The U.S. House of Representatives is poised to vote on a bill that make the largest cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in its history. These cuts could take away food assistance from more than one million people because the Commonwealth cannot afford to replace federal funding.
Almost two million Pennsylvanians rely on SNAP to keep food on the table. As the cost of rent, utilities, and groceries rises, SNAP ensures that people do not go to bed hungry. And our economy is stronger when working families, seniors, and people with disabilities can access a healthy diet!
Devastating cuts to SNAP threaten to take food away from Pennsylvanians and harm our state budget.
For nearly 50 years, SNAP food benefits have been 100 percent federally funded. This national commitment has ensured that eligible families can access adequate nutrition, no matter where they live.
Every month, SNAP brings more than $365 million in federal funding to Pennsylvania. However, the House’s reconciliation bill would require states to pay for a portion of food benefit costs for the first time. It would also greatly expand SNAP’s harsh work requirements and cut in half the federal funding states receive for program administration.
Pennsylvania cannot afford a $1 billion SNAP bill each year.
Radical changes to SNAP would burden Pennsylvania with unaffordable costs. The current proposal puts our state at risk of needing to come up with more than $1 billion to pay for SNAP food benefits.
If Pennsylvania could not meet this unrealistic requirement and raised half that amount, or $500 million (a massive lift!), the Commonwealth would still be forced to cut SNAP in half.
To cut the program in half, Pennsylvania would be left with two painful choices:
- Take food assistance away from one million Pennsylvanians OR
- Cut benefits in half when many people struggle to afford groceries even with help from SNAP.
If the Commonwealth could not pay $500 million, we would have to cut the program by even more than half!
This bill also makes it difficult for states to issue benefits accurately and then punishes states when their error rates increase. The bill expands what counts as an error, cuts funding for staff to determine eligibility, and adds extremely complicated to administer work requirements.
Works requirements are SNAP cuts by another name.
SNAP already has harsh, complicated, and unfair work requirements that prevent eligible people from getting help with buying food. The House bill would expand these ineffective rules and create more red tape.
For the first time ever, parents with children over the age of six and older adults aged 55 to 64 would lose their SNAP after 3 months if they are not meeting harsh work requirements.
In Pennsylvania, more than 400,000 parents, children, and older adults would be at risk of losing the food assistance they need.
The bill also guts SNAP’s longstanding waiver that excuses areas with high unemployment from the 3-month time limit. This waiver protects people from hunger during economic downturns and when employment barriers keep large numbers of jobseekers from finding work in their area. But Congress wants to severely restrict this geographic waiver.
As a result of harsh work requirements, eligible workers, caregivers, and people with disabilities would lose benefits when they cannot navigate complicated paperwork or when county assistance offices make mistakes or do not process paperwork on time.
Exemption processes for people with disabilities have proven complicated, expensive, and near impossible to administer fairly. Researchers found that people who reported they had a disability lost SNAP benefits at the same rate as people without a disability under SNAP’s existing work requirements.
Pennsylvanians would not be able to access country assistance offices for help.
Pennsylvania could lose half the federal funding it receives for program administration. This important funding is needed to protect SNAP benefits from theft, invest in training for CAO staff to do their jobs more efficiently, and upgrade technology systems.
As a result of this sudden loss in funding, county assistance offices would be even less accessible to all Pennsylvanians looking for help with their benefits, including children and seniors. At a time when the SNAP program is changing and people need to know if they will be able to feed their families, Pennsylvanians would face a dysfunctional system rife with errors, unanswered calls, and backlogs in processing paperwork.
All these changes would be even more devastating for CLS clients who face the most barriers to accessing vital public benefits like SNAP.
At CLS, nearly all of our clients get help with buying groceries through SNAP, and they need every single dollar of this support to stay afloat. If our clients and their families fall behind on bills to be able to buy groceries, they would be at risk of homelessness and utility shutoff. Seniors and people with disabilities would get sicker without the nutrition they need to manage chronic conditions. And these preventable issues would grow into crises that touch every area of our clients’ lives, including their ability to work and take care of their children.
In a world where the federal government abandons its commitment to SNAP, Pennsylvanians would be forced into even deeper poverty. Entire families would go hungry, local businesses would shutter, and our economy would suffer.
You can learn more about how SNAP cuts would harm Pennsylvanians in our analysis here.
