Cash-for-work (CFW) has long been used as a short-term relief program that provides temporary cash assistance through jobs. In doing so, these programs invigorate local economies affected by natural and manmade disasters. However, aid actors ranging from the likes of the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) to Oxfam are using—and advocating for—these programs in protracted crisis contexts, like Jordan, where one would assume long-term, sustainable solutions might be more appropriate. This paper subsequently asks: What explains why organizations in Jordan’s aid sector are pursuing CFW programs in protracted conditions, and what are the effects of these programs on the communities and individuals they target? Drawing upon 95 interviews and 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork with aid workers employed in Jordan’s aid sector from 2017–2018, I find that aid organizations strategically use CFW to negotiate the domestic refugee context in terms of the uncertainties they face working as both “relief” and “development” actors in a protracted crisis situation and in an authoritarian landscape. CFW signals to donor and government actors that organizations are committed to investing in local economies in Jordan (i.e., providing “development”) but will maintain support for Syrian and other refugees—who are the main target groups of the program—despite the protracted context (i.e., providing “relief”). However, I also find that organizations’ attempts to use CFW to mediate competing interests among donors, beneficiaries, and the Jordanian government create particular forms of labor arrangements that exacerbate precarity among refugee and host communities in ways that often are unanticipated. I situate my findings in comparison to welfare-to-work programs in the United States and other democratic contexts. In doing so, I extend understandings of how the “welfare state” operates within ambiguous terrains of citizenship and in authoritarian landscapes. This paper therefore nuances explanations related to the sources and processes in aid operations that contribute to, and reproduce, social inequalities and hierarchies at the national and transnational levels.