Food stamps were created to cure rural hunger, but they have become the biggest federal program propping up the incomes of the working poor, a transition that has prompted Republicans to investigate the program.
“It’s the largest welfare program we’ve got,” House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway told the Washington Examiner last week, before kicking off a series of hearings into the food stamp program. “It needs to work, and work well,” Conaway said.
His committee has jurisdiction over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the formal name for the food stamp program, because it is administered through the Department of Agriculture.
That is a reflection of the patchwork nature of the U.S. welfare system, which runs benefits through a number of departments as well as the tax code.
Conaway said last week’s hearing marked the beginning of a “top-to-bottom review of the program,” necessitated because “while the economy has changed and other welfare programs have adjusted to meet changing needs, it does not appear that SNAP has.”
More than five years after the official end of the recession, the U.S. has 46.4 million SNAP beneficiaries, about 50 percent more than during the worst of the financial crisis.
It’s a massive program, with the federal government spending $70 billion on benefits in fiscal 2014, or more than it shelled out through the Department of Education. The average person approved for SNAP receives $130 per month in benefits to spend on food, with many families receiving a multiple of that amount.
The rolls have not shrunk appreciably since the economy began recovering. Although the unemployment rate has tumbled from 10 percent in 2009 to 5.7 percent in January, the food stamp rolls expanded through 2013 and only began ticking down from 47.6 million in 2013 to 46.4 million in the latest data.
That disconnect is partly because the unemployment rate understates the true damage caused by the financial crisis.
In the years following the end of the recession, jobs were so scarce that millions of Americans became discouraged and stopped looking for work, and so they fell out of the official calculation of the unemployment rate. Furthermore, millions settled for part-time work when they would have preferred full-time jobs.
Also, many unemployed people turned to food stamps after they used up all their unemployment insurance benefits, Bob Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities testified at Conaway’s hearing. In most states, unemployment benefits were available for up to 99 weeks during the fallout from the crisis.
Greenstein noted that the Congressional Budget Office, the in-house budget-estimating agency for Congress, correctly projected the increase in SNAP use earlier in the recession, and now projects that the number of people on the rolls will shrink 33 percent over the next 10 years back to more regular levels.
Nevertheless, there is concern that the program has been expanded beyond the role originally envisioned for it, including by changes made by President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill.
“SNAP’s basic shape, however, is anchored in the past — even as the needs of recipients and the U.S. economy have changed,” University of Maryland poverty expert Douglas Besharov testified. He added that “the public continues to view it as an anti-hunger program when, for many recipients, it is really an income-supplementation program.”
In the early days of the food stamp program, when President John F. Kennedy created it by executive order, severe malnutrition was prevalent in rural parts of America, including Appalachia and parts of the South where black families were blocked from receiving welfare assistance.
Food stamps were partly a way to circumvent that racism to prevent people from facing starvation or illness. Today, malnutrition caused by poverty is almost nonexistent in the U.S.
Besharov suggested that food stamps should be considered as part of the broader U.S. safety net and that the entire welfare system administered by different parts of the executive branch should be “rationalized” to make it more efficient and supportive of work.
House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan has focused on similar reform ideas over the past year. He has highlighted the lack of overarching design in the dozens of programs that provide support to low-income families through healthcare, housing, food stamps and a number of tax credits. Ryan also has sought to stress outcomes, rather than spending, in judging programs.
Conaway said he would talk to Ryan in the future if it makes sense for SNAP”to be folded in with broader initiatives, but we don’t have any reforms to propose right now.” He stressed that they were just at the beginning of assessing SNAP.
But Conaway did say that the ideal outcome would be zero people receiving food stamps.
“There’s a certain dignity in taking care of your own family, and we have 46 million Americans who are needing help from the taxpayers and they’re not standing on their own two feet taking care of themselves,” he said. “So we’d prefer — they’d prefer, I think, taking care of themselves.”
