Around every five years, an agricultural bill – the main tool of farming policy in the United States, is passed by Congress. Being under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, food stamp funding has been part of this farm bill since 1973.
On Thursday, however, House Republicans pushed through a significantly trimmed bill that made no mention of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – the catch-all phrase for various food stamp programs open to low-income household.
The move to strip the nutrition programs from the farm bill was a response by GOP leaders to the unexpected defeat of the farm bill last month. The cost of the pared-down bill is $196 billion. Had food stamp programs been included, the bill would have totaled a gargantuan $940 billion. This exclusion then is no trivial thing.
Republicans argue that the linkage of food stamps and farming policy is an illogical one, and nutrition programs ought to be considered separately. This is especially the case as Conservatives seek an overhaul of the program that would result in substantial cuts. And they mean substantial.
The original farm bill cut food stamp spending by $20.5 billion over the next decade. But for Republicans this it wasn’t enough. For Democrats, it was too much and that was why the bill failed to pass before.
Over the last six months the use of food stamps has risen dramatically, and is now at a record high. Today, 47.8 million people in the United States depend on nutritional programs. That’s 1 in every 7 Americans who on average receive a little over $133 a month to help pay for groceries.
Food stamps cost $80 billion 2011. In 2008 SNAP totaled half that. In fact, enrollment in SNAP has increased 70 percent from five years ago. So sure, for many Americans SNAP is the difference between surviving, and well, not. But it’s not the time to panic… yet.
The omission of SNAP from the farm bill should not be taken to mean that such programs are going to disappear altogether. This would never happen. Not only would the Senate would have to accept the House legislation, the President would also have to sign it. In the former instance, the Senate passed in June a five-year farm bill that made only modest cuts to food programs but certainly included SNAP. As for the latter scenario, well, the White House has already threatened to veto a bill without food stamps.
The next step then would be for the House and the Senate to thrash it out and try and come up with a compromise that would reconcile both bills. If an impasse persists beyond September 30, when the current SNAP program lapses it’s highly likely that that food stamps would simply continue to get funded at their current level until a compromise is reached.
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