Donald Trump’s proposed budget for the 2019 fiscal year would make major changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Currently, SNAP recipients receive a budget each month to spend on an array of foods. But Trump instead hopes to send SNAP recipients a package of pre-determined foods—thereby instituting a government-mandated diet for SNAP beneficiaries and stripping them of their autonomy. The proposal does not even include fresh fruits and vegetables in the packages. Fortunately, however, there is strong opposition to this radical proposal, and hopefully this political pressure will stop the changes in their tracks. Nonetheless, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have made it clear that some kind of SNAP reform is on the agenda this year. The more conventional SNAP reform proposals—work requirements, drug testing, and conversion to a block grant system—would all serve to worsen hunger in the US by decreasing the number of people enrolled in SNAP.
After congressional Republicans passed a tax bill this past December, many predicted that welfare reform would be their next move. Fortunately, the prospect of comprehensive GOP welfare reform at the current moment seems low. As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell himself has stated, passing welfare reform in an election year is politically dangerous. That said, nutrition assistance reform might have a higher a chance of succeeding than other areas of welfare reform. This is primarily due to the fact that SNAP is authorized by the farm bill, an omnibus piece of legislation that supports a variety of agricultural and nutritional programs. A farm bill is passed about every five years, and the farm bill that was passed in 2014 will expire in 2018. Though many people associate the farm bill singularly with agricultural policy, about 80 percent of the spending in the bill goes to nutritional programs, mostly SNAP. Since nutrition assistance appears in the farm bill alongside crop insurance subsidies, conservation programs, and rural development projects, it may be easy to hide changes in SNAP within a larger bill. Representatives and Senators could thus more easily claim that they were voting for the bill as a whole rather than voting specifically for SNAP reform.
There are a number of ways in which Republicans might try to alter SNAP in the next farm bill. For one, they may strengthen work requirements. In most states, if people fail to meet work requirements, they can only receive SNAP benefits for three months out of every three years. Republicans may try to mandate that states make these work requirements stricter, or they may attempt to make it harder for states to obtain a waiver for the work requirements. Another way Republicans could restrict benefits is by requiring that states employ drug testing for SNAP beneficiaries. There has recently been increased support for drug testing SNAP recipients in a few states. In December 2017, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker moved ahead with plans to drug test SNAP recipients, a decision that must still be approved by the Trump administration. Finally, Republicans may attempt to convert SNAP to a block grant program. Block grants provide states with a sum of money and general provisions on how to use that money, giving states a great deal of flexibility in how funds are used. A well-known example of a welfare program that was converted to a block grant was Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
In 2017, SNAP supported over 40 million people, or approximately one out of every eight Americans. Moreover, the program has been demonstrated to be essential in lifting people out of poverty. Therefore, all three of the changes discussed above would be disastrous for alleviating hunger and poverty in the US. Work requirements on SNAP are typically just veiled attempts to decrease the number of people receiving benefits by setting time constraints on how long people can stay enrolled in the program. Such time constraints often lead to significant declines in enrollment. For example, hundreds of thousands of people lost their SNAP payments when states reimposed time constraints on SNAP in 2016. Similarly, work requirements for TANF passed in 1996 resulted in millions losing their benefits. Moreover, drug testing SNAP recipients would make it even harder for people to enroll in SNAP and would be an invasion of their privacy. Furthermore, converting SNAP to a block grant would decrease the effectiveness of the program, as block grant programs are easily abused by states. For instance, when TANF was converted to a block grant, states redirected funds to other purposes such as filling holes in their budgets. Thus, the main potential avenues of SNAP reform would all be counterproductive to combating hunger and poverty in the US.
Unfortunately, however, there is a great deal of evidence that the Trump administration’s USDA Secretary, Sonny Perdue, is pushing for SNAP reform. Perdue has stated that SNAP “was not intended to be a permanent lifestyle.” He has also advocated for stricter work requirements in order to “help [SNAP recipients] learn to transition into an independent lifestyle.” Perdue even said that this would be one of the USDA’s top goals in the next farm bill. Moreover, in an ambiguous USDA letter released late last year, the organization wrote that it wanted to reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse” in SNAP and provide “greater State flexibility.” This type of language is usually code for significant changes in welfare programs. Therefore, it appears that Perdue’s USDA would be more than willing to assist Republican changes to SNAP.
Granted, there is no guarantee that SNAP reform would pass Congress, even if it were to pass the House or Senate Agriculture Committees. In 2013, Senator James Inhofe introduced an amendment that would have converted SNAP to a block grant. Nine Republican Senators voted against the amendment, eight of whom are still serving in the Senate. This appears to suggest that SNAP reform is a long shot. After all, there is a reason why welfare reform is unpopular—these changes would quite literally take food out of people’s mouths. However, the political climate has changed a great deal since 2013, and Republicans may want to push conservative bills through Congress before Democrats potentially retake one or both chambers in the fall.
There is another possibility that might be worse than work requirements, drug testing, or a SNAP block grant program. If the Trump administration gets its way, then SNAP recipients would receive a box with a government-mandated selection of foods. Hopefully, political pressure will defeat this early-stage proposal, but in this age of political unpredictability, we can never be sure.