The People Scamming Welfare Are Not Who You Think
Public records obtained from state agencies show that some of the most profitable and powerful companies employ workers who rely on food assistance.
By Donald Shaw and David Moore
Public records obtained from state agencies show that some of the most profitable and powerful companies in the U.S. are also among the largest employers of workers who rely on food assistance.
In state after state, data received by More Perfect Union through open records requests list giant retailers and gig-economy companies among those with the most workers enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), giving a window into how taxpayer-funded public assistance is being used as de facto wage subsidies for some of the wealthiest American corporations.
We requested data from all 50 states, and after nearly two months of correspondence received information from four: Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, and Washington. An additional state, Massachusetts, released similar information to the Boston Globe last year, and is also analyzed in this report. Most of the other states either flatly rejected our requests or said they did not maintain such records, while Texas referred the request to its attorney general, and Utah requested a fee of $5,652 for the data.
In each of the states for which we have data, two companies are among the top four employers of SNAP recipients: Amazon and Walmart. Ranked by revenue, Amazon and Walmart are also the two largest companies in the world.
Amazon’s reliance on public subsidies for its underpaid labor force has been well known for years. In 2023, researchers at the University of Illinois conducted a survey of Amazon warehouse workers across 42 states and found that 33% of those surveyed had used public assistance programs in the previous three months, including 23% who had used SNAP. Eighty-nine percent of the survey respondents said they work at least 30 hours per week, the threshold used by the Internal Revenue Service for determining if someone is considered a full-time worker.
Walmart not only relies on SNAP to make up for its low wages, but it also benefits more than any other company from people using food stamps to buy their groceries. According to a Numerator survey covering the 12 months ending July 31, 2025, Walmart is the largest retailer for SNAP benefit redemption in the U.S., receiving 25.8% of all SNAP dollars.
Other companies that frequently appear at the top of the state lists include McDonald’s, DoorDash, Uber, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General. The dollar stores accept SNAP, so are double-dipping in the same way as Walmart. DoorDash and Uber have fought efforts to reclassify their workers as employees through aggressive lobbying and political spending, most notably spending tens of millions of dollars each in 2020 to pass a California ballot proposition that exempted app-based drivers from a recently enacted state law designed to grant them employee status and minimum wage protections.
Here’s what we heard back from the states that responded:
In Colorado, self-employed workers make up the largest portion of SNAP recipients, followed by Amazon, Walmart, and several of the other companies that frequent the top state lists. The Denver-based grocery chain King Soopers is also near the top of the list, with more than a thousand employees in the state on food stamps.
The data we received from Illinois is current as of Jan. 30, 2026 and shows that the home health care company Help at Home tops the list with more than 5,000 employees on SNAP, followed by Walmart with about 4,500.
In Michigan, the top employers of SNAP participants are Walmart, supermarket chain Meijer, Amazon, and McDonald’s. Close behind them is the Michigan-based Corewell Health.
In Washington, where the state minimum wage is the highest in the country, supermarket chain Safeway tops the list of employers with SNAP recipients in their workforce, followed by home health care intermediary Public Partnerships and temporary staffing company Express Employment.
Massachusetts did not respond to our public records request, but the Boston Globe obtained data from the state earlier this year and found that, beyond the usual suspects, other top SNAP beneficiary employers include grocery store Stop & Shop, social services organization Tempus Unlimited, and non-profit healthcare company Mass General Brigham.
Watch More Perfect Union’s video reporting on this issue here.