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A new Government Accountability Office report has put hard numbers behind something labor advocates have argued for years, thousands of Amazon employees rely on federal food assistance and Medicaid to get by, even as the company posts record profits and continues expanding its position as one of the most valuable corporations on the planet. The report, commissioned by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and released in late July, found that the number of Amazon workers enrolled in these safety net programs has nearly tripled since the GAO’s previous analysis back in 2020.
The specific figures come from a sample covering 11 states, representing roughly one-fifth of the total US population, with the GAO reviewing enrollment data spanning February 2020 through September 2025. Within that sample, 12,346 Amazon workers were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, while another 11,338 relied on Medicaid for health coverage. Those totals placed Amazon second among traditional employers in the study, trailing only Walmart, which had 16,055 workers on Medicaid, a 55 percent jump from the earlier report, and 15,515 receiving SNAP benefits.
The financial contrast driving much of the reaction to this report is genuinely stark. Over roughly the same period the GAO measured this rise in worker assistance enrollment, Amazon’s annual profit climbed from about $11.6 billion in 2020 to $77.7 billion in 2025, while the company’s revenue grew 12 percent year over year to a record $717 billion. Sanders, who has spent years publicly criticizing major corporations over wage practices, was direct in his response to the findings, stating that no one working for a company generating billions in profit should be living in poverty. That combination, soaring corporate profit alongside a near tripling of workers requiring government assistance just to afford groceries and healthcare, is exactly what’s fueling the sharpest criticism of the report’s findings.
Amazon has pushed back firmly against the conclusions being drawn from the data. Company spokesperson Rachael Lighty told multiple outlets that Amazon’s pay is among the best in the industry, pointing specifically to health insurance available to regular full-time employees starting on their first day, priced at $5 a week for individual coverage. Lighty also raised a structural point about how SNAP and Medicaid eligibility actually works, noting that qualification is based on total household income and family size rather than an individual employee’s wages or benefits alone, meaning companies offering part-time positions, which Amazon does, are likely to employ more workers who qualify for these programs regardless of how competitive Amazon’s own pay scale happens to be. She added that 74 percent of Amazon’s regular full-time employees are enrolled in an Amazon health insurance plan, an enrollment rate she said exceeds typical private-sector participation. Separately, Amazon has argued that looking at raw enrollment numbers rather than percentages relative to its overall workforce size is misleading, given that Amazon remains one of the largest employers in the country by sheer headcount.
Those caveats are worth taking seriously, and they echo a similar debate that played out years earlier when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made comparable claims about Amazon workers needing food assistance, claims fact-checkers at the time rated as partially accurate but incomplete, since some workers counted in earlier SNAP enrollment data were part-time by choice or had been receiving benefits before Amazon hired them. Amazon has also raised its minimum wage considerably since those earlier reports, changes the company argues should reduce, though not necessarily eliminate, how many of its workers ultimately need public assistance to make ends meet.
Even accounting for those structural nuances, the broader economic backdrop this report sits within makes the Amazon-specific numbers harder to dismiss as simple statistical noise. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that labor’s share of overall economic output fell to 52.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026, the lowest level on record dating back to 1947, a figure that points to a widening structural gap between how much value American workers generate and how much of that value actually flows back to them as compensation. Wage data reinforces that disconnect directly. While average hourly earnings across the total private sector reached $37.64 in June 2026, real average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, barely moved, sitting at $11.32 that same month compared to $11.18 two years earlier in June 2024, meaning workers’ actual purchasing power has stayed essentially flat even as nominal wages climbed.
Amazon wasn’t the only employer flagged in the GAO’s findings, and the report’s broader scope points to a pattern extending across an entire tier of the American labor market rather than a problem unique to one company. Gig economy platforms including Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, Instacart, and DoorDash barely registered in the GAO’s 2020 analysis but have since risen to rank among the top three employers of both SNAP and Medicaid recipients in the current study, surpassing Walmart specifically as the top employer whose workers rely on food stamps. FedEx saw a similarly sharp rise, with Medicaid enrollment among its workers more than tripling and food stamp enrollment nearly doubling over the same period. Nationally, the GAO’s broader analysis of Census data found nearly 14 million working adults enrolled in Medicaid as of 2024, up from roughly 12 million in 2020, and 10.6 million adults in households receiving SNAP benefits, up from 9 million, figures that show the vast majority of these workers held full-time schedules concentrated in a handful of occupational categories, including transportation and food preparation and service work.
Whatever weight individual readers give to Amazon’s structural explanations for why its enrollment figures look the way they do, the underlying report lands at a politically charged moment, arriving just as expanded SNAP work requirements have already begun stripping benefits from millions of recipients nationally, and as public scrutiny of the gap between record corporate profitability and stagnant real wages continues intensifying across Washington. Whether this particular report translates into concrete policy change, wage floor legislation, expanded benefit eligibility, or continued congressional pressure on Amazon specifically, remains to be seen, but the data itself adds a genuinely hard-to-dismiss data point to an argument that’s been building in American economic policy debates for years.
For more coverage of labor economics and corporate accountability, visit Business Tech.
