Punishment, not reward, for trying

Undersecretary Brandon Lipps, USDA Acting Deputy, announced the agency’s proposed elimination of the policy “Broad-based Categorical Eligibility” (BBCE) in order to save $2.5 billion.

The BBCE system has been around for 20 years with broad bipartisan support, until recently.

Eliminating BBCE would result in three million people losing food stamps including more than a quarter of a million children who are receiving free school meals, although they would be eligible for the reduced-price meal options.

Not only would this remove three million poor people from the food stamps system, but it would also require state program administrators to revert to old systems that pile up additional paperwork, staff hours, and costs.

Presently states can choose to expand access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) beyond the scope built into federal anti-hunger legislation, and twenty-eight states, the District of Columbia, and the territorial governments of Guam and the Virgin Islands have been making modest expansion of income limits BBCE allows.

Also eliminated would be the 20-year-old rule’s allowance for states to suspend the “asset tests” in federal law that denies SNAP to any recipient who manages to accumulate roughly $2,000 in personal savings as more than 40 jurisdictions have done. Three-quarters of the households receiving SNAP  in those twenty-eight states, the District of Columbia, and the territorial governments of Guam and the Virgin Islands have less than $500 in liquid assets.

This could result in low-income workers not working more or taking a job with better pay, because if they reach the $2,000 limit it could eliminate needed assistance, making working-poor Americans less independent.

After years of bipartisan support, conservatives have recently begun to oppose both BBCE and the food stamp program in general.

Poverty in the United States is defined by measures of family expenses from the 1950s that have been updated mathematically but not methodologically in the last 50 years when the cost of housing, healthcare, and childcare has radically increased as wages have not.

Food stamp law offers statutory eligibility to SNAP benefits to families earning 130% or less of Federal Poverty Line (FPL), but States can use BBCE to invite those households earning as much as 200% FPL who qualify for some other low-income program funded through the separate Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) system to apply for SNAP which they may get only after their incomes and expenses are verified by caseworkers, and then, the SNAP benefits they might receive may be less generous than those earning 130% FPL and below.
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This new proposal came about when it became clear that Republicans in the House were unable to slash the food stamps system through the Farm Bill.

One of the reasons that conservatives had historically supported BBCE was because it allowed food stamp recipients to start earning enough money so they could get off any public assistance while not getting kicked out of the system as they made progress toward that end. Just squeaking over the 130% line could result in loosing needed assistance without BBCE pushing families that have made progress back.

Why work harder if your success is a punishment?

There is one case where a millionaire, a conservative Republican, applied for BBCE benefits to show the system as flawed, and in spite of this being one case purposely contrived to show he could do it, and he became the GOP and Fox News poster boy of abuse, rather than deal with the few who might be scamming the system, Trump’s USDA wants to cut benefits for three million people who follow the rules.

Trump’s USDA claims that something as simple as someone receiving a pamphlet or an application for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families means people get automatically enrolled in SNAP just because they were handed a brochure that was printed using TANF money. The reality is that families still have to go through the application process which includes documenting their income and circumstances.

Families who are working hard and struggling to get by while relying on the federal work support programs to get food assistance to make it through the month in order to get that done will lose that necessary support, and might as well not even try to get out of poverty as the closer they get to the goal, the better the chance is that they will be knocked down for trying.

How is that acceptable?

 

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