House Republicans said on Thursday that they would expand work requirements to cover 6 million SNAP recipients and were willing to go it alone to pass the first openly partisan farm bill in living memory. As a sign of the importance the GOP attaches to the issue, leaders designated the farm bill as HR 2, so it stands next to President Trump’s tax-cut law — HR 1 — in House records.
The bill would require “work-capable” adults aged 18 to 49 to work at least 20 hours a week or spend an equivalent amount of time in workfare or job-training programs. States would be given $1 billion a year to ramp up education and training programs to handle every eligible adult who falls short of the 20-hour target, perhaps 1.5 million people or more. Job training has been a small adjunct to SNAP in most states, serving about 700,000 people annually.
Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway said his plan offers SNAP recipients “a springboard out of poverty to a good-paying job, and opportunity for a better way of life for themselves and their families.” The opposite — “greater poverty and hunger” — is the more likely result, said Jim Weill of the anti-hunger Food Research and Action Center, because of “harsh SNAP eligibility cutoffs” in the Conaway bill.
A million people are expected to disappear from SNAP over 10 years under Conaway’s plan, because they will get better-paying jobs, won’t work enough hours, or will drop out of the training program. Enrollment would fall by an additional 300,000 people with the elimination of a broad-based categorical eligibility provision that allows people with incomes above 130 percent of the poverty line to apply for SNAP regardless of assets.
Conaway has a 26-20 Republican majority on the Agriculture Committee and said he is sure it will approve his bill next week, possibly on Wednesday. Passage in the House at large is less certain because some conservative Republicans may hold out for bigger cuts in SNAP. Democrats ended negotiations with Conaway last month, complaining that the chairman was uncompromising in pursuing radical change in SNAP, so they may not vote for it either. A similar combination of opponents led to the first-ever House defeat of a farm bill, in 2013.
“This bill attempts to change SNAP from a feeding program to a work program,” said Collin Peterson, the Democratic leader on the committee. He said Conaway “put the farmers and rural communities who rely on the farm bill’s safety net programs at risk in pursuit of partisan ideology on SNAP.”
For their part, the leaders of the Senate Agriculture Committee said they were working as colleagues to write a bipartisan farm bill. The joint statement by Chairman Pat Roberts and senior Democrat Debbie Stabenow was the latest is a series of signals that a partisan bill would not be welcome in the Senate. Roberts says he will need 60 votes to pass the Senate bill, though he would like 70, which would strengthen his hand in negotiations with the House over the bill’s final version. Republicans hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate and a 237-192 majority in the House.
“Except for the SNAP portion, this is a bipartisan bill,” said Conaway during a news conference to unveil the House plan. A dozen Republican members of the committee flanked him in a show of support. “I’ve done nothing specifically to flush Democrats off this bill.”
Conaway claimed no one would be forced out of SNAP if his plan is adopted, although some people, he said, may “self-select” to leave.
The think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said a multifaceted and effective job-training system for SNAP could easily cost $1 billion a month nationwide, far more than the $1 billion annual allocation in the Conaway bill. The group based its estimate on the track record of work requirements for federally supported welfare. “The almost-certain result would be greatly under-resourced work programs that offer few, if any, services to help people gain skills and jobs,” it said. At the same time, recipients would have to show compliance with the requirement for work or training.
On Tuesday, Trump put the administration’s weight behind work requirements for welfare recipients. In an executive order, the president told agency chiefs to see if new or stronger work requirements are needed.
For the text of the House farm bill, click here.
To read a section-by-section summary of the bill, click here.
For highlights of the bill, written by the majority staff, click here.