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2 Million Children, Parents Set to Lose Food Aid Unless Congress Acts Now
"Republicans are refusing to fully fund the programs families desperately need, and now 2 million new parents, babies, and children could pay the price," warned one advocate.
Jan 17, 2024
As U.S. lawmakers finalize this year's government funding bills amid yet another shutdown threat, progressive advocates on Wednesday warned that Congress must act immediately to ensure the uninterrupted flow of food aid from a key program on which millions of children and their parents depend.
Advocates including U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) rallied outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Wednesday to implore lawmakers to pass a clean budget without cuts to programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP).
"Programs like WIC, TANF, and SNAP are essential tools for ending poverty and hunger. But instead of helping Democrats expand these programs and deliver for working families, Republicans are constantly working to CUT them in favor of tax breaks for the wealthy," Jayapal said on social media. "It's shameful."
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.)
warned that "Republicans are forcing us to the brink of a shutdown for the third time in four months," and that "shutdowns don't affect the donor class, but they're devastating for service members who need their paychecks, moms who need WIC to feed their kids, and families trying to heat their homes."
The group ParentsTogether Action specifically warned of threats to WIC, which "ensures access to fresh and healthy food and formula, breastfeeding support, and healthcare referrals for pregnant and postpartum parents and their kids up to age 5."
The group stressed:
It is critical that [congressional lawmakers] meet President [Joe] Biden's emergency request to fully fund WIC, and honor a long-standing commitment to ensure WIC is able to serve every low-income family who seeks assistance. If they fail to do so by January 19, the program will face a roughly $1 billion shortfall in 2024, which would require states to reduce WIC participation. Up to 2 million eligible young children and pregnant and postpartum adults with low incomes could be turned away by September, resulting in wait lists for the first time in decades.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—which runs WIC via the Food and Nutrition Service—the program served approximately 6.3 million parents and children each month during fiscal year 2022, including nearly 40% of all infants in the United States. More than half of all U.S. newborns are eligible for WIC benefits.
A 2023 ParentsTogether Action survey revealed that:
- 64% of WIC recipients would have been unable to afford necessary formula to feed their infants without the program;
- 52% of recipients would have been unable to afford enough food for themselves;
- 75% of beneficiaries said the program helped them afford nutritious foods that they would not have otherwise been able to purchase; and
- 35% of those receiving benefits said they would not have had the support necessary to breastfeed their children.
As Stacie Sanchez Hare, director of No Kid Hungry Texas, argued Wednesday in an an opinion piece in The San Antonio Express News, the threat to WIC "comes at the worst possible time," as "the latest USDA report on food insecurity in the United States showed more than 13 million children are living with hunger—a 44% increase in a single year."
That's roughly 1 in 5 children in the U.S., with Black, Latino, rural, and single-parent households disproportionately affected.
"Republicans are refusing to fully fund the programs families desperately need, and now 2 million new parents, babies, and children could pay the price," said ParentsTogether Action executive director Ailen Arreaza. "If Congress doesn't act immediately, new parents struggling to buy food and formula for their families will be turned away."
"Congress cannot abandon pregnant people, new parents, and newborn babies and allow them to go hungry," Arreaza added. "They must fully fund WIC without delay."
Last year saw the ignominious end of a yearslong trend of declining hunger in the U.S., an improvement due largely to federal policies like the expanded child tax credit and universal school meals. The expiration—or Republican blockage—of pandemic-era food programs fueled a resurgence of hunger across the nation.
"With rising food costs and increased program participation—and with data showing that funding WIC bolsters our local economy—it is more critical than ever that we also strengthen WIC to provide vital nutrition, formula, and breastfeeding support for pregnant women, postpartum moms, infants, and toddlers in our communities," wrote Holladay, Utah resident Miriam Belgique in a Wednesday letter to The Salt Lake Tribune.
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This Dirty Rotten Deal Shows Why We Must Abolish the Debt Ceiling
As long as we have a debt limit, we will continue to risk forcing unpopular, harmful cuts to federal investment at the expense of the economic well-being of low- and middle-income people.
Jun 03, 2023
The debt limit deal that Congress passed and President Biden will sign tonight may avert the economic crisis that would be caused by the U.S. government defaulting on its payments. But it’s worth reiterating that we shouldn’t be in this deal-making situation to begin with.
