A fight over SNAP funding could derail the farm bill

The partisan fight over federal food assistance programs has posed a major challenge for both chambers of Congress as they try to craft a massive farm bill by an early fall deadline.

Congress has just four months until the Sept. 30 deadline to finish work on the bill, after the two parties agreed last year to postpone it.

The failure to pass a five-year farm bill last year amid fierce disagreements marked only the second time Congress has failed to pass legislation in the program’s nearly 100-year history.

To succeed this year, the bill must navigate a tightrope walk between a Democratic-controlled Senate and a House of Representatives controlled by a significant number of far-right factions.

In the House of Representatives, Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) is pushing to increase welfare payments and insurance subsidies for agricultural farmers, who grow mostly cotton, rice and peanuts.

Thompson wants to pay for those increases by freezing the USDA’s ability to spend more money on food aid in the future, a measure Democrats see as an obstacle to compromise.

“The question is, do they want to do the right thing and support a really good bipartisan chairman’s seal to move us forward, or do they want to play politics,” Thompson asked The Hill. “And I can’t make that choice for them.”

Last week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warned House Republicans that they were “robbing Peter and paying Paul” by funding proposed subsidy increases with backdoor cuts and then failing to cover the difference.

Currently, the two sides are stubbornly fighting over changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the food stamp program.

Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) noted in recent comments to The Hill that SNAP is one of the biggest obstacles lawmakers face in passing a bipartisan farm bill.

“These cuts to SNAP are the biggest in 30 years,” she told The Hill on Thursday as both chambers prepared to head to the House for their Memorial Day recess.

Asked about the possibility of a bipartisan agreement being reached in the coming months, the speaker told lawmakers “there’s still time” but added, “What we need is something that brings people together.”

“The Speaker and I stand on this and that means a lot. We just need to try to come together and not do anything that divides people,” she said.

Her comments come as Democrats target the Republican-controlled House of Representatives’ proposal for a $1.5 trillion omnibus farm bill released earlier this month.

The bill was debated in a heated hearing last week in which both sides engaged in heated debate over Republican-backed changes to the program.

But beyond the policy disagreements lies a big divide over how much these cuts would save, and whether they can even be called cuts.

In a 900-page bill outline, House Republicans argued that the bill would “prohibit unelected bureaucrats from arbitrarily increasing or dramatically reducing SNAP benefits in the future,” targeting actions under the Biden administration that led to a sharp increase in the program’s costs.

Democrats argue that these price increases on the list of covered foods were necessary to make up for the fact that healthy foods like fruits and vegetables tend to be more expensive than unhealthy processed foods.

They argue the Republican plan amounts to backdoor cuts. Thompson’s proposal would prohibit future administrations from adjusting future calculations for SNAP coverage based on anything other than inflation.

Republicans “can’t have it both ways,” said Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Calif. “I’ve heard my colleagues say this is not a SNAP cut, but dozens of outside experts disagree.”

“If the commission considers it a fee, it takes funds away from hungry families.”

Republicans are particularly targeting the Biden administration’s 2021 reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Program (TFP), which is used to determine benefit amounts for the SNAP program.

The TFP is the lowest of the USDA’s four food plans. It serves as a benchmark “market basket” that represents the minimum amount a household can spend on food without becoming food insecure.

The previous TFP only considered foods purchased by the lowest-income households, shifting the list of eligible products to the cheapest and least healthy packaged foods.

While Republicans are trying to portray this as a Biden administration initiative, the TFP was reevaluated in the first place because the Republican-controlled Congress ordered the USDA to do so in the 2018 Farm Bill.

With this legislation, for the first time in history, Congress no longer requires USDA to make TFP cost-neutral.

USDA officials are now focused on including healthier food items and have increased benefits for each SNAP recipient by about $1.40 per day, or an average of $42 per month.

The Urban Institute found that the reevaluated Thrifty Food Program “dramatically reduced the percentage of counties receiving inadequate benefits from 96% in 2020 to 21%.”

But the think tank also noted that Americans are feeling the pressure from rising prices and that for many families, benefits are still too low to keep up with inflation.

A study in the journal Frontiers in Public Health found that while the increase may have helped mitigate the effects of inflation, the TFP revaluation “had no significant effect on food insecurity, diet quality, or mental health outcomes when comparing SNAP participants with non-participants.”

Additionally, the Urban Institute study found that SNAP benefits at the end of last year were “insufficient to cover $49.29 of a month’s food costs for a household with zero net income,” but will be $58.59 short by the first three quarters of 2023.

Stabenow said in a recent interview that he would prefer to pass a “farm” bill rather than another short-term extension, but he also told The Hill that he “has no intention of backing down.”