Fact-checking Sarah Sanders’ claims about Brad, the welfare queen

Gov. Sarah Sanders’ recent ad, touting her administration’s alleged imposition of work requirements on Arkansas’ welfare recipients, has drawn a lot of attention, though likely not for the reasons Sanders expected.

Almost instantly after her people posted the ad on Twitter, rightwing content creators like Matt Walsh and Nick Fuentes, along with all manner of MAGA chuds and incels, attacked Sanders for using a white man named Brad as the ad’s example of someone who spends all day playing video games and collecting welfare while refusing to get a job. The blowback quickly gained national attention, with even Fox News describing Sanders as an “ex-MAGA official” and labeling the ad as “dishonest.”

Rather than acknowledge her inadvertent own-goal and backpedal, Sanders doubled down. In a press release on Tuesday, she bragged about the “six-figure ad campaign that will air statewide on television and digital platforms.”

Her obstinance is hardly surprising — refusing to ever acknowledge a mistake is a load-bearing part of Sanders’ public persona. What is a bit surprising though is Sanders willingly taking all this flak for an ad that is based entirely on a lie.

Sanders says in the ad that she “launched a welfare-to-work requirement,” which requires people like Brad to get a job, be in school or volunteer if they are going to receive government aid. She did nothing of the sort.

The welfare-to-work requirement she’s referring to was actually part of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress passed in 2025. Under that law, able-bodied adults aged 19 to 64 who are enrolled in expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act must complete at least 80 hours per month of working, volunteering, job training or higher education. States have until Jan. 1, 2027, to fully implement this new federal rule.

Sanders had no role in passage of that bill, of course. Likewise, she had no role in Arkansas’ previous efforts to impose a work requirement on Medicaid recipients in 2017.

That time around, Asa Hutchinson was governor, and he signed a bill sponsored by Sen. Jonathan Dismang (R-Beebe) and Rep. Jeremy Gillam (R-Judsonia). The state was warned at the time that the work requirements were illegal, but Hutchinson signed the bill anyway.

The 2017 law required non-exempt Arkansans ages 30-49 (though the age range was later expanded) who received Medicaid to report 80 hours of work or community engagement monthly. The law largely failed at what it was trying to accomplish, and over 18,000 Arkansans lost coverage before a federal judge blocked the rules in 2019.

Those are the only two times in Arkansas where the state imposed work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and in neither case did Sarah Sanders have a single thing to do with the creation of those work requirements.

Sanders has never been particularly concerned with the truth of anything she says, especially in political ads. Her recent hate-filled celebration of bigotry against transgender Arkansans was just one of several examples of this.

Still, bragging about spending six figures on an ad that is both demonstrably false and is infuriating some of the loudest parts of the online right seems like a real test of the idea that all press is good press. It might not be a poor enough decision to cost her reelection in 2026, but it’s the kind of unnecessary misstep that will almost certainly remain an albatross around her neck when she inevitably announces she’s running for president.