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Litigating Welfare Rights: Medicaid, Snap, And The Legacy Of The New Property, Andrew Hammond Jan 2020

Litigating Welfare Rights: Medicaid, Snap, And The Legacy Of The New Property, Andrew Hammond

UF Law Faculty Publications

In 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress was poised to make deep cuts to the nation’s two-largest anti-poverty programs: Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as “food stamps.” Yet, despite having a unified, GOP-led federal government for the first time in over a decade, those efforts failed. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration and its allies in state government continue to pursue different strategies to roll back entitlements to medical and food assistance. As public interest lawyers challenge these agency actions in federal court , roughly five million Americans’ health insurance and food assistance hang in the balance. This Article …


Disappropriation, Matthew Lawrence Dec 2019

Disappropriation, Matthew Lawrence

Matthew B. Lawrence

In recent years Congress has repeatedly failed to appropriate funds necessary to honor legal commitments (aka entitlements) that are themselves enacted in permanent law. The Appropriations Clause has forced the government to defy legislative command and break such commitments, with destructive results for recipients and the rule of law. This Article is the first to address this poorly-understood phenomenon, which it labels a form of “disappropriation.” 

The Article theorizes recent high-profile disappropriations as one probabilistic consequence of Congress’s decision to create permanent legislative payment commitments that the government cannot honor without periodic, temporary appropriations. Such partially-temporary programs include Medicaid and …