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WhiteTara

(29,704 posts) Fri Sep 6, 2019, 01:05 PM Sep 2019

Trump's food stamp rule change will hurt 19 million households

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/460218-trumps-food-stamp-rule-change-will-hurt-19-million-households

President Trump's proposal to the food stamp program would mean 1.7 million households, totaling 3.1 million people, will lose benefits that help them put food on the table. And on top of that, 500,000 kids will lose access to free school lunches.

But as grim as these cuts may seem, they are just the tip of the iceberg. The Trump administration also wants to bury those who remain eligible for food stamps in paperwork. These additional 17.2 million households will “undergo a more burdensome application process” according to the Congressional Research Service. The result: more red tape that means even more families will lose SNAP supports that have proven health and economic benefits.

As it stands, if you qualify for other anti-poverty programs, state governments in 43 states can use data from those programs to make it far easier to enroll in SNAP. The U.S. Department of Agriculture wants to change this “categorical eligibility” rule to make enrolling in SNAP harder.

This is no accident. In fact, it’s only the latest example of how the Trump administration is getting better at using administrative burdens as a backdoor means of policymaking. Having failed in Congress to cut SNAP, the Trump administration is betting that making the application process more dysfunctional will have the same effect.