Over the past few years, we have had Republican governors cutting food stamp rolls in their states. We have seen Republican and Democratic lawmakers cut billions from food stamps. Whether it’s through bullshit drug-testing laws or bullshit work requirement laws, the main culprits, Republicans, have felt that the best way to be able to tell people you have gotten people off of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was not to create a living wage for your citizens, but to just take those assistance programs away. Forget about the fact that food stamps has kept two million children from being in abject poverty. Forget about the fact that the people needing assistance need it because they are dealing with serious hardships and trying to house themselves and their families, while putting food on the table has been nearly impossible. Let’s talk about some of those lazy good-for-nothings:
Military service members on active duty spent $24 million in food stamps at military commissary shops from September 2014 to August 2015, and 45 percent of students in schools run by the military are eligible for free or reduced-price meal programs.
Unfortunately, there hasn’t really been any tracking on how many military people use the SNAP program. This is surprising (not surprising) when you consider how careful the Republicans are about making sure every other agency in the United States accounts for how its monies are spent. Especially agencies that provide any actual services to the people of the United States.
A provision in the 2016 defense spending bill encourages data sharing between the Pentagon and the USDA to address this problem, but the DoD does not have a coordinated effort underway to access that data through the USDA. The GAO concludes that without an interagency dating-sharing effort, the military will miss a valuable opportunity to understand the needs of its service members and address hunger within its ranks.
The numbers released so far have been estimates based on older data.
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The report found that about 23,000 active-duty service members received food stamps in 2013, according to U.S. Census data. Information from the Department of Defense Education Activity showed that in September 2015, 24 percent of 23,000 children in U.S. DoDEA schools were eligible for free meals, while 21 percent were eligible for reduced-price meals.
Whether a military family qualifies for food stamps depends strongly on where they are stationed, since individual states set some of their own income guidelines. For example, at both Camp Pendleton, California, and Fort Hood, Texas, troops need a minimum household size of six to qualify, even though income between those locations varies widely thanks to the Basic Allowance for Housing rates.
USDA officials said they do not track whether an applicant is the military, although they could easily do so, because it does not impact the family's eligibility.
We have been in a perpetual state of war for the past 15 years. Of course the federal government needs more data. Will they do anything to change this in the meantime? No, unless we get more blue in the House and Senate this November.