From Safety Net to Power Base: Reimagining, Not Restoring, the US Antipoverty System

Key Takeaways

• Progressives must move beyond “deliverism”—the focus on merely making programs more efficient—and instead pivot to “rebalancing power” by institutionalizing the influence of low-income constituencies.
• The current safety net relies on a neoliberal logic that assumes subsidizing private markets (demand-side help) is the most efficient way to address poverty, which has allowed corporate actors to capture public investments.
• Much of the current antipoverty infrastructure quietly serves as corporate welfare, funneling public dollars to companies (like Walmart) that pay poverty wages, effectively requiring workers to use the safety net to make ends meet.
• Ending poverty requires a new framework that “braids” market regulations with social policies to ensure that safety net interventions actually build workers’ economic power to counter the concentrated power of corporate actors.
• Economic security is a precondition for a healthy democracy; the failure to correct widespread insecurity and the “deprivation of freedom” inherent in poverty provides a breeding ground for authoritarianism.

Introduction

Our social safety net is under unprecedented attack. Devastating funding cuts from President Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill will cut tens of millions of Americans off from health care and food assistance to finance tax cuts for the wealthy (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2025). Meanwhile, wholesale destruction of state capacity by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has threatened to further undermine the safety net. These attacks will deepen poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth.

But even before these attacks, the safety net¹ was broken. Downward mobility, rising inequality, an affordability crisis, and diminishing economic freedom are defining features of life for millions of working-class Americans. The reality is that the market economy delivers mass-scale poverty that persists in spite of the safety net. Even accounting for federal antipoverty programs, more than 1 in 10 Americans lives below the supplemental poverty measure (Greenstein 2025 [PDF]).

When the government fails to protect its people from economic exploitation, we face a fundamental crisis for democratic legitimacy. The social safety net as it is designed today is simply not capable of reversing these trends—even if it were delivered perfectly. Progressives must therefore resist a restorationist approach that would patch the safety net back together as it was before. Instead, we must pivot from delivering programs to rebalancing power.

Ultimately, working-class families must attempt to survive in the gap between an insufficient safety net and unfair markets. The result is the “affordability crisis” that dominates our politics today—which is really a sanitized way of saying that conditions of poverty are creeping up the income ladder.

The term “social safety net” did not come into widespread usage in the United States until the Reagan administration (Clark 2013) to describe a set of administrative antipoverty programs. This usage has made our understanding of the safety net too small and too passive. In contrast, this report traces the history of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to show how antipoverty systems can operate in a much broader, power-balancing framework. The New Deal marshaled three essential economic interventions to build power for poor people: social insurance programs, market regulations, and public options.

But as New Deal liberalism gave way to neoliberalism, those economic interventions degraded and became decoupled, yielding a safety net that operates through a paradigm of market fundamentalism. Our governing institutions have allowed social policy and market policy to operate in isolation from each other, without coherence or shared strategy. Extensive corporate capture of the safety net means that public investments intended to reach people at the bottom of our economy in fact circulate upward to concentrated corporate actors. Ultimately, working-class families must attempt to survive in the gap between an insufficient safety net and unfair markets. The result is the “affordability crisis” that dominates our politics today—which is really a sanitized way of saying that conditions of poverty are creeping up the income ladder.

To address these systemic shortcomings in our safety net, the New Deal’s promise must be updated for the 21st century through new systems of countervailing economic power. Instead of a safety net that tries (and fails) to help people survive the economy, we need a power base that helps people shape it. This report argues for a new antipoverty system that braids market policy and social policy together to combat conditions of poverty at the sector level, shifting away from a patchwork of reactive programs toward a system that can plan and make investments. As our economy faces potential upheaval and disruption in the age of AI, building an antipoverty system with these capacities is urgent.

This report is rooted in my experience working on family poverty as a policymaker at the White House and in city halls. I experienced a yawning gulf between the standard center-left defense of a big government safety net and the lived reality for millions of low-income families, who often experience the government’s “help” as undignified, demoralizing, and disempowering. To be clear: Acknowledging the limitations of the current safety net is not a license to dismantle it, as some conservative lawmakers seek to do through cruelty and carelessness. Rather, it is a call to build a system that doesn’t just keep people afloat but enables them to stand on solid ground, with the power to direct their own lives.

Pivoting to Power

This report calls for a pivot in antipoverty policy: from delivering programs to rebalancing power. The idea of a safety net, a set of programs woven together to catch people if they suffer financially, has proven too passive to confront the crises of downward mobility, concentrated corporate power, and wealth inequality that lead to the financial exploitation of millions of Americans. Instead, we need an affirmative system of countervailing power that builds up the economic power of Americans in poverty while breaking apart the concentrated power that fuels inequality.

