Farm bill causes Food Insecurity.

On June 21, the House passed the Agriculture Committee’s (the Committee) farm bill,[1] which includes nutrition provisions that would increase food insecurity and hardship. By adopting harmful amendments during floor debate in May, the House made the bill that ultimately passed even worse than the version the Committee originally introduced (see Appendix I). The proposed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) would end or cut benefits for a substantial number of low-income people. SNAP is the country’s most effective anti-hunger program, helping 1 in 8 Americans afford a basic diet, with most SNAP participants being children, seniors, or people with disabilities. Despite providing modest benefits — averaging about $1.40 per person per meal — the program combats food insecurity, alleviates poverty, and has long-term positive impacts on health as well as on children’s educational attainment. The bill would reduce SNAP’s effectiveness and put large numbers of families and individuals at increased risk of hardship. The bill contains changes that would cause more than 1 million low-income households with more than 2 million people — particularly low-income working families with children — to lose their benefits altogether or have them reduced. The House would use these benefit cuts, in part, to pay for a few modest benefit enhancements. But the net effect of all these provisions on SNAP benefits would still be a significant cut overall, and a substantial number of people would lose their SNAP benefits altogether. The remaining savings from the eligibility and benefit cuts would go to expanding state and federal bureaucracies and financing various grant programs outside of SNAP, at the expense of low-income families and individuals whose basic food assistance would end or shrink. In particular, the plan includes sweeping, aggressive new work requirements that would likely prove unworkable and do substantially more harm than good, fueling increases in hunger and poverty. These provisions would force states to develop large new bureaucracies, but research suggests that these requirements would do little to increase employment. This expensive and risky approach runs counter to evidence-based policy making, particularly since the results from work pilots for SNAP recipients that the 2014 farm bill established, which are well underway, aren’t yet available. Moreover, experience suggests that the bill’s proposed work requirements would leave substantial numbers of low-income people who have various barriers to employment — such as very limited skills or mental health issues like depression — with neither earnings nor food assistance. The plan would also impose significant new state mandates and roll back numerous areas of state flexibility that were designed on a bipartisan basis in prior farm bills to streamline and modernize program operations and make the program easier for states to administer and for eligible households, particularly working families, to navigate. [2] The American Public Human Services Administration has raised significant concerns with multiple provisions of the bill, including those that would reinstate a benefit cliff, limit state flexibility, and introduce significant administrative burden. The organization states, “[E]stimates [that] up to two million current individual SNAP recipients, many of them children, in one million mostly working SNAP households could either lose benefits or eligibility altogether under this bill because of often unwise policy proposals [are] disturbing to us.”[3]