more automatic and less paternalistic. Indeed, the country’s strongest anti-poverty programs are in many cases also its simplest. Social Security has slashed the poverty rate among seniors to less than 10 percent from more than 40 percent; a child is more than twice as likely to be impoverished as someone over the age of 65 these days. The earned-income tax credit — you work, you’re poor, you pay your taxes, you get it, more or less — has proved remarkably effective at encouraging single mothers to keep working, without stigmatizing them for not doing so or asking them to document their hours every month. It has drawn hundreds of thousands of women into the labor force and kept them there, all while lifting six million Americans a year out of poverty.

The Trump administration, or a future, more evidence-friendly government, would do well to remake more programs in that image. One option would be to eliminate the welfare program and to replace it with a cash entitlement for poor children, focusing on the needs of younger Americans rather than the perceived inadequacies of their parents. In similarly wealthy countries, poor parents often get a lump-sum payment when a child is born, along with a monthly allowance for those first, critical years. In the United States, they are unlikely to get anything other than a smattering of tax credits. That is a primary reason the United States’ child poverty rate is so high.

More broadly, the government could use the tax code to eliminate poverty by providing a guaranteed minimum income to all households, via something called a “negative income tax,” almost implemented during the Nixon administration.