Core to this argument is the idea that economic security is an insufficient framework. Scholars have long recognized that income is a woefully incomplete way to measure human thriving. Poverty runs much deeper than household finances; it is deprivation of freedom (Royce 2009; Sen 1999). Low incomes have metastasized into limited agency. Poor Americans have constrained power in our economy, as wealth inequality soars; in our pay-to-play political system, where concentrated wealth generates disparities in political power (Rahman 2018b); and in our cultural life, where poverty itself is a form of exploitation and civic alienation (Desmond 2023). But safety net programs still reflect a one-dimensional approach to ending poverty: supplementing income, without more comprehensively ensuring that families have the economic power to self-direct their lives. This approach does not reflect people’s desires for their financial lives. Americans do not want to merely survive our economy; they want to be owners, to experience prosperity, to build wealth for their families, to have real financial choices, and to shape the markets they participate in.

Progressive thought leaders have called for new policy models that confront power imbalances by degrading concentrated power and combating rising authoritarianism. K. Sabeel Rahman calls this approach “policymaking as power-building.” He argues that “in an era of increasing (and increasingly interrelated) economic and political inequality, we must design public policies . . . in ways that rebalance disparities of power—and in particular, institutionalize the countervailing power of constituencies that are often the beneficiaries of egalitarian economic policies, yet lack the durable, long-term political influence” (Rahman 2018b). As Alexander Hertel-Fernandez has starkly warned, pro-democracy policymakers must “learn to build power through policy or cede political ground to those who will use such tools to undermine democracy” (Hertel-Fernandez 2025). Other progressive economists have argued that our vision for a post-neoliberal economy must eliminate economic centers of power that distort our democracy (Stiglitz 2024 [PDF]).

This report seeks to extend these power-shifting frameworks into the context of the social safety net, which has received insufficient attention as an area for safeguarding our democracy. Our broken safety net has been profoundly damaging for our democracy. The social safety net is the principal site of interaction between working-class Americans and the government. The way the safety net treats working-class people plays an outsized role in building or breaking their trust in the American project. Because that safety net has tolerated mass-scale poverty, it has effectively eroded the civic power of low-income Americans.

That’s wrong on its own terms, but feelings of economic powerlessness are also a breeding ground for authoritarianism. Evidence suggests that individuals who perceive a failure of social policies to protect them from economic dislocations and shocks are more likely to shift toward right-wing populism. Similarly, experiences of community and regional decline, unaddressed cost-of-living crises, loss of dignity at work, and declining social status can all increase support for antidemocratic movements (Hertel-Fernandez and Strom 2025). In short, the failure to correct widespread economic insecurity chokes democratic legitimacy.²

From Safety Net to Power Base

Any future administration will have to address how the Trump administration has wreaked havoc on the social safety net. Yet patching holes in the safety net or restoring it to the status quo ante would miss a potentially generational opportunity to reverse downward mobility and inequality. Just as FDR used the inherited crisis of the Great Depression as a generational political catalyst for reform, if a progressive enters the White House in 2029, we must be prepared to reimagine, not simply restore, our nation’s antipoverty system. That means reinvigorating the promise of the New Deal for the 21st century by integrating safety net functions into a system that builds up the power of economically disenfranchised Americans, while breaking apart the concentrated economic power that threatens our democracy. To restore democratic legitimacy, policy interventions must also go beyond attempting to keep families afloat. They must instead “affirm social standing, agency, and dignity, especially for individuals whose standing might feel threatened by changing economic, demographic, or social changes, thus tackling ‘nostalgic deprivation’” (Hertel-Fernandez and Strom 2025).

Five interventions would effectuate a shift from a safety net to a system of countervailing power. Across each of these interventions, it’s important to acknowledge that the government’s administrative capacity to deliver the safety net will be in shambles following the Trump administration. In addition to policy changes, the next administration must build the digital public infrastructure to create a 21st-century antipoverty system capable of delivering assistance effectively.

A Framework for Shifting from a Safety Net to Power Base

1. Braid market policy and social policy with sectoral strategies to end impoverishing conditions.

Rather than defending insufficient programs and protections that have failed to end poverty and that leave a gap between market policy and social policy, we instead need a sectoral approach to ending poverty that protects workers and families from asymmetries of power that lead to economic exploitation.

For workers, this means that our antipoverty system must first and foremost prevent impoverishing labor conditions. One way to do this is to use sectoral bargaining to raise wages and improve labor standards at the sector-wide level—using negotiating power across an industry, rather than at individual employers. A shift to sectoral bargaining would raise wages and help reverse the twin forces of inadequate minimum wages and declining union density (Bustamante 2024). This approach could also involve strengthening labor protections in the industries where the lowest wages are concentrated, and addressing the sector-wide labor abuses that result in poverty and economic precarity. For example, we desperately need nationwide protections against shift instability and algorithmic scheduling, which depress wages and make it impossible for families to predict their paychecks week to week (Schneider and Harknett 2019 [PDF]). Other needed reforms to labor protections include significant increases to the federal minimum wage and indexing minimum wages to inflation; safeguarding the right to organize; expanding overtime protection; and deepening investments in active labor market policies that expand access to high-quality jobs.

