Food stamp cuts by House GOP could hurt 150,000 Minnesotans

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Minneapolis, MN (MinnPost)

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Gail Donkers remembers struggling to buy groceries for her young family on a tight budget.

Public assistance funds helped the southern Minnesota corn, soybean and livestock farmer. Donkers said she used federal help to buy peanut butter, baby formula and other essentials for her household.

She's proud, not ashamed, of how much public assistance helped her family.

"We were starting a business, I worked full-time off the farm, and my husband was farming 100 hours per a week if not more," she said. "We now have three college graduates and a grandson ... It meant so much to our family at that time."

Donkers participated in a roundtable in Mankato this week, the third such event organized by the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families and other state agencies to decry congressional efforts to cut the food stamp program, which serves about 440,000 families in Minnesota.

The U.S. House Agriculture Committee was tasked with slashing $230 billion from U.S. Department of Agriculture programs as the GOP-controlled Congress works towards a huge budget bill that would shrink government spending and renew tax cuts Trump established in his first term that are about to expire.

The largest USDA program, by far, is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the official name for food stamps, and that's where the panel found most of its savings. In fact it found $300 billion in savings.

Much of that would come from the imposition of tougher work requirements for SNAP recipients, who currently receive an average of $6 a day in benefits.

The legislation, voted out of the committee late Wednesday, would increase the age for complying with SNAP's work requirements from 55 to 65. Recipients would have to work or study for at least 80 hours a month.

While adults with dependent children are exempt from work requirements, the legislation would change the age limit of those dependents from 18 to 7 years old.

Democrats on the Agriculture Committee introduced dozens of amendments on Wednesday that would amend the legislation during a marathon session.

Rep. Angie Craig, D-2nd District, the top Democrat on the panel, said Democrats "worked tirelessly to try to put lipstick on this bill."

Rep. David Scott, D-Georgia, introduced an amendment that would strip out all proposed food stamp cuts.

"People are going to die, they are going to starve, they are not going to make it," Scott said during an often emotional debate.

Scott also asked Republicans on the panel, who were largely absent for most of the markup of the bill, "Where are your values?" and accused his GOP colleagues of stripping food aid from single mothers to give tax breaks to billionaires like Elon Musk.

Other Democrats introduced amendments that would lower the work requirement age and raise the age of the children that would allow a caretaker to receive benefits. Democrats also tried to reverse the legislation's complete elimination of the SNAP Nutrition Education program, which funds programs at Minnesota food banks and the University of Minnesota aimed at helping low-income individuals and families make diet and lifestyle choices to improve their health and prevent obesity.

But all of the attempts to change the bill were knocked down by the GOP lawmakers, who hold a majority on the panel.

At one point, Craig requested the committee vote to adjourn the hearing. That prompted the absent GOP lawmakers to run through the halls of Congress to return to the committee room to vote down the attempt to end consideration of the bill. The Republican lawmakers then again left the room.

The bill now goes to the Budget Committee where it will be included in Trump's budget bill.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the work requirements would result in an end of SNAP benefits for about 45,000 Minnesotans, and the legislation would put another 106,000 state residents at risk of losing some of their benefits.

"Proposals to change SNAP would send shockwaves throughout our state," said Tikki Brown, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families. "Cuts to SNAP mean fewer dollars for families already struggling, and it would disproportionately harm working parents, rural communities, tribal nations and seniors on fixed outcomes."

House Republicans said in a statement that the legislation focused on "reinforcing work, rooting out waste, and instituting long-overdue accountability incentives to control costs and end executive and state overreach."

Meanwhile, House Democrats said the legislation would increase hunger and social instability.

"With American families feeling anxious about the economy and so much uncertainty in farm country, this is not the time to make reckless cuts to basic needs programs," said Craig.

The Agriculture Committee bill also shifts part of the cost of the food stamp program to the states. Currently, the states administer the program and the federal government pays for all of the cost of providing benefits.

But, beginning in 2028, states would have to pay for at least 5% of the program, and possibly more based on their payment error rates - that is, how much they overpay recipients.

According to the USDA, Minnesota had an error rate of 4.9% in 2023 - less than half the national error rate. But states that have error rates of 6 % to 8% would pay 15% of the cost of the SNAP; states with rates of 10% to 20% would pay 20% and those with error rates that exceed 10% would pay 25%.

The legislation would also reduce the money the federal government gives states to administrate the program and block the USDA from increasing the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan, a yardstick the agency uses to determine benefit amounts.

The bill would also limit the types of legal immigrants that can apply for help, barring those with refugee or humanitarian parole status.

Meanwhile, the nation's farmers, who've decried Congress' failure to pass a new five-year farm bill, would benefit from an additional $60 billion in spending to shore up their federal safety net.

Among other things, the House Agriculture Committee bill would increase crop reference prices and boost crop and livestock insurance payments and conservation funding. It would also add to the USDA trade promotion and research budgets and increase the amount of money the federal pays beet and cane sugar farmers if processors don't purchase their crop.

The proposed cuts to the food stamp program come as grocery prices are stubbornly high and food shelves, which have suffered from Trump administration cuts in funding, are struggling to keep up with need. The shelves already help food stamp recipients who can't make it on the amount of benefits they receive.

"We're bursting at our seams," said Deisy De Leon Esqueda, manager of the ECHO Food Shelf in Mankato. "We're seeing higher food prices just as our clients are and we really don't know what's going to happen."

De Leon Esqueda also said "it's just a time of a lot of uncertainty, not only for us but for our community."

"We have three times as many visits to food shelves as we saw in 2019," Sophia Lenarz-Coy, executive director of The Food Group, a nonprofit that fights hunger.

She said she recently asked a lawmaker what he thought about taking grocery money away from constituents. She said the lawmaker denied any cuts were happening, instead referring to the proposal to cut food stamps as "optimizing the program."

"It didn't even feel like we were actually having the same conversation," Lenarz-Coy said. "It's a very well optimized program."

Farmers are unhappy about the proposed cuts to SNAP, and so are the nation's grocers.

Steve Barthel, a lobbyist for the Minnesota Grocers Association, said SNAP funding supports about 400,000 jobs nationwide, from grocers, to retailers, to wholesalers to transportation workers and farmers. In Minnesota cuts to SNAP could result in loss of 1,500 jobs in the food industry, Barthel said.

"In some of the places where stores are already holding on by just a thread (the cuts to SNAP) could be the difference between staying open and being closed," he added.

This story is provided as a service of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ On the Ground news wire. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) is a network of more than 475 independent, nonprofit newsrooms serving communities throughout the US, Canada, and globally. On the Ground is a service of INN, which aggregates the best of its members’ elections and political content, and provides it free for republication. Read more about INN here: https://inn.org/.

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