Senate Raids Food Stamps — Again

As blogger Greg Plotkin has just reported, the Senate has once again decided that food stamp benefits should be cut to help pay for an otherwise worthy, though overly stingy piece of legislation. First, it was the two-part jobs amendment. Now it's the bill (pdf) to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act.

If the first seemed irrational and hard-hearted, this latest is downright perverse.

On the one hand, you fashion a bill to reduce child hunger and provide more nutritious meals and snacks for children in school, daycare and after-school programs. On the other hand, you "pay for" nearly half the projected 10-year cost by shaving another five months off the food stamp benefits boost.

Here is truly a case where the needs of poor and near-poor Americans got swamped by more powerful interests.

The Senate Agriculture Committee had unanimously approved a reauthorization bill with a different pay-for. Part of it took some funds appropriated for contracts under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). These basically provide financial assistance to help agricultural producers comply with environmental regulations.

Five Republican members of the committee objected to tapping EQIP. It is, as they said in the committee report (pdf), "highly and widely popular with farmers, ranchers and private forest landowners." They wanted to use funds from another conservation program instead.

Who knows what happened behind closed doors. All we know is that by the time the bill came to the Senate floor, the $2.2 billion that would have come from EQIP had been taken from SNAP (the food stamp program).

Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AK), Chair of the Agriculture Committee, says that "we were going to lose those dollars anyway. You saw teachers grab for it." Well, not exactly. Last I heard, it was the Senate Democratic leadership, not the teachers whose jobs are threatened, who decided to use SNAP as an offset.

Lincoln goes further. "At least these dollars [those her bill siphoned out of food stamp benefits] are going to feed children just like SNAP dollars would." Again, not exactly.

While the Child Nutrition Act subsidizes free or reduced-price lunches for well over 19 million children, fewer than half these children also get free or reduced-price breakfasts. Only a fraction also get subsidized suppers. These, like the in-school meals, are available only five days a week. Come summertime, the vast majority of children who get free or reduced-price lunches during the school year get no free meals at all.

Who feeds these children the rest of the time? For children whose school-year meals are free, the answer is parents who are eligible for food stamps. And nothing in the Senate's Child Nutrition Act will significantly relieve them of this cost burden.

What it will "relieve" them of, effective November 2013, is an extra 13.6 percent in benefits that has helped them keep food on the table. In short, as the Food Research and Action Center says, the Senate's child nutrition bill will make children hungrier.

Consider too that more than half the people who depend on food stamps aren't children. In May, more than 40.8 million participated in SNAP. This means that at least 20.8 million of them were adults. Nearly 10 percent of them were over 60. Doubtless many of the rest have no children who will get any free meals because of Child Nutrition Act programs.

The food stamp benefits cut used to help pay for the little jobs bill is a done deal, at least for the time being. The additional cut to help pay for the reauthorized Child Nutrition Act isn't. The House of Representatives has a better bill (pdf), and the pay-for has yet to be decided.

So here are two things we can do:

1. Sign the Change.org petition to stop raids on the food stamp program.
2. Call our Representatives and ask them to pass a version of the Child Nutrition Act that doesn't take any funds from SNAP. You can reach your Representative's office through the Capitol switchboard toll-free by dialing 1-866-277-7617. If you need to find out who he/she is, type your zip code into the box at the upper left of the House home page.

Now that the Senate has passed its child nutrition bill, the House is likely to move forward when it gets back to regular business after Labor Day. Staff are probably working on the pay-for now. So time is of the essence here.

Photo credit: Ambrozjo