Six weeks into his first term in Congress, Mike Kennedy introduced a bill about who deserves to eat.

It is called the Let's Get to Work Act of 2025, filed on February 11, 2025. One other member of Congress signed on. It has never gotten a vote.

But it is worth reading anyway, because a bill nobody else wanted to co-sign tells you exactly what one member thinks on his own — before leadership, before the whip count, before the talking points get sanded down. And what Kennedy filed, in his first six weeks, was a plan to make it harder for older people, parents, and families in public housing to keep food on the table.

Here is how he explained it at the time:

"Growing up receiving government assistance and working since I was 12, I know firsthand that the key to making government support truly effective is pairing it with hard work."

Read that again. He got the help. He is now a physician, an attorney, and a member of Congress. The help worked. And the lesson he drew from it was that the next family needs less of it.

What the bill actually does

Federal food assistance already has work rules. Adults the government calls "able-bodied adults without dependents" have to work or train for a set number of hours or they lose benefits after three months. There are exemptions — for older adults, for parents, for people the rules would obviously crush.

Kennedy's bill goes after the exemptions. From the text of H.R. 1198:

Older adults. The bill strikes the age exemption and replaces it with one word change: benefits are protected only for someone "over 60 years of age." A 58-year-old laid off from a warehouse job has to document her hours or lose her food benefits. So does a 59-year-old.

Parents. Right now a parent responsible for a dependent child is exempt. Kennedy's bill narrows that to a parent of a child "under 6 years of age." The moment your youngest starts first grade, the clock starts on you. Parents of school-age kids get six months instead of three before the cutoff — a slightly longer runway to the same cliff.

And then there's Section 3. This is the part that got almost no coverage. The bill takes those same food-stamp work rules and bolts them onto housing. It amends the United States Housing Act of 1937 so the requirements apply to "any individual who is a member of a family residing in a public housing dwelling," and again to "any individual who is a member of a family receiving tenant-based assistance" — that's a Section 8 voucher.

So a family that falls out of compliance doesn't just lose groceries. Under Kennedy's bill, the same paperwork failure reaches their housing.

The part he keeps calling "dependency"

Kennedy described the goal to KSL in plain terms: the reforms would "reduce dependency on welfare," and it was time to "empower able-bodied Americans to reenter the workforce."

That framing rests on an assumption — that the people on these programs aren't working. It is the same assumption Republicans made about Medicaid, and it did not survive contact with the data: 92% of adults on Medicaid were already working, caregiving, in school, or unable to work. What the rules actually catch is the paperwork: the shift that got cut, the online portal that timed out, the notice mailed to an old address.

We have watched this happen in real time. After Trump's budget bill pushed the top age from 54 all the way to 64 and dropped the parent exemption to children under 14, about four million Americans came off food assistance. The Congressional Budget Office had estimated the work-rule changes alone would cut roughly 2.4 million people in an average month. Those weren't 2.4 million people who found jobs.

Kennedy filed his version five months before that law passed. He wanted the age at 60 when the statute still said 54. The final bill went past him — and he voted for it.

He is not alone in this. Aaron Bean of Florida wrote the Medicaid work requirement as a standalone bill twice before it was folded into the budget. Darin LaHood, who chairs the subcommittee over cash aid to poor families, wrote a TANF rewrite built on "personal responsibility agreements". The work-requirement push isn't a stray idea. It's a project, and members put their names on the pieces.

What this means in Utah

This is not abstract in his state.

About 176,200 Utahns receive food assistance every month. Roughly 1 in 5 Utah kids faces hunger. When the government shut down last fall and November benefits were in doubt, state officials put the number of Utah households on SNAP at about 86,000.

Those are the households Kennedy's bill is aimed at. Not fraud — households. A 59-year-old in Provo. A mother in Orem whose kid just turned seven.

The doctor part

The thing that makes this land differently is that Mike Kennedy is a practicing family physician.

He knows what happens to a patient who stops eating well. He knows what happens when a family with an unstable roof over their heads tries to manage a chronic illness. Food and housing are not adjacent to health care — for a family doctor, they are health care, and they show up in the exam room long before anything else does.

He voted for the budget bill anyway, the one projected to cost about 80,000 Utahns their health insurance. Then he defended the Medicaid cuts in a published op-ed, writing that they "cut waste while preserving resources for the people it was intended to serve."

The Let's Get to Work Act says the quiet part earlier and more clearly than any vote does. It was his own bill, in his own name, in his first six weeks, with nobody making him file it.

He grew up on government assistance. He wants the next kid's family to have a harder time getting it.

Source

Cami Mondeaux, "Utah congressman pushes to expand work requirements for SNAP assistance", Deseret News / KSL, February 17, 2025. Photo: KSL.