A sign announcing the acceptance of electronic Benefit Transfer
cards at a farmers market in Roseville, California. (AP Photo/Rich
Pedroncelli)
It’s official: Congress will slash food stamp funding in the midst of a deep economic recession, when
more people rely on food stamps than ever before.
Monday night, the Senate passed a five-year farm bill that contained
$4.1 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP) over ten years. This ensures that the only debate now will be
about how much to cut—and it’s likely to result in cuts much deeper than
$4.1 billion.
The House Agriculture Committee passed a farm bill last month that
cut $20.5 billion from SNAP by removing “categorical eligibility” (more
on that
here), which would take food stamps away from 2 million Americans and hundreds of thousands of children.
That bill has yet to be fully debated and passed on the House floor,
and the push to make the cuts even deeper will be strong—conservatives
have insisted on even deeper cuts. Representative Paul Ryan’s 2013
budget, for example,
called for
$135 billion in food stamp cuts, and on Tuesday, twenty-five House
Republicans wrote to House Speaker John Boehner to remove food stamp
funding from the bill altogether. (They just want the program debated on
a separate track, but the barely implicit message in the letter is that
they don’t want to be forced to agree to “only” $20.5 billion in food
stamp cuts at the risk of killing the farm bill.)
The House bill, once passed, will head to conference committee, and
the negotiators will have to reach a consensus number. Without question,
it won’t be lower than $4.1 billion.
Why did Democrats in the Senate head down this road? Some attempted
not to—Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a bill last month that
blocked any food stamp cuts, but only twenty-five of her colleagues, and
zero Republicans,
voted for it. It failed 70-26.
Senator Debbie Stabenow, chair of the Senate Agriculture committee,
has defended the cuts as designed only to stop “waste, fraud and abuse”
in the SNAP program, and urged Democrats to vote against Gillibrand’s
bill. “Every family that currently qualifies for nutrition assistance in
this country continues to get that assistance,” she
said. “We do make sure there is integrity in the programs.”
That’s not really what the bill does, however. It cuts $4.1 billion
by eliminating the “Heat and Eat” programs adopted by several states
that coordinate low-income heating assistance with SNAP benefits, thus
allowing a slightly larger benefit. The Coalition on Human Needs
explains:
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have opted to
provide SNAP households with a nominal [Low Income Heating Assistance
Program] payment, so that instead of having to provide burdensome
monthly documentation of their shelter and heating/utility bills, they
can deduct a standard allowance from their income, thereby increasing
the amount of SNAP benefits they qualify for. This “Heat and Eat”
approach disproportionately helps seniors and those with disabilities,
who pay a high proportion of their income on shelter costs. Without this
coordinated approach, such households may lose $50—$75 a month in SNAP
benefits.
Aside from being, well, cruel, the food stamp cuts in the Senate bill
are also damaging to the economy. The Center for American Progress, in a
study released in March, found that for every $1 billion cut from SNAP, 13,718 jobs are lost:
So the Senate bill, by that calculation, will cost 56,243 jobs. CAP
noted the losses “will likely have the greatest impact on younger
workers, since they account for a disproportionate share of workers in
food-related industries.”
The only hope now to at least moderate the cuts is a band of House Democrats who have
pledged to fight the food stamp cuts ferociously, as we reported last month.
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