Farm Bill Almanac :: The Austerity of SNAP

EBT and SNAP benefits have been increasingly accepted at farmers markets.

As news today broke about the compromise in the Senate to move forward with Farm Bill negotiations prior to its ending in July of this year (the previous 5-year Farm Bill was signed and passed in 2008). As the $969 billion dollar piece of legislation gets moved through the Senate, not much has changed since the murmors of the fall legislation battle -- there are cuts being made to direct payments and other forms of direct subsidy while more the egregious programs are being moved into crop insurance programs; steep cuts are being made to programs like conservation and many rural development programs (we have written previously on both here and here). Nowhere are these cuts being more hard-felt than in the Title I Nutrition programs -- namely the never-contentious-until-now food stamp program, now referred to as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). 

In this most recent Farm Bill, it's been important to note that much of the austerity/budget-streamlining talk has been about programs that have been, mostly, uncontentious in years past; SNAP is largely been supported by both sides of the aisle (with the most wasteful expenditures in the program being those that uselessly attempt to root out "fraud" in the program), and only recently has come under fire, primarily from Tea Party activists within the Republican tent. Cuts targeting SNAP have been proportionate to its size; at $10 billion alone per year in SNAP, it is one of the largest programs in the Nutrition title, and in FY2012 was distributing to 44.7 million elligible recipients (households) 144 dollars a month in supplemental food aid.  All recipients must be working / employed in order to be elligible to recieve SNAP/WIC benefits. 

The proposed cuts are not really cuts so much as restructuring of the qualifiers for obtaining aid, namely, what constitutes the poverty line. Presently, to qualify, one must have a collected worth and earnings at 130% below the understood poverty line, and the level at which one obtains full benefits goes on a sliding scale from that amount. Presently Republicans, moved by Jeff Sessions of Alaska, are attempting to redefine those limits, which would cut an average of $90 per month from most current recipients. (For reference, the average recipient would receive approximately $50/month per household.) The other attempted effort, led by Rand Paul in the House, that would have restructured SNAP as a block-grant program, failed, but would have eliminated much of the federal infrastructure built around SNAP and WIC programs (leaving, of course, the detail of who would run it at the state level up to the cash-strapped states). This is being done, by the by, while the expanded use of the program neatly aligns with the increased rate of joblessness and underemployment happening nationwide, and in certain geographies, the use of food stamps keeps some businesses afloat (exempting, of course, Wal-Mart, who in certain geographies is the beneficiary of over 50-75% of all SNAP sales). 

There are clear changes to be made to the Farm Bill, but most of the stated goals in changing the Title I nutrition program will not help with the goals of the program, namely, assuring a basic level of food security in times of hardship, especially for those most in need. But these proposed changes are not them -- they don't even account for the type of punting happening in the direct-payments-to-crop insurance cross-over, because what this amounts to, in every sense of the word, is gutting the program. The program is run on high efficiency, with the CRS giving the SNAP and WIC programs high marks for reliability of execution and turn around. And fraud cases within the SNAP/WIC system amount to less than 3% of all transactions, amounting to little over thousands of dollars a cycle (whereas the efforts to counteract fraud in the system amount to several million dollars annually). The numbers represented above are per household, not individual, so a family of 3 or 5 is asked to use $50/month to make ends meet nutriatively, if the proposed changes were to be made. Add to this the psychological stress of being unable to make food ends meet, and you can begin to imagine the type of psychological impact this has on participants in the program -- a program that was intended to alleviate that kind of stress to begin with. 

This attempt at reform is, at its core, an easy way to score political points while not answering the key questions about budget balancing and large entitlement reform, and doing so on the backs of the hungry and those least able to promote their interests in Congress. It will hit them in ways that will make it harder for them to go maintain their work. And it will undermine the businesses who can use SNAP/WIC to help maintain and expand their customer bases, from mom and pops, to farmers markets & gardens (yes, gardens), even Wal-Mart. Ultimately, the economic drivers from the SNAP program are a more important variable to consider, and short-sighted political aims to  dismantle or otherwise cripple this piece of the Farm Bill do so at the risk of further crippling local economies across the country.