When a mother loses a job and needs help making ends meet, or when a fast-food worker’s hours are too inconsistent and wages too low to support him, SNAP is there.
That is why it is so concerning that lawmakers on the House Agriculture Committee have chosen to make harmful changes to SNAP that will cut benefits for those who need them most: struggling working families. The latest Farm Bill, released on April 13, cuts SNAP benefits by more than $17 billion and diverts much of that money to a risky new scheme of ineffective work programs.
Much of the “savings” from cutting SNAP will go into a new massive bureaucracy that will likely fail to help people get jobs but will guarantee to take food assistance away. Job training or work slots will be needed for an estimated three million people each month. To put that in perspective, the nation’s largest federal job training program trained about 153,000 adults in 2015. With the $1 billion in work program funding providing less than $30 per needed job training slots per month. This is not even close to the $7,000 to $14,000 per year required for effective, meaningful programs. This is a pure waste of taxpayer dollars.
It is a critical time to reach out to our Representatives and urge them to vote no on the Farm Bill.
– Kathleen Murphy, Virginia Hunger Solutions
