Republicans have already targeted food stamps. Senator Mike Lee and Representative Jim Jordan introduced a bill last year that would add stricter work requirements to the program, while the Trump administration is planning to give states more leeway in imposing them. “If you are on food stamps and you are able-bodied, we need you to go to work,” the White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said early last year. “There’s a necessity to work to help the country succeed.”

Housing assistance is also, apparently, included in the welfare umbrella. Housing Secretary Ben Carson has said that his agency will be “significantly involved” in any welfare overhaul. He believes the “critical work” of the agency is to “help work-eligible households achieve self-sufficiency,” and that as things stand assistance makes people dependent and public housing is too cushy.

We’ve already tried out work requirements, and they just don’t work. In the 1990s, as part of that original effort to change cash assistance, a strict work requirement was included under the idea that it would get people “off welfare and into work,” in President Bill Clinton’s words. But many people who were shoved off cash assistance didn’t land in paid employment. In Maryland, over a third of people had no job at all within five years of losing enrollment. In some other places, within five years they were less likely to be employed than those who weren’t subjected to work requirements.

Those who did secure work were frequently stuck in low-wage jobs that didn’t even last the full year, and most still lived in poverty. In Maryland, more than half of those pushed off the program had unstable, low or declining earnings.

This is the policy that the House speaker, Paul Ryan, has lauded as “revolutionary.” What it’s shown is that we’re more concerned that people prove their worth through work no matter the quality of the work itself, nor whether it actually improves their lives. Those who fall through the cracks are simply forgotten.

Republicans don’t want to appear cruel. In justifying their onslaught, Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee assured viewers of Fox News, “We’re not talking about taking away benefits from those who deserve those benefits.”

But that is perhaps what’s most galling: the notion that those who can’t or won’t work for a multitude of reasons don’t deserve anything. Medicaid is an especially bizarre place to impose work requirements, and not just because health care makes work easier. Even if someone who can do it won’t work, does that mean he deserves poor health? Do we feel it’s right to let him face a greater risk of dying based on his work ethic?