Republicans in Congress could finally get their wish to make it harder for poor people to access food assistance. “Today, at the direction of President Donald J. Trump, we are taking steps to restore integrity to SNAP,” USDA head Sonny Perdue said in an op-ed Thursday, “and move people toward self-sufficiency.” SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program colloquially referred to as food stamps, has been helping keep Americans from going hungry since the 1960s. Perdue’s announcement came on the same day the president signed into law the new farm bill, which didn’t include SNAP work requirements Republicans in Congress had been pushing for. Perdue’s proposed USDA rule is a farm-bill workaround, and it takes aim at “able-bodied adults without dependents,” ages 18 to 49. This group can’t access food stamps for more than three months during a three-year period unless they’re working or registered in an education or training program. But states can request to waive that time limit, including if their unemployment rate exceeds 10 percent, or if the rate is 20 percent above the national average in certain regions. Thirty-six states and territories currently have waivers for some adults without dependents. States can also bank exemptions for later use, a practice Perdue referred to as “stockpiling.” The new rule would crack down on the ability of states to access waivers by restricting them to areas where the unemployment rate is greater than 7 percent. The waivers would also be good for only one year to end “this hoarding of exemptions,” Perdue said. Right now, three-quarters of the people targeted by this rule are not working, according to Politico. That’s 2.8 million people, of which 755,000 would lose SNAP benefits over three years if this rule goes ahead. Republican leaders like acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and House Speaker Paul Ryan have long accused welfare programs like food stamps of being ineffective, arguing that they discourage people from seeking jobs. “If you are on food stamps and you are able-bodied, we need you to go to work,” Mulvaney said at a White House briefing last year, referring to stricter employment requirements the administration wanted to add to SNAP. But there’s little evidence that the program discourages people from working, or that work requirements will alleviate poverty. That’s why nutrition advocates say the new rule could make life tougher on the most vulnerable Americans. As Sarah Reinhardt, a food systems and health analyst for the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement: “The administration’s insistence on restricting access to food assistance, despite strong opposition from experts and ample evidence of the program’s effectiveness, is simply mean-spirited.” SNAP doesn’t discourage people from working Before we go any further, some background on SNAP. The program began as a pilot under President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as part of the war on poverty. Today, it’s the biggest and most important nutrition assistance program: About 45 million Americans living below the poverty line — nearly half of them children — rely on SNAP to purchase food. Administered by the states, low-income people who meet the eligibility criteria get access to “Electronic Benefits Transfer” cards (which are essentially debit cards) with money that they can use to purchase food. The lower your income, the more benefit you get (up to a monthly maximum of $194 per month for individuals and $771 for a family of five). When researchers have looked at SNAP’s effects on food insecurity (having too little or uncertain access to food), they’ve found consistently positive effects. In a 2012 paper, researchers found SNAP cut the prevalence of food insecurity by at least 13 percentage points. In another 2013 study, researchers found exactly the same reduction in food insecurity when they studied variation in state-level policies that affect access to SNAP. Other studies have found the same association between SNAP participation and a decreased risk of food insecurity, albeit by varying amounts. Yet one oft-repeated Republican Party line is that benefits like SNAP discourage people from working. But according to the researchers who study SNAP, there’s no good evidence that it acts as a work disincentive. In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, the majority of non-disabled, working-age households that start to get SNAP don’t actually stop working. Craig Gundersen, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois who studies SNAP, explained why in the Washington Post: What makes SNAP perfect is that the tax on each additional dollar of income is 24 cents. There’s not a disincentive to work, except insofar as all taxes are disincentives to work. And I don’t think that 24 percent is a high tax rate in this context. There’s also no cliff effect with respect to SNAP, because as your income increases, your benefits gradually go down. There’s also little waste and fraud in the program. Some 95 percent of federal dollars spent on SNAP go directly to benefits. The USDA takes SNAP abuse very seriously, which is why the rate of SNAP fraud has declined dramatically over the years. Work requirements aren’t an effective poverty reducer House Agriculture Chair Michael Conaway (R-TX) praised the new USDA rule for “creating a roadmap for states