Public Comments Needed to Protect Families at Risk

The White House has announced new administrative proposals that put struggling families in harm’s way. These proposals are the latest attack on basic needs assistance, threatening to take food off tables, increase homelessness, and jeopardize access to health care.

Open for public comment right now is a proposal that would redefine how we measure poverty. The proposal is part of an effort to take basic needs assistance from struggling households. The federal poverty line is used to determine eligibility for a broad range of programs including SNAP, school meals, housing, and health care. Research has pointed out many ways that the current poverty measure is flawed in that it does not accurately capture costs for basic needs, but this proposal would only make the poverty measure even more inaccurate by using a slower growing inflation rate, resulting in lower poverty thresholds each year. A lower poverty line would make it even harder for low-income people to meet the income eligibility for assistance so, over time, more people will lose eligibility and face steeper hurdles to financial security as they struggle to make ends meet without assistance.

Also open for comment right now is a proposed rule from Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that threatens to take away all housing assistance–including rental vouchers and public housing–from households with mixed immigration status. It’s estimated that 108,000 individuals, 70% of which are US citizens and over half of which are children, would lose their homes. Proposals like these put the health and safety of families at risk by putting them out on the streets.

We also want to alert you to several harmful proposals that have been announced but have an unclear timeline for when corresponding rules will be published for public comment:

• HUD announced its intent to reverse an existing rule so that homeless shelters will be able to deny admission to transgender individuals.
• The Department of Justice recently announced intention to draft a rule related to public charge as grounds for deportation. This would follow-up on the proposed Department of Homeland Security Rule that would allow immigration officials to review an immigrant household’s lawful use of SNAP, housing, and health care assistance when determining if the immigrant may be dependent on the government for basic needs (“public charge.”) A study from the Urban Institute has documented the chilling effect on use of public benefits by immigrants as a direct result of these harmful proposals.
• USDA is drafting a rule related to Categorical Eligibility for SNAP, threatening to take food off the tables of working poor households.

Together, we have pushed back against harmful proposed rules, generating hundreds of thousands of comments that are a vital part of a strategy to delay the implementation of harmful proposals and raise important concerns that can be part of a legal challenge in the courts. Please don’t let fatigue wear you down: stay engaged and keep putting pen to paper to let this Administration know how these proposals put families at risk and what experience and research tells us are the right moves for ensuring the health and safety of our communities when all of us are secure in our basic needs.

WHAT YOU CAN DO