Guaranteed income programs do not work and amount to mere “redistributions of wealth,” according to Michigan Republican state Rep. Jay DeBoyer, who joined other Republicans in the state Legislature in criticizing the programs, which have gained prominence in recent years.
“Absolutely not. When does that stop?” Rep. DeBoyer, R-Clay Township, told Fox News Digital. “When you think about the role of government, the role of government is not to fund people’s lives. The role of the government is to provide a conducive environment where you have opportunities for success.”
DeBoyer, who chairs the state House Oversight Committee, is leading a contingent of Michigan House Republicans demanding rigorous inspection of Rx Kids — a taxpayer-funded initiative billed as the nation’s largest prenatal and infant cash assistance program. Lawmakers are raising alarms over how hundreds of millions of public dollars are being spent.
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The scrutiny boiled over during a June 2 House Oversight Committee hearing, where GOP lawmakers targeted the program’s lack of spending restrictions or income limits.
Republican leaders argue the state-funded initiative has evolved into something far different than what was originally presented to the Legislature, accusing Democrats of using hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding to advance a broader guaranteed-income agenda.
Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall told Fox News Digital that lawmakers were led to believe they were funding a targeted maternal and prenatal health initiative — not what he characterized as an open-ended social experiment. Under the current design, Rx Kids provides expectant mothers with a lump-sum payment of $1,500 during pregnancy, followed by $500 per month for six or 12 months after birth, depending on the participating community, regardless of household income.
GOP lawmakers across the country have raised similar legal, budgetary, and ideological objections to guaranteed basic income (GBI) and direct cash transfer programs.
In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Harris County over its Uplift Harris direct-cash pilot, prompting the Texas Supreme Court to block the payments in 2024. Harris County later terminated Uplift Harris and a successor program in June 2025 and moved to reallocate the funds. In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed Republican-backed legislation that would have prohibited local municipalities and counties from enacting GBI initiatives. Meanwhile, Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed House File 2319 into law on May 1, 2024, banning local guaranteed income programs statewide.
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The director of Michigan’s Rx Kids, Dr. Mona Hanna, told Fox News Digital that the initiative is neither a traditional guaranteed income program nor a universal basic income (UBI) model, pointing to its strict focus on the critical first year of a child’s life.
DeBoyer directly challenged that distinction, pointing to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) plan. The state document explicitly defines a “guaranteed income program” as a “cash payment provided on a regular basis to members of a community with no strings attached and no work requirement,” citing Rx Kids as a primary example.
“The truth is this is just about redistribution of wealth,” DeBoyer said. “It’s a distribution tactic that I would argue is not going to help moms and babies, when that’s actually what we should be trying to do.”
Progressive advocates have pushed back against the Republican offensive. Adriane Brown, senior communications director for the Economic Security Project (ESP) — an advocacy group founded in 2016 to promote direct cash transfers — argued that direct assistance enjoys bipartisan support.
“Cash is widely supported across ideological lines, and there’s long been growing momentum and political appetite for guaranteed income,” Brown told Fox News Digital.
“The majority of the Michigan Legislature supports this pilot,” Brown added. “Republican Senator John DaMoose wrote an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press about how Rx Kids is a pro-life policy and ‘fiscally responsible,’ and the program has been expanded in both urban and rural communities throughout Michigan by both Democrat and Republican leaders.”
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Brown emphasized that economic pressures on young families necessitate immediate, flexible relief.
“The bottom line is, people are struggling in our economy,” Brown said. “It’s more expensive than ever to have a child. In acute moments of vulnerability, people need all the support they can get. It doesn’t make sense to malign cash assistance as a partisan idea when so many communities would benefit from the stability it offers.”
Meanwhile, the ESP has been pushing for guaranteed income long before affordability became a salient issue. Founded in 2016, ESP launched with more than “100 entrepreneurs, activists, researchers and philanthropists” advocating for direct cash payments.
The ESP helped create over 100 guaranteed income pilots across the U.S.
The broader campaign for direct payments includes Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, led by former Stockton, California, Mayor Michael Tubbs. Tubbs, who launched one of the nation’s early municipal cash experiments, has long argued that federal tax dollars should fund income supplements to help lower-income Americans keep up with rising inflation, rent and groceries, claiming it’s a viable policy to tackle affordability.
As many guaranteed income advocates would like to make the policy permanent and even push it at the federal level, only Cook County, Illinois has approved such a measure so far.
DeBoyer countered that established social safety nets already exist to support low-income families, but said those programs carry strict eligibility standards and oversight mechanisms that Rx Kids lacks.
“We have a safety net. We spend literally billions of dollars on social welfare,” DeBoyer said. “The difference is, in this particular spending, there are no parameters. There is no means test. Literally a millionaire qualifies for this program. An individual who’s not an American citizen qualifies for this program.”
“An individual that is in this program can spend their money on anything they want to spend their money on — they can spend it on alcohol, cigarettes, fast-food or vacations. At the end of the day, we can say that this is about moms and babies, but that creates the potential for massive abuse.”
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