An average family of four on food stamps will see their benefits decline by $36 per month starting Friday, while Congress debates further reductions to a program that ballooned during the recession and now covers 1.9 million Georgians.
Friday’s 5.5 percent benefit cut is due to an expiring piece of the 2009 stimulus law, and there is no real effort under way to reverse the cuts for 47 million recipients nationwide.
Today, Congressional negotiators meet for the first time on how to resolve the differences between a House bill that cuts food stamps by an estimated $39 billion over 10 years and a Senate version that trims the program by $4 billion. The chambers’ farm bills also change the way agriculture subsidies work, eliminating direct cash payments to farmers.
Two Georgia Republicans — Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Rep. Austin Scott of Tifton — are on the House-Senate conference committee faced with the tricky task of resolving the chambers’ dueling visions. The Farm Bill has been expired for more than a year amid continued debate over farm policy and nutrition programs such as food stamps.
The recession sent food stamp costs spiraling to a record $80 billion last year, making it a bigger bulls-eye for lawmakers looking to reduce the deficit. But defenders of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as it is formally known, argue that the safety net must expand in bad times and will shrink as the economy improves. The number of Georgians receiving the benefits declined slightly from June to July, according to initial U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Cutting food stamps will place the Atlanta Community Food Bank under an impossible strain, said founder Bill Bolling. He said the food bank has doubled in size during the past four years, as donors have stepped up in response to tough times, but it does a small fraction of what the federal government can do.
“Everybody is working harder, doing more with less, trying to stretch our resources,” Bolling said. “It’s very difficult at this stage to figure out how to do more.”
The most controversial piece of the House bill is new work requirements for food stamp recipients.
Able-bodied working-age adults without children would be required to find a job or be enrolled in job training for more than 20 hours a week to receive benefits for longer than three months. This provision brings back a requirement that had been lifted for high-unemployment states such as Georgia.
States also could choose to add a work requirement for adults with children, and state governments would get to keep half of the federal money they save from having fewer people on the rolls — a strong enticement for cash-strapped states.
Among other changes, the bill would prevent states and the USDA from advertising food stamps and would ban lottery winners from receiving them.
Ken Hardy, a retiree in Woodstock, supports the changes. Serving on a citizens review panel for juvenile court cases in Cherokee County, Hardy said he comes across people for whom government benefit programs are a way of life.
“You want to see the needy people who really need the service get it and you want to see the scammers intent on getting a freebie get the hell off of it,” Hardy said.
Passions can be inflamed by headline-grabbing reports of fraud, including a Fox News report this summer about a California surfer purchasing sushi and lobster with his food stamps.
But USDA data show payment error rates have hit record lows.
In fiscal 2011, the most recent data available, USDA found $15 million in fraudulent payments in Georgia. Thousands were booted from the program, and the government won 32 criminal convictions.
Atlanta Democratic U.S. Rep. David Scott said Republicans who seek to cut the program have a mistaken view of recipients at a time when an estimated 900,000 veterans, for example, receive benefits.
“They look at it as lazy folks, lazy black people, urban people, immigrants,” Scott said. “That’s an image thing.”
The Senate farm bill limits state coordination between food stamps and home heating assistance for poor people. The House bill adopts that provision and adds more restrictions, including the work requirements and an elimination of “categorical eligibility” where states can enroll people for food stamps if they qualify for other federal assistance.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the House proposal would remove at least 3.8 million people from the food stamp rolls next year.
“Our goal is to … get the program back to what it’s supposed to be, which is temporary assistance for people who need the help,” Austin Scott said.
“Over the last several years it’s moved from that into essentially a way of life and, quite honestly, it robs those very people who have become dependent on that program from the economic opportunities that come from work.”
The bills also make big changes in farm subsidy programs, saving billions by doing away with direct cash payments to farmers in favor of a choice between crop insurance and “target prices” for commodities. If crops fall below the target price, a subsidy would kick in.
The House target prices are more generous than the Senate’s, but Chambliss predicted that gap could be bridged fairly easily.
Bigger differences include the structure of the law, as the House split the farm-subsidy and nutrition programs into separate bills, which conservatives argue will make it easier to reform them.
By approving a single bill, the Senate kept the rural-urban, farm-nutrition political alliance that has sustained farm bills for decades.
Chambliss said he expects today’s meeting to be “ceremonial,” and that, with the House at home next week, it will be mid-November before serious work can begin. A deadline looms Jan. 1, when without a new agreement milk prices will skyrocket as price supports from 1949 kick back in.
“Unfortunately there’s not a lot of conversation going on right now between the conferees about trying to find that middle ground,” Chambliss said.
