By Ty Johnson | The Brownsville Herald
The U.S. House of Representatives passage Thursday of a bill that calls for deep reductions to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistant Program has sent ripples of concern throughout food banks nationwide as the cuts, if approved, would bar more than 3.8 million individuals from benefits.
Senate leaders have said the House plan for SNAP won’t pass in the upper house and President Barack Obama’s administration has threatened to veto the bill if it reaches the president’s desk.
Still, the House bill that passed on a 217-210 vote, which calls for $4 billion in cutbacks each year for the next decade, has rattled food banks and soup kitchens where demand is already expected to increase Nov. 1 due to Congress’ decision to pull the plug on a 2009 hike in food stamp disbursement.
Texas Food Bank Network CEO Celia Cole said families will see monthly SNAP benefits decrease by an average of $25 beginning in November.
TFBN launched in July a 100-day countdown clock online to tick down the moments until the November funding reductions in an effort to prompt congressional action, but with the deadline drawing nearer, food banks are preparing for the worst.
“Food banks are preparing in all the ways that they can,” Cole said. “(That food deficit) is not something our food banks are equipped to make up.”
The food stamp increase, passed as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was intended to fade away as inflation increased, Cole explained, but Congress changed its mind.
Now, with more cuts to SNAP on the table, Congress could be poised to make those reductions hurt more.
“It adds insult to injury that Congress is contemplating another massive cut to the program,” she said.
Based on the House’s proposed $20 billion cut, which was proposed in the spring, the food bank estimated that about 171,000 Texans would lose food stamp benefits.
The new $40 billion cut is expected to do even more damage she said, although her organization doesn’t have such estimates.
One thing that is for sure, however, is that the state’s 109,000 beneficiaries who receive benefits because of a waiver for areas with high unemployment may be in danger of missing out on food stamps.
In areas where there aren’t enough jobs to meet demand, job seekers didn’t have to fear being cut off from benefits due to the waiver. The House bill would end that flexibility although Republicans, like Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, insisted that taking away the benefits from the unemployed would “put people on the path to self-sufficiency and independence.”
“This bill is designed to give people a hand when they need it most,” he said on the House floor just before lawmakers passed the bill.
The food stamp bill passed by the House would allow states to put the work requirements in place for SNAP recipients but would not force them to. The bill would allow the states to require 20 hours of work activities per week from any able-bodied adult with a child over age 1 who has child care available, and for all parents whose children are over age 6 and attending school.
The bill would allow states to drug test applicants and would end government waivers that have allowed able-bodied adults without dependents to receive food stamps indefinitely.
The legislation also would eliminate so-called categorical eligibility, a method used by many states that allows people to qualify for food stamps automatically if they already receive other benefits.
Congressman Filemon Vela, who represents South Texas, was adamant that the bill would do much damage to the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.
“This week’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to cut SNAP funding by $40 billion will have a devastating impact on South Texas’ families,” Vela said in a statement Saturday.
Vela took aim at the splitting of the Farm Bill into two, a tactic members used to ensure farm subsidies could be guaranteed to ease concerns from the nation’s agriculture industry.
For decades, food stamps and farm subsidies have been packaged together in Farm Bills to ensure representatives from rural and urban areas would vote to approve it, but conservatives in the House called for cutbacks to SNAP this year.
The cost of SNAP has more than doubled since 2008 when the Great Recession pushed many onto its rolls. More than 47 million Americans, or 1 in 7, use the program.
The Senate passed a bill including both food stamps and farm programs in June. Later that month, the House defeated a farm bill that included both the food and farm programs after conservatives said its food stamp cuts — about $2 billion a year — weren’t high enough.
GOP leaders then split the farm programs from the food stamps and passed a farm-only bill in July. Conservatives crafted the food stamp bill, saying higher cuts would be easier to pass in a stand-alone bill.
While Vela suggested the move by House Republicans was political in nature, he said the effect the bill would have, if approved in the Senate, would be felt nationwide.
“The precedent that has been broken here by delaying reauthorization of the farm bill with these divisive tactics is devastating to this institution, but that is nothing compared to what will actually happen to those this bill affects,” he said.
Vela cited statistics showing nearly a quarter of the population of his district is food insecure — far more than the national average of 14.5 percent.
Vela said 394,000 families in and around the Rio Grande Valley receive SNAP benefits.
Cole said the cuts proposed by the House, combined with the Nov. 1 cuts, could wipe out the entire food bank network, saying that this would be the “worst time” for cuts of this magnitude.
