A Walmart cashier in Indiana earned $14.53 per hour in 2024, according to salary data collected that year. She cleared the federal minimum wage by $7.28. She qualified for Medicaid. Senator Bernie Sanders reignited his attack on Walmart on July 23, 2026, with a single post on X and a number: $37.6 billion.
Walmart has spent $37.6 billion buying back its own stock since 2020. Sanders calculated that the same amount, divided among the company’s 1.6 million U.S. workers, equals a $23,550 bonus for each employee. According to a federal audit released the day before his post, Walmart ranked among the top employers of Medicaid and SNAP recipients in every one of the 11 states the government examined.
The $37.6 Billion Accusation
In February 2026, Walmart announced a new $30 billion share repurchase authorization, the largest in its 55-year history as a publicly traded company. This followed a fiscal year in which Walmart returned $15.6 billion to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks combined.
The new $30 billion program replaced a previous $20 billion authorization from 2022. Walmart spent $8.09 billion on repurchases in fiscal year 2026 alone. The company also announced its 53rd consecutive annual dividend increase, raising the payout by 5% to $0.99 per share.
In his July 23 post, Sanders said Walmart had spent $37.6 billion on stock buybacks since 2020, an amount sufficient to give each of the company’s 1.6 million U.S. workers a $23,550 bonus. He charged that Walmart pays wages so low that many of its employees depend on taxpayer-funded Medicaid and SNAP benefits.
Walmart reported $713.16 billion in total revenue for fiscal year 2026, which ended January 31, 2026, a 4.7% increase over the prior year. Its market value crossed $1 trillion for the first time in February 2026.
What the Government Accountability Office Found
A federal report released one day before Sanders’ post provided political weight to his accusation. According to a new GAO report, an estimated 13.8 million adults enrolled in Medicaid and 10.6 million adults living in households that received SNAP benefits worked at some point during 2024. About two-thirds of these adults in each program worked full-time, defined as 35 hours or more a week.
Walmart employed 16,055 workers who relied on Medicaid in the states GAO sampled, a 55% increase from the previous report. Walmart also employed 15,515 workers who needed SNAP assistance in those same states. Walmart ranked among the top employers of workers on these programs in every one of the 11 states examined.
Other major employers appearing high on the GAO’s list include McDonald’s, Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and FedEx. The report found that the number of Amazon employees enrolled in Medicaid and SNAP nearly tripled from February 2020 to September 2025 in those 11 states. Gig platforms including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Instacart collectively replaced Walmart as the employer group with the most SNAP recipients.
Walmart has raised its starting wages for associates by 93% since 2015, with associates earning $18 an hour on average. An average hourly rate of $18 still leaves workers below the threshold needed to afford basic costs in most American cities, particularly for those supporting families.
The Walton Family and the “Welfare Queen” Charge
Sanders directed particular criticism at the Walton family in his Senate press release accompanying the GAO report. The press release called on the Waltons, worth $485 billion and owning 39% of the company, to “get off of welfare and pay their workers a living wage with good benefits.” On X, Sanders put it more bluntly: “The real welfare queen is the Walton family worth $485 billion.”
“Welfare queen” entered American political discourse in the 1970s as a stigmatizing label aimed at low-income individuals accused of gaming the public assistance system. Sanders applied it to the billionaire owners of a company whose workers, he argues, are subsidized by taxpayers.
Walmart did not directly respond to Sanders’ July 23 post. A spokesperson invited Sanders to “learn about the many ways we’re working to provide increased economic opportunity, mobility and benefits to our associates.”
Walmart employs 1.6 million people in the U.S. as of the end of its 2026 fiscal year. As the country’s largest private employer, Walmart’s wage and benefit decisions carry outsized consequences for the national workforce.
A Legislative Battle That Never Finished
In 2019, Sanders, along with Senator Chuck Schumer, introduced legislation aimed at prohibiting corporations from share repurchases unless they first raised entry-level wages to $15 per hour and offered sick leave and pensions. The bill was called the Stop WALMART Act: Stop Welfare for Any Large Monopoly Amassing Revenue from Taxpayers Act.
