As Paul Ryan prepares to head off into the sunset, many have noted that his dream of destroying the safety net has not come to pass. The kind of frontal assault on social programs Ryan favored was politically suicidal, so it kept getting put off for another day, even now that Republicans have complete control of government.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans will stop trying to chip away at whatever meager benefits Americans might count on to mitigate the suffering that poverty imposes.
The latest effort comes as part of the new farm bill. Because it involves food, the food-stamp program, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), is funded through the farm bill. So Republicans are taking this opportunity to expand work requirements for the program.
If you’re between 18 and 59 and aren’t sick or caring for a child, you’ll have to either prove you’re employed or participate in a job training program for 20 hours a week, or you could lose your benefits.
There’s an intuitive appeal to the idea. After all, if you’re able-bodied and of working age, shouldn’t you be working or training? But once you take a close look at this idea, you quickly realize just how incredibly cruel it is, and how it is specifically designed to get as many people as possible kicked off food stamps, which means more Americans going hungry.
I spoke this morning to LaDonna Pavetti of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who has done extensive research on work requirement programs and the safety net. She emphasized that this new bill would impose an enormous bureaucratic burden, not just on recipients but also on the state government workers who would have to spend much of their time monitoring people’s compliance with the requirements — and with a fraction of the money that has been provided in the past when work requirements have been added to programs such as welfare.
Under these kind of work rules, recipients have to constantly provide proof that they’re meeting the requirements. If you’re employed, that means you’ll have to document your hours; if you’re a student, you’ll have to get your school to repeatedly verify that you’re still in class. Then you’ll have to mail in those forms or find time to bring them to the state agency, and you have to do it not once or twice but every month. Miss a month and you could lose part or all of your benefits.
Guess who has the hardest time keeping up with all the bureaucratic requirements? In the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, says Pavetti, studies have shown that those who lose their benefits under work requirements are more likely to have mental health problems or low education levels, and African Americans are more likely to see their benefits cut off. “The people who don’t make it through the system are the people who are most in need of help,” Pavetti says.
Nor will people benefit from all these new work programs. As the experience of TANF has shown, many job training programs don’t help people, and the ones that do are extremely expensive to mount, costing as much at $10,000 per participant per year or more. But this bill proposes to spend just $1 billion a year to provide job training to an estimated 3 million people, or around $28 per person per month.
“The numbers are just so much bigger in SNAP, and the money that’s allocated in the SNAP bill is less than what states currently spend for work programs in TANF,” Pavetti says. “The only way you can actually meet those requirements is to cut a lot of people off.”
What’s more, as Pavetti points out, around half of non-disabled people on SNAP are in households where someone is already employed, and if you add people who were working the year before or year after they got food stamps, it goes up to around 80 percent. So for millions of people, SNAP is a way to get by because their job doesn’t pay enough, or a way to survive when they’re temporarily out of work. Now Republicans want to take those people and make them jump through a whole bunch of hoops, including perhaps having to spend four or five hours every day during the week in a job training program that won’t do much to help them get a job, at the very moment when their lives are already at their most difficult.
So imagine this. You’re working a minimum-wage job. Because the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in almost a decade, that means even working full time you’re making less than $15,000 a year. If you’re unlucky enough to live in a Republican state that refused to expand Medicaid, you won’t be able to afford health insurance either. But food stamps make it possible to feed your kids, with a few hundred dollars a month to help you get by. And now, you’re going to have to navigate your way through a bureaucratic maze in order to maintain those benefits, at a time when your life is already incredibly challenging and stressful, all with the threat that if you make a mistake — forget to have your boss sign your time sheets, fill out a form wrong, miss a meeting — you could lose your benefits and not be allowed to reapply for a year.
And one more thing: President Trump wants to make food stamp recipients take drug tests. Because it isn’t hard and humiliating enough already.
Let’s not forget that Republicans want to do this not long after they passed a tax cut bill that larded hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits on corporations and the wealthy. They are waging what can only be described as a comprehensive war on poor Americans. Next time you hear Republican candidates wax rhapsodic about their “conservative values,” remember that this is what they’re talking about.