SNAP

The Trump administration will hold states accountable "for transitioning able-bodied [SNAP] recipients permanently into the workforce," said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in an essay that underlined the White House call for new or tougher work requirements in federal welfare programs. "Too many states have abandoned this goal of self-sufficiency."

After Democrats spent three hours criticizing House Agriculture Committee chairman Michael Conaway’s plan to overhaul SNAP, the committee approved its draft of the farm bill on a party-line vote.

The work requirements for SNAP recipients proposed by House Republicans "would cause more than a million low-income households with about 2 million people — particularly low-income working families with children —- to lose their benefits altogether or have them reduced," said Robert Greenstein, the head of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "We really believe they need to go back to the drawing board," saying the package is too poorly designed to be salvaged by amendment.

Millions of poor Americans will gain the opportunity for a better way of life if Congress toughens the work requirements for SNAP recipients and offers job training to them, says conservative Texas Rep. Micheal Conaway, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. The Republican-controlled panel could approve Conaway's restructuring of the largest U.S. anti-hunger program today, clearing the politically charged bill for an election-year floor vote.

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.

Michael Conaway, the Republican chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, proposed a dramatic change in SNAP today that would significantly tighten eligibility rules for the program.

President Trump put his weight behind new or stronger work requirements for "work-capable people" enrolled in federal welfare programs in an Executive Order released on Tuesday. Trump ordered eight federal departments, including USDA, to see if stronger work rules are needed within the "public assistance programs of their respective agencies." Meanwhile, House Democrats say SNAP faces a radical, and unworkable, overhaul at the hands of Republicans in the name of work requirements and job training.

Congress ought to focus on the "N" - nutrition - in SNAP rather than pursue stricter work requirements on food stamp recipients, said former agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, in remarks aimed at House Republican farm bill proposals.

As many as 5 million people will have to work longer hours each week to avoid a 90-day limit on food stamp benefits under revisions proposed by the Republican chairman of the House Agriculture Committee but uniformly opposed by its Democratic members.

At an impasse with Democrats over his plans for large cuts in the food stamp program, House Agriculture Committee chairman Michael Conaway says he will write — and pass — a farm bill without them.

The leaders of the Senate Agriculture Committee have ruled out major changes in the food stamp program, effectively rejecting big cuts to the program before House Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway can write them into his committee’s version of the farm bill. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

The cost of the largest U.S. antihunger program, food stamps, doubled during the slow recovery from the 2008-09 recession, a factor in the first-ever House defeat of a farm bill in 2013. Costs have fallen for four years in a row and are expected to fall again but SNAP, as the food stamp program is known, again is the divisive factor in writing an omnibus farm bill.

Defending the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was the top priority of attendees at a convening yesterday of 63 sustainable agriculture and food access organizations in Washington, D.C. The meeting was to prepare members of the Good Food for All coalition to lobby Congress on the 2018 farm bill.