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House Republicans have coupled their cruel plans to kick people off of food assistance programs with a supposed solution—the expansion of an existing job training program in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The problem is that they are proposing this expansion having done nothing to determine if it will work—if it's big enough, if states are prepared to scale up their programs to meet the demand, if the basic idea behind it is even workable.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has long sought to shrink the safety net, lauded the farm bill advanced last week by the House Agriculture Committee calling it “the precise thing we need to do to get people from welfare to work." Ryan said Thursday he sees the farm bill as part of “the final installment” of the House GOP agenda.
But standing up training capacity for as many as 3 million people so quickly would be roughly equivalent to building almost half the existing U.S. community college system from scratch, said Kermit Kaleba, director of federal policy at the National Skills Coalition.
"You could have a real paradigm shift in how we invest in low-income workers," said Kaleba, a big proponent of expanding training. "But in order to have that conversation, you have to have a realistic sense of scale."
And that scale dwarfs what exists now.
What exists now is a SNAP Employment & Training program funded at about $90 million annually. The new bill would increase that to $1 billion in annual funding over three years, and states would be expected to have their expanding training programs running in two years, bringing in the 5 to 7 million who would be subject to the work requirements. That's a huge lift in a very short period of time, and the $1 billion allocated by House Republicans likely wouldn't be adequate for the job. Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "estimated that it would probably take closer to $4 billion to $5 billion to stand up a SNAP E&T program on the scale needed to serve everyone who would be mandated to either participate or work 20 hours per week."
The other huge unknown is whether it this particular job training program actually works to help lift people out of poverty, since a study of it hasn't been done since 1994, when researchers found "'no evidence' the program, which was primarily focused on low-touch services like job search, 'increased the likelihood of participants finding jobs.'" In 2014, the farm bill allocated $200 million to launch a 10 state pilot project over five years to test new education and training approaches. The projects run until 2019, and right now the results are unknown—because this takes time. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), who served as her state secretary of labor before being elected to the House pointed out that this programs could provide guidance to the congress. "If you're concerned with getting the policy right, then why aren't we waiting to consider [the results] of these pilot programs? […] I think it's ill-advised to scale up a massive training program until we know more."
This is just one more reason why the House bill is highly unlikely to fly in the Senate. The House Republicans, giving Ryan his sociopathic send-off, are setting up a massive fight over a bill that has traditionally been bipartisan and generally non-controversial. They're doing at a time when rural states are already reeling over the trade hit farmers are getting because of Trump's trade war. Now Republicans are jeopardizing the farm bill. It's hard to imagine most of farm country turning on Republicans, but 2018 might be the year it happens.