“There’s this fallacy that these people are just lazy, or they don’t care, and that by taking help away, they will be empowered to move off of welfare into employment,” said Robyn Merrill, the executive director of Maine Equal Justice Partners, a nonprofit legal-aid provider. “But there are barriers. There are things that stand in the way, whether it’s affordable child care or transportation or needing more education or training. We aren’t doing anything about those things.”

I spent a week traveling in Maine to meet people who had lost assistance, were at risk of losing assistance, or had been denied assistance due to the LePage reforms. One was Sandy J. Bishop, who was eating breakfast at the soup kitchen at Preble Street, a major state anti-poverty organization, in downtown Portland. At the time, Bishop was not receiving any kind of federal or state benefits, and had no cash income or savings. Deep poverty had become its own kind of trap, she explained. “Once you become homeless, then you lose everything,” she told me. “You can’t apply for a job. You can’t apply for an apartment. There are all these little glitches.”

Her wallet had been stolen, so she lacked identification. She had a cell phone, but no money to put on it. She had needed to get her birth certificate replaced twice since becoming homeless. Every morning, she took all her belongings with her when she left the shelter, as there was no storage space for them there and clients cannot stay in the dorm rooms during the day. She piled her bags onto her walker and tossed her handbags over her shoulder, wrapping three scarves around her neck and carting her two canes. “I am not going to get hired like this,” she told me.

The LePage reforms had also disadvantaged low-income individuals and families in the vast reaches of rural Maine, social workers I spoke with explained, where there is scant public transportation and where there are fewer jobs and volunteering opportunities. Kane, for instance, had managed to get some work making wreaths during the holiday season and processing blueberries during the summer. But she worried she would not be able to do the same this year, since she had no way to get to the seasonal factories and the economy was slow. Kane’s case manager mentioned that another indigent client of hers lived on an island without a vehicle, and thus would never be able to meet a work or volunteering requirement.

More broadly, experts argue that work, volunteering, and job-training requirements overly burden individuals in areas with high rates of joblessness and failing economies, such as reservations and isolated rural areas.

Work requirements also disadvantage people who have been incarcerated, given many businesses’ hesitation to hire ex-convicts and many nonprofits’ hesitation to take them on as volunteers—a particular problem in Maine given the state’s rampant opioid-abuse epidemic. (In Portland, the workers at Preble Street had trimmed the bottoms off of its bathroom doors, so that they could see if anyone had overdosed inside and administer naloxone.) Kane’s partner of nearly 20 years, Edmund Osbourne, had been arrested for selling opiate painkillers to a friend to try to raise some cash to pay a past-due bill and ended up serving a few months. “It ain’t been the same since that,” he said, describing his difficulty accessing both the safety net and the labor market.