“Debt limit deals” are a way to force policy change through a backdoor by holding the U.S. (and global) economy hostage. Accepting that “debt limit deals” are just business as usual every time we approach the ceiling basically means that one political party can gain access to an inordinately powerful “hack” around the normal democratic process so long as some arbitrary conditions prevail.
Republicans have a majority in just one chamber of Congress, and face a president of the opposing party. Normally, this would mean they would have to argue their case for policy changes on the floor of the House, and compromise more often than not. However, just because we were about to cross over the utterly arbitrary debt limit, Republicans magically gained enormous amounts of leverage to dictate policy—including a lot of policy divorced from the specific conversation of addressing the debt and deficits. This is not a sensible way to govern.
This deal looks significantly less harmful than the original McCarthy proposal that passed the House last month, but it still contains several worrying provisions. Notably, it still includes a concession to expand and tighten work reporting requirements for some of the most vulnerable Americans to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). These should never have been part of a debt ceiling discussion.
While the deal includes new exemptions that could actually extend access to SNAP to people in certain categories (like veterans), it would needlessly still put a large number of older adults ages 49–54 at risk of losing their food stamps if they can’t meet the new burdensome requirements to report on work activities. (This is despite the fact that we know workers over 50 already face difficult working conditions and a tougher labor market than younger workers.)
It’s ridiculous that Republicans claim to care about fiscal responsibility in this debate, but also completely took tax increases off the table in negotiations.
Paperwork and reporting for these programs are already excessively burdensome and deny aid to those in need. The fact that the deal’s new exemptions for certain groups might actually expand receipt of food stamps just highlights the damage being done by current work requirements. They increase red tape and increase the risk of getting kicked out of much-needed safety net support—they do not boost job opportunities or employment for individuals in need. The inclusion of this provision from conservatives has nothing to do with reducing federal spending or encouraging work, and everything to do with punishing poor people.
While less severe than the original Republican proposal, the deal will also place a cap on non-defense discretionary spending at current levels for the next two years, meaning that federal spending will not keep up with inflation. This is effectively a spending cut to nearly every spending area outside of the military, from housing and child care assistance to environmental protection.
It’s ridiculous that Republicans claim to care about fiscal responsibility in this debate, but also completely took tax increases off the table in negotiations. This is despite the fact that tax cuts passed in recent years are prime contributors to the deficit, offering little to no economic benefit to the rest of us in return.
In fact, the Republicans did not just take tax increases off the table; they demanded constraints on the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) ability to enforce tax laws by taking away the budgetary resources needed to modernize their systems and to audit wealthy tax cheats. While Republicans didn’t get everything they wanted, the final deal will claw back some of the boost to IRS resources provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. This is essentially an attempt to return to the era of “do-it-yourself tax cuts”—something we’ve allowed for the richest Americans since the last harmful debt limit deal in 2011 decimated IRS funding.
Ultimately, we need to abolish the debt ceiling, and, at minimum, we should have had a clean debt limit increase. The administration should never have been in a position of negotiating the ability for the government to meet its basic existing obligations. As long as we have a debt limit, we will continue to risk forcing unpopular, harmful cuts to federal investment at the expense of the economic well-being of low- and middle-income people.
Short of getting votes for abolishing the debt limit altogether, we can at least have the Treasury Department start experimenting with measures that would allow workarounds in the future. For example, Treasury could issue and auction a small amount of consols or premium bonds. If Treasury begins doing so early, they could ensure that a market for these premium bonds exists before they need to be used, when the debt limit threatens to bind us again in 2025. This would make issuing them much more credible in the next debt ceiling crisis, and could shift leverage away from those attempting to weaponize the debt limit in future.
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'Absolutely Terrible Idea': Jayapal Warns Biden Against Accepting GOP Assault on Food Aid
Sen. John Fetterman also denounced the Republican attempt to impose more punitive work requirements on SNAP recipients, saying he "didn't come here to take food away from hungry kids."
May 16, 2023
The leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said Monday that the GOP's push to impose even harsher work requirements on recipients of federal food aid is "an absolutely terrible idea" that President Joe Biden must reject as a high-stakes standoff over the debt ceiling continues.
