Don’t Let Them Take Food from Hungry Families – Farm Bill Update

Could your food bank meet a 40% increase in demand for services on its existing resources?

That’s what H.R. 2, the House Farm Bill that passed out of committee along strict party lines last week, would do to charitable programs across the nation.

H.R. 2 proposes a $20 billion SNAP cut that reduces or eliminates household benefits over the next ten years. This would take nutritious food off the tables and out of the refrigerators in over one million households across our nation, impacting more than 2 million individuals.

SNAP recipients are primarily families with children, seniors living on low and fixed incomes, people with disabilities, and veterans. The SNAP cuts proposed in H.R. 2 are particularly harsh because they will be harmful for underemployed families with children:

• A proposal to eliminate categorical eligibility, an option that gives states the flexibility to allow households with modest earnings but high costs for basic necessities to apply for SNAP, would eliminate SNAP benefits for more than 20,000 Washington households. Children in these households would also lose their eligibility for free school meals. With the total loss of these supports for food, families would then be at risk of deeper hunger or else losing other necessities including housing or the ability to pay for their utility bills. This cut will exacerbate the “cliff effect,” jeopardizing the abilities of these families to work their way out of poverty.
• H.R. 2 also proposes penalties for individuals up to the age of 60, including primary caretakers of children over the age of 6, if they are not working a minimum 20 hours/week or else engaged in an employment and training program. That requirement goes up to 25 hours/week after the first five years. As written, these policy changes would create an unworkable bureaucratic nightmare: our state government would have to develop a case management system to monitor the work activities on a monthly basis for hundreds of thousands of individuals. Additionally,  individuals who can only find part-time, seasonal, or temporary work would be at risk of losing SNAP, jeopardizing their health and abilities to continue to work when jobs are more readily available.

Cuts of this magnitude will mean less food for families in need, deepening their need for food bank services. The Farm Bill proposes a small increase for TEFAP resources for food banks, but this change can’t even begin to make up for the loss of meals provided by SNAP. According to Feeding America, the TEFAP increase would replace only 6% of the more than 13 billion meals that would be missed over the next 10 years from the loss of SNAP.

Members of Congress will be back home in district next week for a state work period. This means that a floor vote on H.R. 2 could take place as early as mid-May. Your Congressional Representative must hear from you: tell them that taking food from needy families is completely unacceptable and urge them to vote NO on H.R. 2.

WHAT YOU CAN DO