On Friday, the House Freedom Caucus shot their hostage.
These members kidnapped the 2018 Farm Bill – which included long-overdue cuts to food stamps, bloated after Obama-era expansion – demanding that the House leadership pay a legislative ransom of an immediate vote on immigration reform.
The bill now is now dead. President Trump is fuming – not because he lacks zeal on preventing illegal aliens from coming to the country to take advantage of our unsustainable welfare system, but because he saw the GOP farm bill as an opportunity to make significant progress in reforming that system itself, by linking food stamp payments to work requirements.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus have played an important role in recent years as the conscience of Congress, refusing to compromise libertarian and conservative principles for the sake of political expediency – and for that they deserve our respect and gratitude. But like other self-proclaimed keepers of ideological purity and consistency, with the defeat of the Farm Bill, they have demonstrated a lack of larger perspective that is now undermining their ability to be objective.
My criticism is informed primarily by a dozen years working in the agriculture industry, but also from my experience in libertarian and Objectivist circles. As a senior vice president of Dole Food Company, my boss, the chairman and owner of Dole Food Company, billionaire David H. Murdock, asked me to spearhead nutrition and marketing initiatives, including the founding of the Dole Nutrition Institute. With the election of former President Barack Obama in 2008, his wife, first lady Michelle Obama, prioritized nutrition and the problem of childhood obesity. Hoping to find common cause, I traveled back to Washington, D.C., where I had previously spent most of my career in politics and public policy, to meet with officials at the Department of Agriculture.
These officials took the meeting – probably more out of an interest in simply having something to do (and meeting with executives from the largest fruit and vegetable company in the world qualified as something to do) – than out of any sincere desire to do anything differently in terms of agriculture policy.
Anything, except for one thing: Pump up the food stamp program, with orders coming from the top of the political food chain, the White House, and I suspect, the commander-in-community-organizing himself, former President Barack Obama.
“Remember, expanding S.N.A.P. is a top priority,” one of the lower-ranking USDA bureaucrats told another, referring to the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” – a failed attempted to rebrand of the federal food stamps program. And it was a priority on which the Obama administration largely delivered.
Food stamps cost taxpayers more than $70 billion a year. The number of Americans receiving food stamps increased signifcantly under Obama, from 28 million the year he was elected to 48 million at the end of his first term. Partisan boosters can argue till the cows come home about who to blame for the Great Recession, with Democrats blaming Republican policies and vice versa. But the growth in food stamp enrollment outpaced the growth in the percentage of Americans living in poverty — and this discrepancy, if not directly linked to a political directive to increase the number of voters receiving government assistance, certainly reflects Obama-era advocacy to “spread the wealth around.”
Even with the country carrying $20 trillion in federal debt, and deficit spending unleashed by the most recent “budget” deal lifting the debt limit and increasing federal spending by $300 billion, most Americans would not begrudge temporary use of food stamps for those willing to work, or in the wake of disasters, like hurricanes, fires, and floods.
The defeated Farm Bill made that distinction, and it’s the new work requirements for food stamp recipients that inspired lockstep resistance from Democrat members of Congress. Now the Democrats will get their way, with an expected revised farm bill devoid of food stamp reform and with the worst excesses of crony capitalism, including massive agricultural subsidies and tariffs, preserved.
For that they can thank the members of the House Freedom Caucus, who with a single-minded focus on reforming immigration lost sight of one of the main reasons why immigration needs reform in the first place: as a magnet for those seeking to take advantage of America’s overly generous welfare benefits, like food stamps, at the working taxpayer’s expense.
Jennifer Anju Grossman is CEO of the Atlas Society and a former speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush.
