There is little point in writing a compromise version of the House and Senate farm bills if it does not include stronger work requirements for food stamp recipients, said analysts from think tanks favoring free enterprise and members of a group of state officials that promotes self-reliance on Thursday. The overarching issue for farm bill negotiators is the House Republicans’ proposal to require an estimated 7 million “work-capable” adults to work at least 20 hours a week or spend equivalent time in job training or workfare to qualify for food stamps.
Senate and House negotiators want to enact the 2018 farm bill by the end of this month, when the current law begins to expire, but they are running out of time. Farm subsidy rules and land stewardship programs also are at issue.
During a teleconference, supporters of stricter work requirements dismissed one potential compromise, involving state-level waivers from existing work requirements, as insufficient. While the Trump administration supports new or stronger work requirements for social programs, new administrators could change the rules, said the speakers, who prefer statutory change. Since the 1996 welfare reform law took effect, so-called able-bodied adults without dependents, or ABAWDs, have been limited to 90 days of SNAP benefits in a three-year period unless they work at least 20 hours a week or live in a region where the 90-day limit has been waived.
“Without a work requirement in the compromise, it’s not worth making the changes that are in the Senate bill,” said Jason Turner, executive director of the Secretaries’ Innovation Group of state social services officials. The group supports “national solutions which favor healthy families, work, economic self-reliance, budget responsibility, and limited government.” Turner said Senate negotiators have been intransigent about making major changes to SNAP.
“Getting [a stronger work requirement] in federal legislation is paramount,” said Kelsey Phillie of the Foundation for Government Accountability, which promotes “principled strategies to replace failed health and welfare programs.”
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation said there was no reason “to abandon a good idea that has wide support,” meaning work requirements. Robert Doar of the American Enterprise Institute said the USDA should do more to encourage SNAP recipients to find work and to prepare them for jobs.
Also speaking during the teleconference were state officials who run social services departments in Texas and Kansas, the home states of the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Agriculture committees.
Besides the work rule for ABAWDs, healthy working-age food stamp recipients in general are required to register for work and accept a suitable job if offered one. Close to two-thirds of SNAP participants are elderly, disabled, or children, and they are not expected to work.
“I don’t think conditioning nutrition benefits is the way to get at what may be labor market problems,” said Ellen Vollinger of the anti-hunger Food Research and Action Center. There are longstanding federal job-training and employment programs, she said.
House Agriculture chairman Mike Conoway told a group of Republican women in Odessa, Texas, that he was working overtime to win Senate acceptance of stricter work requirements, reported the Odessa American. Combest said that some farm-state senators are willing to compromise “because they want a farm bill.”
Republicans will lose a dozen of so House seats in the Nov. 6 elections but retain a small majority of the 435 seats, Combest predicted during an interview with the newspaper. “I think we could lose down to 222 or 225.”
Corrects penultimate paragraph to House Agriculture chairman Mike Conoway … not Former House Agriculture chairman Larry Combest.