to more effectively engage [able-bodied adults without dependents] in this booming economy,” AP reported. But there’s also little evidence that work requirements for government aid lift people out of poverty, as Dylan Matthews has explained. The government has actually done numerous experiments to test out work requirements for cash welfare, as part of the state-level reforms leading up to the 1996 welfare reform law that imposed work requirements across the board. And the effects were meager at best, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ LaDonna Pavetti, who reviewed this literature last year. She found the premise of work requirements — the presumed existence of a large number of people on public assistance who should be working and aren’t, due to laziness or inertia or whatever — just isn’t true. In most studies, work requirements led to an increase in the share of recipients working in the first year or two. But only three experiments out of 13 still found significant positive results after five years, and two experiments found that work requirements reduced one’s odds of working five years later. In the long term, the policy didn’t seem to promote work much at all. Whether the new rule goes anywhere remains to be seen. House Democrats warned the SNAP changes would face tough opposition in Congress, since they ignored stipulations in the bipartisan farm bill.<doc-sep>WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would seek to put in place more stringent work requirements for adults who rely on food stamps, even as the president signed a sweeping farm bill in which lawmakers had rejected stricter rules. By moving to limit the ability of states to issue waivers to people who say they cannot make ends meet under the requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Agriculture Department found another route to create restrictions, bypassing Congress and drawing immediate criticism that the proposed rule was sure to harm Americans below the poverty line. The administration, which along with conservatives had fought to include stricter work requirements in the farm bill, continued to argue that food stamps were never meant to be a way of life and that able-bodied adults should be able to find jobs in a healthy economy. “Long-term reliance on government assistance has never been part of the American dream,” Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary, said in a statement. “Moving people to work is common-sense policy, particularly at a time when the unemployment rate is at a generational low.”<doc-sep>President Donald Trump signed and celebrated the farm bill Thursday, while the administration also moved to force more people who enroll in food stamps to comply with work requirements, despite the fact that Republicans were unsuccessful in pushing the same measure through Congress. Republicans have pushed for more work requirements for food stamp participants and for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow states to impose more requirements such as drug testing. But those requests were left out of the recently approved farm bill after Democrats refused to move forward with the changes and other GOP proposals. After months of negotiations the 2018 farm bill does not include changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that House Republicans wanted. But he did direct the USDA to pursue some of those changes through a rule, saying with this "thriving economy" people should have to go back to work. "Under this new rule able-bodied adults without dependents will have to work or look for work in order to receive their food stamps. Today's action will help Americans transition from welfare to gainful employment, strengthening families and uplifting communities. And that was a difficult thing to get done," Trump said during the event in Washington. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters Wednesday that Trump might not have supported the massive farm bill without a separate food stamp reform rule. The bipartisan bill Trump signed Thursday provides billions of dollars in assistance for farmers, research projects and mental health programs in addition to re-authorizing nutrition assistance programs and legalizing industrial hemp. "These actions will save hardworking taxpayers $15 billion over 10 years and give President Trump comfort enough to support a farm bill he might otherwise have opposed," he told reporters Wednesday night, citing the USDA estimate of how much money the program will save from people no longer eligible for the program. Under current SNAP rules, able-bodied adults with no dependents enrolled in food stamps are required to work, participate in work training or enroll in an education program for at least 80 hours a month to receive benefits. Those who don't meet that requirement are only eligible for three months of benefits in a three-year period. The Trump administration said the waivers are meant to be temporary relief during tough times, but that with lower unemployment nationwide, more people should be required to work to receive food stamps. "The bottom line is this," Perdue said. "In 2016 there were 3.8 million individual [able-bodies adults without dependents] on the SNAP rolls with 2.8 million or almost 75 percent of them not working. This is unacceptable to most Americans and belies common sense particularly when employment