But these antipoverty labor protections cannot operate in isolation. We also need a wholesale reevaluation of the relationship between social policy and the labor market. As I’ve described earlier, our current system conditions assistance on employment, but allows low-quality jobs with poverty wages to proliferate, resulting in a coercive and ineffective gap between market policy and social policy. Just as the New Deal strengthened worker power as part of a broader approach to protecting Americans from economic hazards, we need a new sectoral approach to ending poverty that rebalances power throughout our economy.

We instead need a sectoral approach to ending poverty that protects workers and families from asymmetries of power that lead to economic exploitation.

This means we need an antipoverty system that works at the sector level to end asymmetries of power that create impoverishing market outcomes. That system would bring to bear all the tools the federal government has—social insurance, market regulations, and public options—at the sector-wide level to bring down costs and build consumer power, with an emphasis on the industries where broken markets are most impoverishing. Housing, health care, child and elder care, groceries, and utilities are five obvious sectors to target, given their outsized role in depressing the economic well-being of the American people. Other sectors, like higher education, where costs and debt limit upward mobility, also require this type of intervention.

A sectoral approach to ending poverty would mean, in practice, a very different approach to legacy aspects of our safety net. We must use both predistributive and redistributive approaches in coordination rather than alone. Market regulation would need to be coordinated with subsidies. This centralized approach will likely require new governing structures that coordinate enforcement, while maintaining (and, post-Trump, restoring) enforcement independence. Programs that rely on private actors to distribute public goods must ensure that those private actors are aggressively regulated to protect against poor services.

Another aspect of a sectoral strategy to ending poverty would be strengthening the capacity of antitrust enforcement for antipoverty work. Of course, antitrust enforcement may in and of itself reduce inequality. But there are opportunities to go further. As Eric Posner and Cass Sunstein outline, regulatory agencies could adopt more explicit enforcement priorities to target markets that are important for the lowest-income consumers, such as the food and health care sectors, which comprise big portions of low-income family budgets and are “notorious for the degree of concentration in crucial sectors and the ubiquity of anticompetitive behavior.” Antitrust enforcement could also prioritize labor markets where low-wage workers are concentrated, especially where significant income disparities by race and gender persist and where anticompetitive practices are common given the limited historical antitrust enforcement (Posner and Sunstein 2022).

2. Directly provision public goods through public options rather than subsidizing broken markets.

A system of countervailing power should accept that many markets have fundamentally failed to serve low-income communities, and would shift our public investment into public options rather than relying solely on private subsidies. Investing in public options is an essential pillar of any sectoral approach to ending poverty. As Sabeel Rahman has argued, “Given the difficulties of ensuring access and provision through regulatory oversight of private actors, renewed attention should be paid to direct public provision through public utilities and public options” (Rahman 2018a). Similarly, “Because of the failure of America’s markets-first approach to policy, the federal government should intervene by introducing public options that provide these essential goods and services in direct competition with private firms. Doing so will set soft ‘floors’ on wages and quality and ‘ceilings’ on price for private actors who are intent on providing important economic rights at a cost” (Darity et al. 2019 [PDF]). Health care, childcare, and elder care are areas where private markets have failed to ensure access to public goods. In these contexts, a public option may just be more effective than a tax credit or voucher (Sitaraman and Alstott 2019).

There’s another industry where public options are desperately needed: the financial services sector. We need vastly stronger protections for families against poverty predation and rising debt. Building countervailing power will require getting poor people out from under the exploitative credit and lending conditions that limit their freedom and future prospects. A more robust safety net that actually keeps people financially secure would, on its own, go quite a way in choking off these predatory financial services by making people less economically vulnerable. But stronger regulations are also needed on unregulated sectors such as buy-now–pay-later, pawning, and payday lending. Public financial options are also needed, to give consumers more choice.

For example, a system of countervailing power could establish a public banking option (Beyer 2025), providing credit and lending programs that give low-income Americans access to a public lender with more advantageous and transparent terms. Those public options would be especially powerful in helping low-income Americans smooth income shocks to maintain financial stability, and to pursue economic mobility through founding and owning small businesses. For example, a national postal banking system would create a public option that provides greater access to basic financial services and gives consumers greater power in the financial market (DiVito 2022; Baradaran 2014). Public-option banking would have another benefit: creating the digital public infrastructure we need to administer secure cash payments to unbanked households.

