‘Work Is the Only Path Out of Poverty’: House Republican to Introduce Bill Expanding Food-Stamp Eligibility Requirements
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Representative Dusty Johnson (R., S.D.) will introduce a bill on Tuesday that would expand work-based eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
The proposed bill, first reported by Politico, would enlarge the age group of SNAP recipients without dependents who must comply with work requirements to be eligible for food stamps. Advocates of the bill insist that refining the work requirements of SNAP beneficiaries will incentive recipients to escape poverty.
Johnson, a member of the House Agriculture Committee whose own family relied on food stamps when he was a child, had made clear his intentions to change the eligibility requirements following his reelection in November 2022.
Winning over three-quarters of the vote, Johnson told voters that combatting skyrocketing energy costs and reforming SNAP within the new Farm Bill would be his top priorities.
“Work is an opportunity. It’s not a punishment,” Johnson told a crowd of supporters on Election Day in Sioux Falls, S.D. “There is no recipe for escaping poverty that doesn’t have work as a requirement.” Johnson said much the same in a recent statement to Politico: “We know that work is the only path out of poverty.”
While Johnson wants to include the new requirements in the upcoming 2023 farm bill, other House Republicans have expressed interest in making work requirements part of debt-ceiling negotiations.
However, Johnson and the Republican Party will face an uphill battle with many Democrats already condemning the move.
“These guys talk about states’ rights all the time, except when it comes to poor people,” Representative Jim McGovern (D., Mass.) told Politico ahead of the bill’s announcement.
A similar sentiment was echoed by Representative Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.). “This is not something new, this go round. All you have to do is look back over the years.”
In late February, a pandemic-era funding boost granted to SNAP expired, with the average beneficiary set to lose approximately $82 monthly. Consequently, the Capital Area Food Bank estimated that it will provide 23 less meals per recipient a month. Cumulatively, that amounts to 7.5 million less meals for the entire District of Columbia region that it serves.
“We’re calling it a ‘hunger cliff’ because people are going to lose in a very precipitous fashion a very large amount of grocery money,” SNAP director of the Food Research & Action Center, Ellen Vollinger, told the Washington Post last month. “We know a lot of these households don’t have a lot cushion in their budgets.”
Over 40 million Americans currently receive assistance from SNAP.
