Last-minute politics can be a lot of work. In the case of the farm bill, that work revolved around food stamps.
On Thursday, Dec. 20, President Donald Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill into law. During a press conference the day before, however, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue indicated the signing might not have happened if not for last minute USDA efforts to change the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s (SNAP)’s work requirements.
“These changes will save hard-working taxpayers $15 billion over 10 years and give President Trump comfort enough to support a farm bill he might otherwise have opposed,” Perdue said during a brief press conference call during the afternoon of Dec. 19.
Nutrition programs represent about 80 percent of farm bill funding, with SNAP taking the lion’s share of the nutritional funding.
Work requirements related to SNAP benefits have long been a contentious issue in Congress. The House version of the farm bill included tighter work requirements for those receiving SNAP benefits, but those reforms were eventually stripped from the version of the farm bill that reached the president.
During the Dec. 19 call, Perdue presented the proposed regulatory changes to the SNAP work requirements. The changes would limit states’ abilities to grant work requirement waivers to “Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents” or ABAWDs. This category includes non-disabled adults, aged 18-49, without dependents, but excludes pregnant women.
“Under current SNAP requirements, ABAWDs must work or participate in an employment program for at least 20 hours a week to continue to receive benefits for more than three months over a 36-month period,” explained Perdue.
However, he said “permissive regulation” allows states to waive these requirements. The proposed changes would restrict the states’ ability to grant waivers.
“The bottom line is this: In 2016 there were 3.8 million individual ABAWDs 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 as plentiful as they are currently.”
According to USDA data not presented during the call, there were about 45 million Americans receiving SNAP benefits (13.9 percent of the total population) in 2016. This would make the estimated 2.8 million non-working ABAWDs about 6.2 percent of the SNAP-receiving population, and 0.9 percent of the total U.S. population.
Despite Perdue’s focus on current low unemployment rates, participation in SNAP is far more closely tied to poverty rather than unemployment, according to USDA’s own data. One USDA report noted that “SNAP increasingly serves the working poor” with a growing share of SNAP benefits going to “households where one or more members are employed.” USDA also estimated average SNAP payments to individuals at $126/month in 2017.
The proposed changes will be open for public comment for 60 days pending publishing in the Federal Register. As of press time, that had not happened. A proposed rule can take as much as two weeks to be published in the Federal Register after being officially announced. This means the comment period could be open until mid-March 2019. — Kerry Halladay, WLJ editor
