President Trump’s proposal to send packaged food directly to low-income families in lieu of food stamps was criticized Monday as a “bureaucratic nightmare” by a member of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.
“The administration’s proposal would create a bureaucratic nightmare that would increase costs and force-feed Americans in a one-size-fits-all system,” wrote NTUF associate policy analyst Andrew Wilford for USA Today.
The Trump administration said last week that it could save money by getting wholesale prices for millions of people around the country, and using that food to replace some of the food stamp benefits people receive.
But Wilford, whose NTUF serves as the research arm of the National Taxpayers Union, said that’s doubtful, and said the idea would likely be highly inefficient.
“Assuming 16.4 million packages sent out 12 months a year, about 197 million Harvest Boxes would have to be sent out annually,” he wrote. “For reference, that’s almost a third of the amount of packages Amazon handles in a given year.”
“It’s difficult to see this as a more efficient system than simply crediting money to an Electronic Benefit Transfer card,” Wilford wrote.
Wilford also said a huge bureaucracy would have to be established to run the program.
“Producers would need to be selected, food of nutritional value chosen and purchased, then directed to shipping centers,” he wrote. “The requirement that all Harvest Box food be 100 percent American essentially means that the proposal would sacrifice cost savings in order to provide a payout to large farming businesses.”
He also argued that this program would take away one of the main benefits of the current system, which is letting families choose by themselves what food is best for them.
“Families know far better than the federal government what they or their children need to eat, and forcing them to eat from a standardized package is inefficient (not to mention demeaning and insulting),” he wrote. “The current system allows families to simply go to the grocery store and choose for themselves what their needs are. So long as families are purchasing items eligible for food stamps, no bureaucrat needs to be involved in that choice.”
