President Trump often boasts that his economy has created new jobs, rescued U.S. manufacturing and led to new highs on Wall Street, but there’s one thing it hasn’t been able to do — make a real dent in the tens of millions of people who still use food stamps.
The rolls have dropped somewhat since peaking four years ago, when 46.5 million people were participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps.
But this year, even as the decade-long bull market continues to create jobs, participation in SNAP has fallen only modestly. As of May, there were still 39.3 million people still using the program.
And many, including Trump’s Agriculture Department, say policies set by the states are a major reason why food stamp rolls haven’t fallen closer to the 26.3 million people who were using the program before the Great Recession.
Brandon Lipps, acting USDA undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services, told the Washington Examiner that food stamp rolls have fallen by 3.6 million since Trump took office, which reflects the improving economy. But he said the bull market alone isn’t enough to reduce the rolls, and said states need to do more.
“[E]ven with unemployment around 4 percent, states continue to seek waivers of rules that support work among the able-bodied — waivers that we are bound by law to approve,” Lipps said. “USDA is urging states to strengthen their employment and training programs, and working with Congress to strengthen the law, because those who can work, should work.”
States have been in the crosshairs for the last few months, as Republicans in Congress have wrestled with how to tighten the conditions for receiving food stamp benefits. At the center of the GOP debate is whether and how to tighten work requirements for food stamp recipients.
Other experts agree that state-level waivers too easily allow able-bodied people to evade these work requirements, which puts more pressure on the program. That’s why many think it’s unlikely the rolls will ever be able to drop back to their pre-recession levels without major reform.
“I don’t think we’re going to get back to 26 [million SNAP users], or even 30 [million], anytime soon,” said Craig Gunderson, a University of Illinois professor who tracks the causes and consequences of food insecurity in America. He’s also a technical adviser to the group Feeding America.
Gunderson said one example of a state policy that creates an incentive for people to say on the program is the new flexibility states have for determining when people qualify for SNAP. Under rules in place a decade ago, applicants had to have a maximum gross income of 130 percent of the poverty level and a maximum net income of 100 percent of the poverty level.
But states were since allowed to adjust the gross income threshold higher to account for high-cost areas, and states have used that flexibility to make it easier for people to qualify and stay on the program.
Jamie Hall, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said states were also given the flexibility to waive work requirements, which only apply to childless, able-bodied adults aged 18 to 49. Hall said those waivers tell more people to join the program and stay on it.
“We have a system right now that’s telling a large number of people, ‘you never need to work or even look for work,'” Hall said. “It’s not sending a good message to the people in the system.”
Work requirements were put in place in 1996, but were later changed to give states a way to exempt more people. Hall said the current law allows states to exempt work requirements in areas of the country where there is a lack of sufficient jobs, which has been defined to mean an unemployment level 20 percent higher than the national average.
When unemployment is sitting at 4 percent, as it is today, that means states can exempt work requirements in areas where the unemployment rate is 4.8 percent, even though economists see that as a healthy level of unemployment. Hall said the work requirements would have to be tightened significantly to create a large dip in SNAP rolls.
If that could happen, the result could be dramatic. Hall thinks that strict enforcement of the work requirements would take 10 million SNAP recipients off the rolls, which would drop total participation to about 29 million, roughly the pre-recession level.
“If they’re subject to work requirements, most drop off,” he said of SNAP recipients.
But there’s no sign Congress is close to making these sorts of changes. The House has language to prohibit work requirement waivers when the unemployment rate is below 7 percent. But this is a known problem in the Senate, and Hall said it’s “not looking likely” that any major reforms to the work requirements are close.
Gunderson said there are other factors at play. Reductions in SNAP enrollment can be expected to come after sustained economic improvement. Additionally, he said, the Great Recession was so big that it might have forced some people to find work at a lower pay scale that still lets them collect SNAP benefits.
But state policies are being seen as a major factor in elevated rolls, and the associated elevated costs. In 2007, SNAP was a $30 billion proposition, but it cost nearly $70 billion in 2014 and 2015, and its cost has only fallen a few billion dollars a year from those highs.
According to Gunderson, anyone looking for sustained, 4 percent unemployment to bring the SNAP rolls back down to 2007 levels again needs to look elsewhere.
“I really don’t think that’s the main issue here,” he said.
