Campaign Action
The House Agriculture Committee has begun the markup of the 2018 draft farm bill, the bill that would strip food assistance from millions of poor Americans. The bill has gotten enough blowback and bad press that the committee has had to resort to sending out tweets, lying about what the bill would do: "CLAIM: New proposal takes #SNAP benefits away from children, elderly and disabled. FACT: This proposal doesn't touch those groups; benefits remain intact."
Except for the part about how the Congressional Budget Office wrote to the committee chairman, Rep. Mike Conaway of Texas, and said it would cut $23 billion in food benefits for struggling Americans, including families with children. That includes a stringent, punitive work requirement that would make all SNAP participants aged 18-59, who aren't disabled or don't have preschool-aged children, prove that they are working at least 20 hours a week or are in a training program for those 20 hours or are completing some combination of the two. They have to prove that every month. Their employers have to do that paperwork, every month. The states would have to process and verify that paperwork, every month. That's not just a huge burden on the recipients, it's a burden on the states, and the very costly new requirement is inadequately funded.
The penalty for people who don't meet that requirement is draconian—failing to work and/or train for 80 hours a month would cause you to lose benefits for a full year. If it happened more than once, you'd be cut off for three years. There's the possibility of reapplying for people who can fulfill that 80 hours/month of work, but they would have to know that they were eligible again and reapply. Republicans are counting on the majority of them being unable to jump through all those hoops.
Here's why that is so bad. The nature of the kind of low-wage work many of these people are stuck in makes getting those hours unpredictable. Their hours could be cut at any time, the job could just disappear at any time. They could be promised 20 hours a week, but some weeks only get 19—and not have the ability to find a jobs program to make up lost hours. Or their employer could mess up the paperwork. This is a big chunk of SNAP participants.
Over the course of a year, about 49 percent of working SNAP participants had at least one month in which they participated in SNAP and didn’t work at least 80 hours, CBPP analysis of Census data from June 2012 to May 2013 finds. Even among those who worked about 20 hours per week on average over the year, over one-quarter didn’t meet those requirements in every month so would risk losing benefits. […]
The Conaway proposal assumes that workers can choose to work more hours when they want to but, in reality, low-wage jobs—particularly the jobs that SNAP participants typically have in industries such as food service and retail—often have hours that change from week to week, and employees often have little control over their schedules. Low wages, irregular scheduling, lack of paid sick leave and other benefits, and lack of supports such as affordable child care can cause many workers to move in and out of work. Many workers turn to SNAP when they’re between jobs, and others to supplement low wages. The Conaway proposal would eliminate this important feature of SNAP, which helps workers with volatile incomes and low wages put food on the table and keep working.
The proposal also ignores the fact that most of the targeted population—the so-called "able-bodied adults" they love to pretend are shirking—is already working. They're scraping together whatever jobs they can get and still meet the obligations of caring for children or other family members, or going to school. It also ignores the fact that states already have the ability to impose work requirements if they want to and have been able to for more than 30 years. Here's the party of "states' rights" trying to impose harsher federal policy on states, whether states want it or not.
The politics of this bill are also a problem. It was written entirely without Democratic input, because Conaway refused to compromise with them on the SNAP restrictions. Plenty of farm state Republicans are upset that Conaway is making this a fight when the bill has to be passed by the end of September, and when they already have a boatload of pissed off constituents because of how hard retaliatory tariffs are hitting them, thanks to Trump's trade war. And the Senate is working on an entirely different version of the bill, because this one can't pass there.
All this just to make more people go hungry.