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House Democrats are holding the line against drastic cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that could remove a million people from the program and create expensive administrative burdens for states. Republicans want to tighten existing work requirements in the food stamp program, and the proposal is threatening the farm bill. With the Trump administration pushing their "Harvest Box" replacement to 50 percent of food stamp benefits, and House Speaker Paul Ryan insisting he's going to get "good welfare reforms" when "it comes to the farm bill," it's going to be a big fight.
The details of the SNAP proposal remain very much under wraps, but Democratic staff members told reporters Tuesday that the bill would impose stricter work requirements on as many as 5 million of the 42 million Americans who rely on the program — a number that would mostly target able-bodied adults without children, as well as millions of school-age parents who are currently exempt in many states.
Able-bodied adults without children or other dependents are already required to participate in a training program for 20 hours per week or to work to keep their SNAP benefits longer than three months over a three-year period. However, states largely exempted participants from those time limits during the Great Recession. The waivers have been slowly lapsing as the economy recovered. But about 36 percent of the U.S. population lives in an area where that rule is still waived, and the House bill is expected to rein in that flexibility. […]
It also would slash more than $20 billion in spending on food stamp benefits over a decade, while mandating $13 billion in new administrative costs, according to the Democrats. Those new costs would come from a massive expansion of state education and training programs and a new requirement to drop parents from SNAP who don’t pay child support unless they cooperate with state officials, say minority staff. The savings and cost estimates are moving targets, as the committee is still drafting the bill.
As usual, House Republicans are split, with the Freedom Caucus types opposed to pretty much everything in the bill—ag subsidies and food stamps—making Democratic support necessary. On the Senate side, Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) is aware of the danger, and not putting any changes to the SNAP program in his version of the bill, which should be released next month. So far, the House chairman, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) has "kept a tight lid on SNAP negotiations—so tight that committee Democrats revolted two weeks ago and successfully pressured ranking member Collin Peterson, a moderate Minnesota Democrat, to halt negotiations altogether." If it's bad enough to make blue dog Peterson revolt, it's really bad.
Meanwhile, tanking commodity prices, natural disasters, and Trump's trade wars have producers worried that the bill that needs to pass by September 30, when the current bill expires, will crash and burn because of the fight.
