In a quiet subcommittee vote, Congress declined on Wednesday to take delivery of “America’s Harvest Box,” the Trump administration’s headline-grabbing idea of sending a monthly box of nonperishable foods to SNAP recipients. The House Appropriations subcommittee approved a $145 billion USDA-FDA funding bill for fiscal 2019 that would pay SNAP benefits, as usual, through EBT cards rather than half in a government-ordered box of food.
Subcommittee chairman Robert Aderholt, Alabama Republican, did not mention the Harvest Box during the half-hour subcommittee mark-up of the funding bill. Afterward, he said it was “not the right idea at this time,” though it might be worth another look later. The senior Democrat on the subcommittee, Sanford Bishop of Georgia, said there were too many unanswered logistical questions to adopt the idea nationwide.
From the day the Harvest Box was proposed, with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue as its champion, the idea appeared to have a shorter shelf life than the processed and canned foods — cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans, and canned meats, fruits, and vegetables among them — that would go into the box. Skeptics pointed to the difficulty of assuring accurate and timely delivery to tens of millions of people each month and questioned if deliveries could be adjusted to reflect allergies or dietary restrictions in a household.
“I’m pleased the committee has lost its appetite for the Trump administration’s condescending plan to replace about half of SNAP benefits with a box of nonperishable food,” said New York Democrat Nita Lowey. Bishop said nine grocery stores in his district are on the verge of closing, and that three counties have no grocery store at all. The Harvest Box could become an unintended drain on local grocers by reducing their SNAP revenue, he said.
The White House said huge savings — as high as $13 billion a year — were possible with the Harvest Box because the government could order food in bulk. The anti-hunger Food Research and Action Center likened it to a Rube Goldberg device: wildly complicated and inefficient.
House Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway has proposed major changes in SNAP, but they involve stricter work requirements and ignore the Harvest Box.