The bill contained a provision capping executive pay at no more than 150 times the median worker salary. On June 5, 2019, Walmart’s shareholders voted down a Sanders-backed proposal to put company employees on its board of directors. The Stop WALMART Act itself stalled in Congress without advancing to a vote.
According to the Foreign Policy Journal, critics of buybacks argue that share repurchases primarily benefit shareholders and executives rather than rank-and-file employees who do not participate in stock-purchase plans. Many economists argue that returning excess cash to shareholders does not necessarily come at the expense of worker pay, since compensation and capital investment decisions are typically handled through separate budgeting processes.
The Tax Foundation has argued that stock buybacks do not come at the expense of capital investment or other economic activities, maintaining that buybacks do not deprive firms of cash they would otherwise use for investment and paying workers. Corporate finance economists make a similar case: treating buybacks as a discrete pool of diverted wages fundamentally misunderstands how capital allocation works inside large public companies. Sanders’ allies believe the calculation is simpler. If a company has $37.6 billion to deploy on its own stock, it has money it could have directed elsewhere.
In June 2026, Sanders said roughly 60% of Americans were living “paycheck to paycheck,” arguing that many families were struggling to afford basic expenses despite the nation’s record wealth.
Walmart’s Counter-Narrative
Walmart has increased its starting wages for associates by 93% since 2015. A 93% increase in starting pay from a historically very low base can still leave workers below a living wage in expensive markets. The company’s average associate wage of $18 an hour is above the federal minimum of $7.25 but well below what most cost-of-living analyses suggest is needed to live independently in major U.S. metropolitan areas.
Walmart generated $41.6 billion in operating cash flow during fiscal year 2026, more than enough to fund capital expenditures, dividends, and the buyback simultaneously. The company paid out 121% of eligible bonuses to U.S. corporate employees, above its 100% target. Walmart did not publicly report whether that figure covers warehouse associates and hourly workers at the same rate as salaried corporate staff.
The Broader Debate on Corporate Buybacks and Labor
The Walmart confrontation is a particularly vivid instance of a debate that has intensified across American politics since Congress lifted restrictions on share buybacks in 1982. Before the SEC’s adoption of Rule 10b-18, large-scale stock repurchases were considered potential market manipulation. After 1982, they became one of the primary vehicles for returning capital to shareholders.
The volume expanded dramatically after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, when repatriated offshore profits flooded back into corporate treasuries. Sanders and Schumer pointed to that dynamic in 2019, noting that U.S. corporations repurchased more than $1 trillion of their own stock in 2018, the highest amount ever authorized in a single year. The policy question Sanders has been trying to force into legislation is whether federal rules should condition a company’s right to buy back stock on minimum standards of worker treatment. The Stop WALMART Act represented one answer. With a Republican-majority Senate in 2026, any similar legislation remains a remote prospect in the near term.
The 2026 GAO report found that 46 companies, about one third of the total companies tracked across all 11 states, were among the top 25 employers of Medicaid enrollees or SNAP beneficiaries in at least two states. Seventeen of those 46 companies were among the 50 largest Fortune 500 companies by number of employees. The federal safety net functions, in practice, as a wage subsidy for some of the most profitable corporations in American history.
What the Numbers Actually Mean
Walmart executed $37.6 billion in stock buybacks since 2020. Over that same period, its annual profits grew from $14.88 billion to $21.89 billion, and the number of Walmart workers relying on Medicaid in the 11 states sampled by the GAO rose by 55%. Profit growth and worker welfare are not, in standard corporate finance, treated as connected. Sanders argues they should be, or at least that they functionally are when the workers in question rely on public funds to survive.
Walmart has raised starting pay substantially over a decade. But an average hourly rate of $18 and a consistent presence at the top of the GAO’s employer lists for benefit recipients in every state studied exist at the same time, in the same company. Pay increases and government assistance rolls are both going up together.
Seven years after the Stop WALMART Act stalled in Congress, the record buyback program that reignited the argument is six times the size of the $5 billion figure that originally inspired that bill. The politics have not moved in Sanders’ direction. The scale of what he’s pointing at has.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.