Piling more work requirements onto the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—which already has work mandates—is "a nonstarter for many of us across the Democratic caucus," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told Politico after Biden suggested he is open to additional work requirements for federal assistance programs other than Medicaid, noting that he supported such measures as a senator—remarks that Republicans quickly seized on.
But Jayapal responded that "we did not elect Joe Biden of 1986."
"We elected Joe Biden of 2020," she added.
In exchange for any agreement to lift the debt ceiling and avert a catastrophic default, House Republicans are demanding stricter work requirements for SNAP, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which supplanted the more generous Aid to Families With Dependent Children program under the Clinton-era welfare reform law that Biden voted for.
Citing two unnamed Republicans and two Republicans and three other people familiar with the fluid talks, Politico reported Monday that Democrats "are floating a rough proposal within their ranks that includes potential new restrictions" on TANF.
"But House Republicans, who are aware of the movement, are still demanding further concessions on work requirements for food assistance and believe they have the leverage to force them, possibly before Biden leaves for the G-7 meeting in Japan Wednesday," the outlet added.
Research has consistently shown that work requirements are effective at kicking struggling individuals and families off federal aid programs and leaving people poorer, but not at boosting employment.
As the Center for Public Integrity's Alexia Fernández Campbell wrote earlier this month, "A major study published in February from researchers at the University of Rochester, the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard, and the University of Maryland found that SNAP work requirements did not boost employment or income in Virginia."
"On the contrary," Campbell wrote, "they led more than half of adults in the program to lose food aid."
In a letter to Biden late last week, members of the House Democratic Caucus Poverty Task Force stressed that "decades of research and real-world experience show that taking basic assistance away from people who do not meet rigid work-reporting requirements does not improve employment."
"These GOP proposals would have devastating impacts in our communities," the lawmakers wrote.
"I didn't come here to take food away from hungry kids, and that's exactly what this proposal would do."
Prominent Democratic senators have also spoken out against any agreement that weakens safety net programs and harms vulnerable families, adding to the outrage that House Democrats and progressive advocates have expressed over the GOP's work requirement proposals and the White House's apparent willingness to entertain them.
"I didn't come here to take food away from hungry kids, and that's exactly what this proposal would do; a proposal that would make Scrooge blush," Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said in a statement Monday.
"I've never met a SNAP recipient who aspires to stay on SNAP for life," Fetterman added. "Let's end the games, pay our bills, and get on with the important work people sent us here to do."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for her part, said Monday that she is "very concerned about any efforts to just tangle aid recipients in red tape in the hope that they will be choked to death rather than get the help they need."
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that House Republicans' work requirement proposals could slash federal nutrition assistance for millions of children, compounding the nation's worsening hunger crisis. In recent weeks, food banks across the U.S. have seen a surge in demand following the recent expiration of pandemic relief.
With Biden set to meet congressional leaders at the White House again on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that recent staff-level talks have "centered on several subjects on which Democrats and Republicans may be able to find agreement," a list that apparently includes "clawing back unspent Covid-19 funds, speeding up the permitting process for energy projects, capping spending, and imposing stricter work requirements on some government programs."
According to The Washington Post, the White House "recently gave Republican congressional leadership a list of proposals to reduce the deficit by closing tax loopholes"—proposals that Republican negotiators rejected.
"If the White House's position on the budget is that closing tax loopholes on the wealthy and corporations is preferable to kicking a bunch of families in the teeth with work requirements, sure seems like now would be a great time to let the public know that," Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, wrote in response to the Post's story.
On Monday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters that he "doesn't see any real movement on anything" and reiterated that work requirements for key federal aid programs must be part of any debt ceiling deal.
Progressives are urging Biden to stick to his earlier pledge to only accept a clean debt ceiling increase, arguing that any spending concessions would reward House Republicans for taking the global economy hostage.
"I don't think we should normalize such destructive tactics," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told Axios on Monday, adding that Biden can "expect pushback on nearly any significant concession."
"It's profoundly destructive and it also threatens to weaken the president," the New York Democrat added.
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Poor Mothers Don't Matter in Welfare Policy
'It is time to overhaul TANF'
Aug 23, 2015
This week marks the 19th anniversary of legislation that conditions income assistance for parents and children on participation in a disciplinary program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Over the lifetime of the brutal TANF regime, the provision of actual income assistance has been overshadowed by the imposition of rules and services to regulate poor mothers' lives. As the Black Lives Matter movement shines a light on the racism of so-called criminal "justice," it is an important moment to consider how the intersecting inequalities of race, gender, and poverty are reproduced in the policy that claims to promote poor peoples' "welfare."
