FOR MANY YEARS, the most vulnerable people in Massachusetts had to prove to the state they not only earned very little income, but also owned essentially nothing of financial value in order to qualify for a cash aid program meant as a last resort.

The requirement for the Emergency Aid to the Elderly, Disabled, and Children program posed a major barrier, caseworkers and legal aid experts said, keeping assistance out of reach for reasons that in some cases seemed illogical.

Deborah Harris, an attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, once represented a client who was homeless and living in a broken-down car. She said the state wanted him to submit paperwork showing that the value of the car did not render him ineligible for the program.

In another case described by the legal aid organization, the state said a refugee couple who came to Massachusetts to escape persecution in the North Caucasus region of Russia did not qualify because the home they still owned, in a country they fled in fear, counted as a financial asset.

That all changed in 2021. After years of advocacy from attorneys who contended the asset limit erected unnecessary obstacles, the Legislature eliminated it.

But now, Gov. Maura Healey wants to revisit the idea.

Healey’s fiscal year 2027 state budget bill would reintroduce an asset test for EAEDC, barring anyone whose accounts or property total more than $2,000 in value from accessing the cash assistance.

Administration officials say the change would align with the program’s intended purpose as temporary assistance for people with few resources. The $2,000 asset limit would also match requirements for the state’s Medicaid program, MassHealth, as well as those for a federally funded aid stream known as Supplemental Security Income.

Advocates, however, warn that the requirement could close the door to one source of financial support for Bay Staters with the greatest needs.

“We fear it’s going to harm the most vulnerable clients who have the most difficulty getting hold of these types of verifications and result in them losing benefits that they urgently, urgently need,” said Naomi Meyer, lead attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services.

Healey’s push to reinstitute an asset limit for the program is a policy rider attached to her vast annual state budget bill, a $63.4 billion spending plan that attempts to navigate sharply increasing health care pressures and the prospect of federal funding cuts.

When fiscal times get tight, governors regularly comb through the massive architecture of state government looking for savings, proposing a tweak here and a cut there to get the math to work. And those changes invariably provoke blowback from groups arguing that they’ll have dire consequences.

In a statement responding to questions about the governor’s safety-net recommendations, Healey spokesperson Karissa Hand said the budget “is a smart, fiscally responsible proposal that protects taxpayer dollars in the face of significant cuts from President Trump, while preserving services that our most vulnerable residents depend on.”

Social safety-net advocates say reimposing an asset test for the emergency aid program would chip away at those services.

Rebekah Gewirtz, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers Massachusetts chapter, said the proposed change feels like an unnecessary hurdle for people struggling to stay afloat.

“It just requires people to be destitute,” Gewirtz said.

Massachusetts once deemed anyone with assets worth more than $250 ineligible for EAEDC, a threshold significantly lower than the one Healey now wants to impose. Five years ago, the Legislature added a provision to the fiscal year 2022 state budget scrapping the limit.

In response, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker at first proposed a compromise that would have effectively raised the limit to $2,000; when lawmakers didn’t bite, he vetoed the language. The Democrat-dominated House and Senate then overrode the governor along party lines to eliminate the asset test altogether.

Sen. Jamie Eldridge, a Marlborough Democrat who helped lead the push to eliminate the prior limit, said he was “very shocked” to see Healey call for its return. He called the asset test “a cynical policy measure” that “doesn’t hold up.”

“It’s just a very troubling narrative,” Eldridge said, describing himself as wary of the notion that the state’s lowest-income residents “somehow could have tens of thousands of dollars in their bank account.”

The EAEDC program offers cash benefits to some of the poorest Bay Staters who are older than 65 and are not receiving federal Supplemental Security Income, unable to work due to a disability, or caring for a child or someone else with a disability.

The modest benefits are the same as the income limits: for example, a homeless individual could not earn more than $441.10 per month to qualify, and that’s also the maximum they could receive from the program. Despite the program’s billing as “emergency assistance,” residents can receive aid as long as they continue to meet the eligibility criteria, and some stay enrolled for years.

Massachusetts had roughly 33,000 EAEDC recipients per month last year, according to state data, and the administration projects the program will cost $207 million in fiscal year 2026.

Healey’s office would reduce funding for the program next year by about $3 million below that level, but it’s unclear how much of that change would come from imposing the asset limit. Administration officials did not answer CommonWealth Beacon questions about how many people they project would be affected by the revived asset limit or how much money the state would save with the threshold in place.

It’s also not clear exactly what would count toward the $2,000 cap under Healey’s proposal, but legal aid providers are worried that the new requirement would cut off some recipients who lack the wherewithal or resources to produce proof that their assets are low enough, all while adding extra administrative work to an office that’s already stretched thin.

Harris, who has spent more than three decades offering legal assistance to public benefit claimants, said although “almost no applicants” had $250 in assets when the prior limit was in place, many struggled to prove their destitution.

She and others questioned whether the move would yield financial benefits for the state after accounting for the extra work that Department of Transitional Assistance employees will need to do to confirm someone’s eligibility.

“That amount of energy to gather the documentation and for DTA staff to verify that is going to be burdensome, especially at a time when the Department of Transitional Assistance doesn’t have enough staff to deal with the current work that’s before them,” said Kelly Turley, associate director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless.

Safety-net advocates and lawyers say existing demands on the DTA workforce are already straining the department.

Healey’s annual budget includes about $148 million for caseworkers at the agency, just a bit more than the administration expects to spend in the current fiscal year.

Vicky Negus, a policy advocate at Mass. Law Reform, worries that not hiring additional staff will leave the department shorthanded, especially as Massachusetts and other states brace for major eligibility and funding changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Smooth distribution of food aid could prove especially critical in the years ahead. Under the new federal law signed by President Trump last July, states starting in October 2027 could be on the hook to pay tens of millions of dollars more per month if their SNAP “error rates” — the share of payments that are too large or too small — are too high.

“A lot of the stuff that’s swirling around here is [from the] imposition of really arcane and misguided and harmful rules from the federal government, but those are the rules,” Negus said. “We as a state need to make sure that we’re serving families who are eligible timely and accurately, and we can’t do that with the caseload that we have right now.”

Although SNAP’s caseload declined in 2025, it’s still nearly 40 percent higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to state data. Negus said the DTA workforce has not grown at the same pace, leading to about 50 percent more cases per employee.

Last year, more than six in 10 phone calls that sought to connect with a caseworker about SNAP failed because the volume was too high for the system to handle, MLRI concluded after reviewing state performance data.

Advocates will now turn to the House and Senate, hopeful that lawmakers will have more of an appetite for staffing up DTA and pressing them to rebuff the Democratic governor’s push for a new asset test five years after they did away with the policy.