opportunities are plentiful as they currently are." Even though Democrats and some Republicans ultimately blocked similar changes to food stamps in the farm bill, the USDA can make some of the changes through the rule-making process. The current law says states qualify for waivers if unemployment is above 10 percent or with a "lack of sufficient jobs," usually relative to the national unemployment rate. USDA's proposed rule would redefine a "lack of sufficient jobs" as 7 percent unemployment and make administrative changes like limiting waivers to one year and eliminate state-wide waivers in favor of smaller areas. Food and Nutrition Service Administrator Brendon Lipps said the USDA estimated 75 percent of areas that currently have a waiver would no longer qualify under the new rule. He said the able-bodied adults on food stamps who are not working could now be subject to work requirements depending on where they live. Robert Campbell, policy director for the anti-hunger group Feeding America, told ABC News that the administration estimated more than 750,000 people could lose benefits because of the rule. He said the farm bill actually does more to support workers and provide training for workers, while the proposed rule only punishes people who can't find a job. "We're concerned that taking food away from people will not make them more employable and it will not help them in their prospects," Campbell said on ABC News' The Briefing Room. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway, R-Texas, praised the rule, comparing it to the controversial House version of the farm bill that he said would allow able-bodies adults "to seek new opportunities and achieve their goals." But Sen. Debbie Stabenow, ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said the rule blatantly ignored the bipartisan farm bill. "Congress writes laws and the Administration is required to write rules based on the law, not the other way around. Congress chose not to change the current SNAP work rules in the Farm Bill, and instead, focused on strengthening work programs that actually help people get jobs," she said in a statement, adding, "Administrative changes should not be driven by ideology. I do not support unilateral and unjustified changes that would take food away from families." Lipps emphasized the rule would not apply to the elderly, people with disabilities or pregnant women but is intended to encourage people capable of working to find jobs. Some groups like the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities say the USDA numbers don't tell the full picture because people often sign up for food stamps when they're between jobs or people may have a job but still make less than the federal poverty level. The move is the latest effort to reform programs intended to push low-income or unemployed Americans to become more "self-sufficient" through work requirements or changes to welfare programs like nutrition assistance, public housing or Medicaid.<doc-sep>
Nearly 800,000 people could lose their access to food stamps if US president Donald Trump gets his way. And many of them will be single, white men. “Today, at the direction of President Donald J. Trump, we are taking steps to restore integrity to SNAP and move people toward self-sufficiency,” US Department of Agriculture chief Sonny Perdue said in a press release issued Thursday. SNAP, or the Supplemental Food Assistance Program, has been providing food to low-income Americans since the 1960s. The rules require so-called “able-bodied adults without dependents,” known in government jargon as “ABAWDs,” to have jobs if they receive food stamps for more than three months in a three-year period. (Another, easier way to describe these Americans would be “childless adults.”) However, USDA regulations currently let individual states waive the work requirement in areas with unemployment rates at least 20% higher than the national rate. The USDA’s proposal, if it is implemented after a 60-day comment period, would tighten those restrictions, requiring that the local unemployment rise above 7% before the 20% provision is triggered. Of the roughly 2.8 million ABAWDs in the US, about 755,000 are not currently working and under the new rule would lose their SNAP benefits, which come to approximately $5 a day. What Trump may not realize is that ABAWDs tend to match the profile of his core constituency. According to data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington DC think tank, 55% of low-income ABAWDs are male, and 48% are white. (Given the millions of women with children who are also in the program, men make up only 38% of adult SNAP participants overall.) Here’s what the rest of SNAP’s demographics look like: As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted in a 2016 report, many childless adults “have disabilities that make working difficult or impossible but don’t meet the severe disability standard for receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).” That makes SNAP a rare government lifeline for many of the country’s unemployed ABAWDs. “Americans are generous people who believe it is their responsibility to help their fellow citizens when they encounter a difficult stretch,” USDA secretary Perdue said in his statement on Thursday. “That is the commitment behind SNAP. But like other federal welfare programs, it was never intended to be a way of life.”