- A GAO report requested by Bernie Sanders lists Amazon among the top employers of Medicaid and SNAP recipients in every state that supplied employer data
- Amazon’s capital expenditure guidance for 2026 has risen from $200 billion to $220 billion citing AI demand as a primary driver
- Amazon contests the findings, stating the rankings used do not account for the employer’s workforce numbers
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently published a report claiming Amazon is among the largest employers of Americans who rely on food stamps and Medicaid.
The report, requested by US Senator Bernie Sanders, who is the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was released publicly on July 22 2026, a month after it was sent to the senator.
The study is not the first of its kind: the GAO published the same in October 2020 at the request of the same committee, though Amazon was far less dominant on the list at a cursory glance.
A report that paints a worrying trend, but fails to provide a complete picture
GAO collected employment records from 15 agencies across 11 states, all of them the same agencies that supplied the 2020 data, and asked for a snapshot of September 2025.
The office then estimated the 25 employers in each state with the most enrollees. The resulting document showed Amazon near the top of every list: It ranked second in five states for Medicaid enrollees, and second or third for SNAP recipients in six different states. Adding the state figures links the e-commerce giant’s employee list to 11,338 Medicaid enrollees and 12,346 SNAP recipients.
The report does not, however, directly or indirectly address AI, data centers, or Amazon’s Capex ambitions, or point to a particular trend as a snapshot of a single month of data, and it fails to draw a direct comparison with its 2020-based iteration.
It has drawn a sharp rebuke from Amazon, which saw its spokesperson, Rachael Lighty, tell The Washington Post that the company dealt in raw numbers rather than percentages, which was misleading, and CNN that eligibility “is based on total household income and family size, not individual wages or benefits,” so an employer offering part-time work will naturally show more eligible staff.
This is something the GAO tends to accept, even in its own footnotes: a larger employer simply has more employees in play and is therefore more likely to be on that list, which is skewed against part-time individuals who are more likely recipients of those food assistance programs.
It does make for an interesting approach to the entire model, which Senator Sanders has pointed out shows “triple” the number on SNAP and Medicaid simply because Amazon’s employment statistics have swung so wildly of late.
The e-commerce giant’s global workforce went from about 798,000 at the end of 2019 to a peak of 1.61 million in 2021, and stood at 1,576,000 at the end of 2025, effectively doubling from when the report was originally published in 2020, potentially skewing results against itself due to a larger employee base.
The findings and the defense presented by Amazon, however, have not gone down well with certain quarters; Senator Sanders has called the trends “beyond unacceptable”, stating that “American taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize the starvation wages of large corporations”.
Much of Amazon’s recent focus, including a significant increase in Capex spending, has been towards AI and AI-related infrastructure under its AWS arm. Amazon guided to about $200 billion of 2026 capital expenditure on its Q4 2025 call in February, up from $131.8 billion in 2025. On July 30, Andy Jassy raised that to $220 billion, blaming higher memory prices, and said Amazon would still not have enough capacity for the demand it is seeing.
AI data centers are increasingly a point of contention among AI juggernauts, hyperscalers, and less-eager locals bearing the brunt of higher water and power costs, even as availability becomes equally challenging.
For a company spending $220 billion on AI infrastructure this year and rolling out an $1 billion commitment in late 2025 to raise base pay for its US fulfillment and transportation workers, being at the top of multiple lists of states with workers being eligible for (and using) Medicaid and food assistance programs might not be great timing when there is increasing scrutiny of trillion-dollar corporations and their massive profit margins by consumers and jobseekers alike.
