A fight over SNAP funding could derail the farm bill

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the impact of 2018 changes to the Thrify Food Program.

A partisan fight over federal food support programs is posing a major challenge to both chambers as they try to craft a mammoth farm bill ahead of an early fall deadline.

Congress has just four months until a Sept. 30 deadline to finish work on the bill, after both parties agreed to kick the can last year on the bill.

Last year’s failure to pass a five-year farm bill amid ferocious divides represented just the second time in the program’s nearly centurylong history that Congress failed to pass the legislation.

This year, a successful bill must walk a tightrope across the stark divisions between a Democrat-controlled Senate and a sizable far-right contingent in the House.

In the House side, Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) is pushing to increase welfare payments and insurance subsidies to commodity farmers, primarily those growing cotton, rice and peanuts.

Thompson wants to pay for these increases in part by freezing the ability of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to spend more money on food aid in the future — a measure that Democrats consider a dealbreaker.

“The question is, you know, do members want to do the right thing and support which is a really good bipartisan chairman’s mark to move us ahead, 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 accused House Republicans of “robbing Peter to pay Paul” by funding their proposed subsidy increase with back-door cuts that wouldn’t cover the difference. 

Now both sides are digging in their heels over changes pertaining to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as the food stamps program.

In recent remarks to The Hill, Senate Agriculture Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) identified SNAP as one of the biggest hangups lawmakers are facing in striking a bipartisan farm bill.

“They have the largest cut in 30 years in SNAP,” she told The Hill on Thursday as both chambers prepared to head home for Memorial Day recess.

Pressed on the chances of a bipartisan deal in the months ahead, the chair noted lawmakers “still have time,” but she added “what we need is something that brings people together.”

“There’s a lot in the chairman’s mark in the House and in mine, we just have to be willing to get together and not do those things that pull people apart,” she said. 

Her comments come as Democrats have been targeting a proposal in the GOP-dominated House’s version of the $1.5 trillion omnibus farm bill, which was unveiled earlier this month.

That bill was marked up in an explosive hearing last week, when both sides went back and forth in a heated debate over GOP-backed changes to the program. 

But beyond disagreements over policy lie a yawning gap over how much these cuts could save — and even whether they are cuts at all.

In a summary of the 900-plus page bill, House Republicans argued the measure “disallows future unelected bureaucrats from arbitrarily increasing or decimating SNAP benefits,” while targeting actions taken under the Biden administration that led to a sharp increase in costs for the program.

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

The GOP plan, they argue, amounts to cuts through the back door. Thompson’s proposal would ban a future administration from adjusting its future math on SNAP coverage based on anything other than inflation.

Republicans “cannot have it both ways,” said Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) ”I have heard my colleagues say that this is not a SNAP cut. But dozens of outside experts disagree.”

“If the committee’s considering it a pay-for then that is funding you are taking away from hungry families.”

Republicans have specifically targeted the Biden administration’s 2021 reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan (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 baseline “market basket” that marks the minimum a household can spend on food without lapsing into food insecurity. 

Prior TFPs had just considered the foods bought by the absolute lowest-income families, which moved the list of covered products towards the cheapest, least healthy packaged foods.

While the GOP has sought to cast this as a Biden-administration initiative, the reason the TFP was reevaluated in the first place is because the Republican-controlled Congress ordered the USDA to do so in the 2018 farm bill.

In its interpretation of that legislation, USDA for the first time in its history decided to focus on how it would cost an average household to buy healthy food, even if that number wasn’t cost neutral.

Now focused on including more healthy groceries, USDA officials raised the amount of money given to 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 Plan “dramatically reduced the share of counties with inadequate benefits to 21 percent, compared with 96 percent in 2020.”

However, the think tank also noted that benefits were still too low for many families to keep up with inflation as Americans felt the squeeze of rising price stickers.

A study in Frontiers in Public Health found that the increase may have helped to blunt the impacts of inflation, but that the reevaluation of the TFP had “no significant effects” “on food insecurity, diet quality, and mental health outcomes among SNAP participants relative to non-participants.”

The Urban Institute research additionally found that SNAP benefits fell short of “covering monthly food costs by $49.29 for families with zero net income” at the end of last year, compared to $58.59 short in the first three quarters of 2023.

Stabenow said in the recent interview that she would “rather get a farm” bill, as opposed to another short-term extension, but she also told The Hill, “We’re not gonna go backwards.”

Updated May 30, 2024 at 4:17 p.m. EDT.