3. Shift toward social insurance models that provide universal guarantees to address the precarity of our 21st-century economy while overhauling policies to reduce administrative burden.

Instead of a patchwork of administrative programs that are complicated to navigate and provide piecemeal support, we should shift more of our social safety net toward universal guarantees that are centralized and predictable. National social insurance programs will create more countervailing power than diffuse programs for which only certain people qualify. The Social Security program, operated as a nation-to-family promise in which all Americans are vested, has proven remarkably effective at bringing down poverty for older Americans, and it is a source of power for families because it is reliable and a nearly guaranteed source of support. The safety net as a whole would be more effective at addressing poverty and building the economic power of families if more parts of the system worked this way: providing broader eligibility and coverage with consistent benefit levels available in a centralized place. Shifting toward programs that offer more secure guarantees of assistance would also mean adopting more proactive models of support, providing the flexibility to respond to risks before they are realized, such as intervening before layoffs to ensure that individuals can get support.

Moving to simpler and more universal programs is also essential for “curbing the neoliberal obsession with complex and federated means-testing that creates the opportunity for corporate capture” (Farrell 2026). Shifting from a safety net to a power base requires extracting the private contractors like Equifax and Deloitte that profit enormously off of complex and diffuse benefits administration, and replacing them with digital public infrastructure. That digital public infrastructure, and the expanded state capacity that is needed to build it, is essential for enhancing and modernizing administration of the safety net.

Building universal guarantees of economic freedom may also mean consolidating programs that no longer succeed at ending poverty, like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and restoring more of the safety net to cash-based assistance, which provides dignity and autonomy. Instead of piecing together support from multiple government agencies, families should have one source of coordinated assistance through consolidated programs. We should also shift away from the diffuse administration of our safety net through state governments, including block grants, toward national administration of essential programs, while investing in community-based organizations that provide deeper support to people experiencing crisis or precarity.

4. Use antipoverty programs to support poor people’s capacity to engage in collective action, and end coercive safety net policies that erode personal power.

Building countervailing power requires that we facilitate collective action by poor people. Drawing on the practices of labor unions and tenant unions, the federal government could play a leading role in building new organizing power—for example, by creating grocery shopper unions for individuals who receive federal nutrition assistance, or patient unions for those who use Medicaid and Medicare.

Our safety net provides historical precedent for organizing welfare beneficiaries. The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, a cornerstone of the War on Poverty, required the “maximum feasible participation” of low-income communities in new antipoverty programs. The federal government established local community action programs to mobilize community members and ensure their participation (Melish 2010). Similarly, the legacy of community-based organizations like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which worked to mobilize welfare recipients for collective action, provides inspiration for an approach of blending service provision with organizing (Brooks 2005). These historical practices should be revised and reinvigorated to support 21st-century antipoverty organizing.

At the same time, we must also end coercive policies within the safety net that erode personal freedom and power. Work requirements are ineffective and out of step with the labor conditions low-income workers face in the 21st century, and they diminish worker power to the advantage of low-road employers. Similarly, policies that prevent striking workers from accessing unemployment insurance concentrate asymmetric power against the working class. An even broader approach, as described by Andy Stern, would be to think of expanded access to cash assistance as creating personal “strike funds” to give workers more power in the labor market (Kuttner 2016). Across the board, removing the administrative burdens that waste the time of public benefit recipients would improve personal freedom.

5. Shift away from a reactive safety net toward a safety net that can plan and make investments.

We need a safety net that can plan for and manage economic transitions, rather than simply reacting after they occur. This means going beyond an expansion of automatic stabilizers (though we should do that too). A safety net that can plan would mean central coordination to prepare for economic transitions at the levels of place and industry.

Investing in places of concentrated poverty would require a fundamentally new level of coordination in our safety net. Various place-based strategies in the Obama and Trump administrations provide some lessons learned about opportunities and challenges in place-based poverty work, and the limitations of a place-based attempt that relies only on private-sector tax credits to spur investments. A successful federal antipoverty system would make significant and multifaceted investments in the communities that face deep and concentrated poverty. A safety net that affirmatively prepares for place-based economic crises could focus on readying communities for climate change, the arrival of a new data center, or the departure of a major employer, while ensuring corporations are also responsible for addressing disruptions they may cause.

Similarly, a safety net that plans at the industry level would require a system that actively monitors and prepares for sectoral transitions that could lead to upheaval for American families. Building on the limited and reactive trade adjustment assistance programs that exist today, a safety net could expand and deepen its investment in programs that help Americans transition to emerging sectors. For example, as artificial intelligence begins to alter labor market conditions in some sectors, a safety net should be actively preparing for job losses.