Food stamp spending “doubled under President (George W.) Bush and doubled again under President Obama.”
U.S. Rep. Tom Cole on July 16, 2013, in an MSNBC interview
Food stamp spending has soared under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, says U.S. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla.
Cole is disappointed that House lawmakers missed a chance to push for more than $20 billion in savings over 10 years when they stripped nutrition programs from the farm bill. Now they may be stuck with current law or the Senate bill, he said, which aims to trim about $4 billion.
“I would argue what we missed, as Republicans, was the chance for real reform,” he said in an MSNBC interview July 16, 2013. “We could have gotten some reductions. It’s a program that’s doubled under President (George W.) Bush, doubled again under President Obama.”
We wondered: Did such spending double under Bush, then double again?
We’ll start by noting that food stamps have officially been known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, since October 2008.
It’s the federal government’s largest food program. It helps low-income people buy groceries, usually with benefit cards that work like debit cards.
The 2007-09 recession drove the number of folks on food stamps to a record high under Obama. In an average month in 2011, one in seven U.S. residents got help.
We asked Cole for his evidence that spending doubled under Bush before doubling under Obama. The congressman provided numbers from the agency that administers the program, the U.S. Agriculture Department.
He compared total costs of the program from the start of Bush’s first term to the end of his second term, then growth from 2008 to the most recent fiscal year available, 2012. Costs had more than doubled under Bush, from $17 billion to $38 billion, then doubled again under Obama, to $78 billion.
The story since 2007 is still fresh: Joblessness driven by the recession made more people eligible for help, and also drove more folks who were already eligible for help to ask for it, perhaps because their other support networks were tapped out.
The recession also partly explains the rise in benefits before Bush left office in 2008.
But it was the presidency of Bill Clinton and the 1996 welfare reform that set the stage for rising benefits under Bush. Under Clinton, spending had fallen nearly 40 percent, partly because of new limits in the law.
Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who advised Bush on welfare policy at the time of the 2002 farm bill, said the goal then was to expand food programs for low-income working families.
Now, some argue that no change is required. They believe spending will come down on its own as the economy recovers. About 65 percent of the growth in spending from 2007 to 2011 was driven by an increase in the number of people eligible for food stamps in the poor economy, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Cole said food stamp spending “doubled under President Bush, doubled again under President Obama.” Agriculture Department numbers back his claim.
Whether that’s evidence the program requires reform depends on your perspective on government assistance. Even with no change in the law, spending will fall as the economy recovers. Cole got his history right.
We rate his claim True.
