With its proposed food stamp work requirement rule, USDA has an opportunity to crack down on fraud and abuse while moving millions from welfare to work — but to fully leverage this opportunity, it needs to amend the proposed rule to make sure government treats rural areas fairly.
Under the proposed rule, states could use so-called “labor market areas” to determine whether a region has high-enough unemployment to qualify for a work requirement waiver, but this is problematic for multiple reasons.
The biggest? Labor market areas, by definition, isolate rural regions.
While labor market areas may provide a reasonable grouping for large urban areas made up of many counties, rural communities are too often considered their own independent labor market area. Nearly 82% of the 2,274 labor market areas reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics contain just a single county, many of which are rural.
This matters because the proposed rule would let states exempt entire metropolises from the work requirement using the labor market area loophole, meaning that residents of some big cities would not be required to work part-time or seek work as a condition of food stamp eligibility.
But a simple switch would prevent this abuse while also preventing rural communities from being defined as their own disconnected economic region.
USDA’s final rule should rely on “commuting zones,” a concept developed by USDA’s own researchers, because it offers a more realistic representation of how people actually find and commute to work on a daily basis, and this change would level the playing field between urban and rural areas.
Consider Georgia, which currently has 93 labor market areas, 73 of which are single counties. The Atlanta metro region is one huge labor market area while Berrien County, Georgia, a rural community, is defined as its own isolated labor market area. Ironically, only 30% of Berrien County’s employed residents actually work there. The majority of workers commute to nearby counties.
Now consider what would happen if the state were to be sorted instead using commuting zones: Georgia would only have 32 zones, none of which are single counties. Berrien County would no longer be defined as its own labor market, providing a more accurate representation of how residents already find work within the region.
If work requirement waivers were off the table in commuting zones that had sufficient jobs, more people would be expected to work, train, or volunteer part-time to meet the work requirement. According to the Foundation for Government Accountability, that would double the positive impact of the proposed rule.
This would empower thousands more Georgians, and Americans across the country, with the opportunity to find work and move off welfare. Some would have to commute to do so, but that is the reality for millions of Americans nationwide.
If USDA wants to help promote self-sufficiency within the food stamp program while treating rural areas fairly, its final rule needs to account for jobs nearby to where people actually live. A county shouldn’t be waived from the work requirement if it has plenty of available jobs, and it shouldn’t get a waiver if there are plenty of jobs nearby.
The easiest way to do this is to prohibit waivers in commuting zones that have sufficient jobs. If USDA insists on using the labor market area standard, it should require that counties must independently qualify and cannot receive a waiver if located within an labor market area with available jobs.
The reality is that work is good for everyone — whether they live in a large metropolitan area or a rural community. Those who do live in rural areas should be afforded the same opportunity to lift themselves out of dependency with work.
Kristina Rasmussen is the vice president of federal affairs at the Opportunity Solutions Project.
