It Matters Who's Cashing the Check

The governor's campaign is spending six figures this fall on a television ad about a young man named Brad. He lounges around playing video games, eating cheese balls, and collecting welfare. The governor tells us she launched a welfare-to-work requirement so the Brads of the world must work, go to school, or volunteer.

It is a tidy story. It is also not true.

The Medicaid work requirement she is taking credit for was written in Washington, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Congress passed in 2025, and takes full effect Jan. 1, 2027. She had no role in passing it. The last time Arkansas tried this on its own, starting in 2018, more than 18,000 Arkansans lost their coverage before a federal judge shut it down.

We also learned, more importantly, that it was an expensive way to take coverage away from people. Standing up the requirement cost $26.1 million in state and federal money, and Arkansas paid 17 cents of every dollar of it. Meanwhile Washington was paying 94 cents of every dollar of Arkansas Works coverage that year, so each person the state dropped saved Arkansas pennies on the dollar.

DHS had projected $49 million a year in savings. No such savings were ever reported, the program lasted less than a year, and the coverage losses were largely reversed once the court stepped in. In fact, more than 95 percent of the people targeted were already working or should have been exempt. Most of those removed lost coverage because DHS could not reach them (by its own account it received a "very high volume" of returned mail) and when they called, they sat on hold for up to an hour to reach local staff who were ill-equipped to help.

But set the ad's accuracy aside. I have no quarrel with protecting tax dollars from fraud and waste. I would just like the concern to apply to all of them, not only the ones that go to poor people.

Consider LEARNS. Last month the Legislative Council released another $70 million in reserves for Education Freedom Accounts, bringing this school year's total to $379.4 million. Roughly 50,000 students hold accounts, 28,000 in private schools and 21,000 homeschooling, at $7,346 apiece. Lawmakers approved $277 million for last school year, added $32 million in January when that ran short, and this year's figure is $70 million higher still. I have not heard the word "waste" used once.

Now look at what the state requires of a private school that takes this money. It is audited only if the Education Department happens to pick it at random. It picks its own test from a state list and does not have to report individual results to the state or to parents. ProPublica found this summer that in three school years the department has intervened at exactly two schools and never permanently cut one off. At one, which had collected more than $300,000, payments resumed two days after they were stopped.

Public schools in Arkansas post their expenses every month and are audited every year. When Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families asked that private schools taking public money live under the same audit rules, the department's written response was "Comment considered, no changes made," with a note that the audit language was not up for amendment at this time.

When state auditors did look at the accounts, they found 19 full-time public school students who collected $58,751 anyway, and a recoupment process that, as one Republican legislator read aloud from the report, "has not yet been fully developed."

So here is where we are. An adult on Medicaid expansion will have to navigate a convoluted administrative process to document 80 hours a month or lose health-care coverage. A private school, responsible for the education of Arkansas students, can collect several hundred thousand dollars in state tax dollars and may never see an auditor.

If Brad had opened a private school instead of picking up a game controller, nobody from the state would have come to check. Fraud and waste, it turns out, only count when the check is small and the person cashing it is poor.

This column originally appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on October 25, 2026.