Joseph Lawler of the Washington Examiner reports on congressional efforts to focus on the growth in federal food stamp spending.
Food stamps were created to cure rural hunger, but they have become the biggest federal program propping up the incomes of the working poor, a transition that has prompted Republicans to investigate the program.
“It’s the largest welfare program we’ve got,” House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway told the Washington Examiner last week, before kicking off a series of hearings into the food stamp program. “It needs to work, and work well,” Conaway said.
His committee has jurisdiction over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the formal name for the food stamp program, because it is administered through the Department of Agriculture.
That is a reflection of the patchwork nature of the U.S. welfare system, which runs benefits through a number of departments as well as the tax code.
Conaway said last week’s hearing marked the beginning of a “top-to-bottom review of the program,” necessitated because “while the economy has changed and other welfare programs have adjusted to meet changing needs, it does not appear that SNAP has.”
More than five years after the official end of the recession, the U.S. has 46.4 million SNAP beneficiaries, about 50 percent more than during the worst of the financial crisis.
It’s a massive program, with the federal government spending $70 billion on benefits in fiscal 2014, or more than it shelled out through the Department of Education. The average person approved for SNAP receives $130 per month in benefits to spend on food, with many families receiving a multiple of that amount.
The rolls have not shrunk appreciably since the economy began recovering.