Sexist assumptions and stereotypes about African Americans and Latinos/as were pervasive in the debate that generated TANF. This program made limiting women's choices and ending single motherhood its goals. Although TANF is the primary national policy dedicated to impoverished families with children, TANF legislation did not include mitigating poverty, enhancing opportunity or attenuating inequality among its purposes. As a result, while welfare rolls have declined, poverty still stalks single mothers and their children. Childhood poverty and extreme poverty have both increased.
TANF has done little to prevent or alleviate women's and children's poverty. Signal features of TANF were its elimination of the entitlement to aid for people who qualified for it, its imposition of draconian rules on those who received assistance, and an increase in flexibility for the states that would implement the law. The new rules included time limits, work requirements, and policies regulating reproductive decisions and family forms. Time limits imposed tight deadlines on individual transitions to self-sufficiency. Work requirements compelled recipients to take low-paying jobs, sometimes at the expense of further education.
We have enough evidence now to assess TANF. The program has increased participation in the labor market by recipients and former recipients. However, the work lives of mothers who joined the labor market under pressure from welfare rules have not been secure. Wage work has not kept them or their children out of poverty. Nor has the publicly funded promotion of marriage and fatherhood eliminated the economic vulnerability of mothers who raise children on their own. Far from empowering families economically to rise out of poverty, welfare reform has proliferated policing mechanisms against poor people while repudiating the original purpose of welfare: income support to help custodial parents make ends meet.
TANF has done little to prevent or alleviate women's and children's poverty. According to calculations by the Center and Budget and Policy Priorities, in 1996, sixty-eight of every one hundred poor families received benefits under the program. Thanks to national and state rules that have made it difficult to get or keep benefits, only thirty-two out of one hundred poor families had TANF help in 2006. By 2011, when the United States was still in recession and unemployment was at historic highs, the number had dropped to 27. In the five years between 2006 and 2011, the percentage of families served by TANF fell in almost three-quarters of states. In other words, as economic uncertainty, unemployment, poverty, and inequality all worsened, the nation's main cash aid program for needy people did progressively less.
The disciplinary principles of welfare reform have shaped the whole domestic state. Time limits, proposals to compel low-income recipients to work for wages while parenting and surveillance of recipients' family behavior became common in other anti-poverty programs. This year, there were even efforts to impose work requirements upon low-income recipients of Medicaid health insurance--a response to the Affordable Care Act that began roughly simultaneously in several Republican-dominated states. The 2014 budget of the Obama administration contained a clause that would have widened the ability of local housing authorities to impose work requirements upon low-income residents.
Welfare reform has been part of the "new Jim Crow" of rising incarceration for African American women and men. Welfare fraud under new rules has produced new criminals. The extreme poverty of people who are not eligible for economic assistance has no doubt driven some to crime. Others have lost children to foster care and adoption.
As welfare reform has enforced poor mothers' inequality and their children's economic vulnerability, it also has been deadly. In a study published in February 2015, researchers reported that the policy established by the Republican Congress and the Clinton Administration in 1996 shortens lives. In two states, Florida and Connecticut, scholars compared the old, pre-1996 welfare program with the latter one. The new policy shortened recipients' lives by nearly one-half a year (0.44 year). It also saved governments approximately $28,000 per recipient over her lifetime. In Florida alone, the death rate for participants in the post-1996 welfare program was 16% higher than for people who had received welfare in earlier decades.
Based on our past experiences and other industrialized countries' experiences, we know how to alleviate poverty. We can make decently waged jobs, with access to union protection, available to those who, under TANF, are often directed into poverty-level "workfare" instead. We can raise the minimum wage. We can make higher education accessible and affordable. We can seriously enforce the anti-discrimination provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and end gender- and race-based pay disparities both within job categories and between them. We can make good child care universally available, with no cutoffs for those with earned income or families who hit arbitrary time limits. We can also provide basic income to caregivers outside the labor market or those unable to get market work that pays enough to support their families.
As we approach the 20th year of the disgraceful TANF program, it is time to overhaul TANF principles and practices to support the family work single mothers do and to open pathways to economic security.
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