Republican Food Stamp Bill Would Cut Benefits, But Not The Size Of Government

WASHINGTON The Republican food stamp plan would cut benefits by billions of dollars, but it would also create a new database of food stamp recipients, a new job-training bureaucracy and an expanded child support enforcement regime.

In other words, while the bill might reduce “government dependence” by kicking people off food stamps, it stands to increase the role of government in other ways.

And while the Congressional Budget Office says the bill wouldn’t raise spending over the standard 10-year budget window, its upfront costs in the next five years are now giving conservatives pause.

If House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway (R-Texas) can’t win over the wavering House Freedom Caucus an influential bloc of roughly 30 right-wing Republicans then it’s hard to see how his bill could pass the House of Representatives, since Democrats seem to be uniformly opposed. (Last week, Freedom Caucus leaders suggested they were more open to the legislation than they had previously been.)

Conservatives have long sought big changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps more than 40 million Americans buy food each month and is one of the biggest federal programs responding to economic need.

New “work requirements” in Conaway’s bill would reduce spending on benefits by $9 billion over 10 years, which is somewhere between 1 and 2 percent of the program’s projected cost in that time. The bill would invest $7 billion in job training, substantially increasing the scope of programs that states currently offer.

The new rules would require more SNAP recipients to log at least 20 hours per week of work or participation in a state scheme.

“They would force states to develop large new bureaucracies that would need to track millions of SNAP recipients, but likely would do little to boost employment, particularly given that the new funding provided in the bill for job training and work slots would amount to just $30 per month for those recipients who need a work slot to retain SNAP benefits,” the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in an analysis of the bill this week .

Conaway and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) aren’t getting a ton of support for their food stamp plan from conservatives outside of Congress, either. Robert Rector, an influential welfare expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the work requirements have “huge loopholes” and that the job training proposal would be ineffective.

Above all, the Heritage Foundation has faulted the Conaway bill for not fixing the so-called marriage penalty. Under current policy, it’s possible for a household to receive greater benefits if it excludes the income earned by a non-married parent on its application. Heritage claims this creates a disincentive for people to get married.

But the bill does include a provision to bring families together, at least through the administrative state. Parents applying for benefits would be required to cooperate with Child Support Enforcement, a federal-state program that can track down noncustodial parents and make them pay child support to the custodial parent. States already have the option to require SNAP recipients to do this, but only six do.

States should be allowed to choose whether to require cooperation with child support enforcement, Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.) argued during a hearing on the bill last month, since it could be dangerous for some parents.

“They may not want that other parent in their life because of violence or because of some fear,” Soto said.

The CBO said the child support provision would actually cost more than $3 billion over 10 years, because the savings from sanctioning some uncooperative parents would be outweighed by the administrative cost of tracking down other uncooperative parents who might be unable to pay, anyway.

Conaway questioned CBO’s analysis of the provision.

“It’s the right thing to do, but on paper it looks like it costs money,” he told HuffPost last week. “You want noncustodial parents and custodial parents to make agreements to take care of the kids, make sure the kids have the right resources and child support’s paid.”

Another provision in the bill would set up a new database of SNAP recipients in order to cut down on people receiving benefits in multiple states, and to measure the duration of people’s enrollment.

The CBO says the database would save roughly half a billion dollars. The CBPP, however, calls it a privacy risk, since it would contain personal information about SNAP recipients. “The data, which states would share with USDA each month, would be stored in the database for many years, if not indefinitely,” the center noted in its analysis.

Matt Fuller contributed reporting.