On Thursday, hours before President Trump was expected to sign the farm bill, the administration has proposed restricting the power of states to waive the usual 90-day limit on food stamps for able-bodied adults who do not work at least 20 hours a week. Congress rejected stricter work requirements in the farm bill, and Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow predicted “significant opposition and legal challenges” to the proposal.
“Administrative changes should not be driven by ideology,” said Stabenow, one of the four lead House and Senate negotiators on the five-year farm bill. “I do not support unilateral and unjustified changes that would take food away from families.”
Anti-hunger activists said the proposed regulation, which will be open to public comment for 60 days, would end SNAP benefits for several hundred thousand people. The USDA said its proposal would save $1.5 billion a year and would apply to about 2.8 million 18-to-49-year-old able-bodied adults without dependents, or ABAWDs. The USDA worked quietly on its proposal for months while Congress fought in public over House Republican attempts to write welfare reform into the farm bill.
The proposal of tight rules for ABAWDs “will give President Trump comfort enough to sign a farm bill he might otherwise oppose,” said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. Trump, who advocates new or stronger work requirements for participants in social programs, urged lawmakers to tighten SNAP work rules in the farm bill but also acknowledged last month that the idea lacked support in Congress. House Republicans avidly pursued stricter and broader work requirements. House Democrats uniformly opposed them, and a bipartisan majority of senators voted against them.
Under the 1996 welfare reform law, ABAWDs are limited to 90 days of food stamps in a three-year period unless they work at least 20 hours a week or spend an equal amount of time in job training. Waivers are allowed in areas with an unemployment rate higher than 10 percent, areas where the unemployment rate is 20 percent above the U.S. average, or areas with insufficient jobs.
The USDA’s proposed rule would require a jobless rate of 7 percent in areas with high relative unemployment and eliminate labor surplus areas as a criterion for a waiver. It also would limit waivers to a 12-month life, prevent states from covering broad swaths of territory with a single waiver, and end states’ ability to stockpile one-month exemptions for a portion of their ABAWD population.
Acting Agriculture Undersecretary Brandon Lipps said the 7 percent threshold, in combination with new limits on geographic size, “will reduce waived areas by 75 percent.” Activists said the requirement for a 7 percent jobless rate would end waivers in areas that now meet the standard of an unemployment rate that is 20 percent higher than the U.S. average, currently 3.7 percent. Under the USDA proposal, waivers would be based on “labor market areas” or separate jurisdictions. Lipps called the approach “anti-gerrymandering,” as compared to the freer hand states now have to offer waivers to large geographic areas.
With the economy booming and the U.S. unemployment rate low, Perdue and Lipps said the new restrictions would move people into the workforce and reward them with self-sufficiency. “Nothing could be farther from the truth,” responded Stacy Dean of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank. “In fact, it is a proposal to cut impoverished people off assistance. … It will increase hardship.”
Analyst Sarah Reinhardt of the Union of Concerned Scientists said the proposed rule was “a despicable consolation prize for House Republicans” and “a pretty straightforward attempt to kick people off the program.”
ABAWDs comprise roughly 10 percent of the 38.6 million SNAP recipients, who get an average of $123 a month. The food stamp program cost $65 billion in fiscal 2018, which ended on Sept. 30. Enrollment soared during the 2008-09 recession and the slow economic recovery afterward, peaking at 47.6 million people and a cost of $80 billion in fiscal 2013.
The House defeated a farm bill for the first time in 2013 amid GOP attempts at the largest food stamp cuts in a generation. House Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway, author of this year’s proposal for stricter work requirements, said increased funding in the 2018 farm bill for the education and training adjunct of SNAP would dovetail with the USDA’s proposed rule to “allow ABAWDs to seek new opportunities and achieve their goals.”