Questioned for the second day in a row on Capitol Hill, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said he has the authority to tighten food stamp rules for able-bodied adults even if lawmakers don’t like it. The senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Debbie Stabenow, urged Perdue on Thursday to withdraw the SNAP proposal and warned him to expect fierce opposition if he does not.
“The proposed rule is an end run around the law that would leave families hungry while doing nothing to connect people to long-term employment,” Stabenow told Perdue. “I encourage you to withdraw it.” Two other Democratic senators raised the issue during an Agriculture Committee hearing. Critics say the Trump administration ignored a congressional decision in the farm bill to leave SNAP benefits unchanged when it proposed stricter enforcement of SNAP time limits at the same time President Trump signed the 2018 farm bill into law.
“It was not a prohibition. It was no changes” in the law governing SNAP, said Perdue, who said the law gives him discretion about whether or not to waive the usual 90-day limit on food stamps in a three-year period for able-bodied adults aged 18 to 49 without dependents unless they work at least 20 hours a week or are enrolled in job training. “It says the secretary may waive those requirements,” said Perdue, who thinks states issue too many waivers to the 90-day limit. “We do not believe that in states where unemployment is 4 percent that able-bodied adults should be able to stay on assistance interminably.”
Stabenow, who is from Michigan, said 755,000 people would lose benefits under the USDA proposal, which would require a higher jobless rate for some regions to qualify for a waiver, reduce the territory that can be covered by a waiver, and eliminate waivers for areas with too few jobs. “We rejected some of the things you intend to do,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, Ohio Democrat, said during the hearing. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York called the proposal “a non-starter.”
Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts told reporters that farm bill negotiators, and Congress when it passed the bill, “gave the secretary a lot of latitude with regard [to] the waiver situation.” During negotiations on the bill, Congress rejected a House Republican proposal that would have imposed stricter work requirements for an estimated 7 million able-bodied adults aged 18 to 59 with children aged 6 or older. “We could have had a flash point in the farm bill,” said Roberts. Instead, SNAP waivers were left to the USDA’s discretion. “We’ll get by it,” said Roberts.
The comment period on the SNAP proposal closes on April 2.