Congressional talks will resume on Wednesday over a Farm Bill that has languished without resolution in both chambers since last year.
And while Republicans have continued to attack the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP), which provides food assistance to the nation’s poorest families and individuals, the Democrats have played along by proposing less aggressive, but still damaging, levels of cuts to the essential program.
And because the last adjustment to the SNAP program expires at the end of this week, the pain caused by a feuding Congress willing to put hungry children and the elderly in the crosshairs amid an ongoing series of budget battles is about to get very real for some.
As Greg Kaufmann, poverty correspondent for The Nation, writes this week:
But as the conference committee comes together Wednesday, as McClatchy reports, deeper cuts seem likely:
As Willy Blackmore, food policy editor as the TakePart.com, writes:
Among the progressive lawmakers trying to avert the disaster, Rep. Jim McGovern confessed to Blackmore that there were no good legislative options given the current climate in Washington. And because the current elevated funding for SNAP was written with a vague sunset clause when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (or stimulus) was enacted in 2009, McGovern says those reductions are now an “inevitable reality.”
“What we absolutely should not do is make the situation even worse by piling on additional cuts in the context of the farm bill,” he adds. “As a member of the farm bill conference committee, I will fight with every ounce of energy I have to prevent additional cuts from happening.”
For Blackmore, however, Democrats should receive a large portion of the blame the current mess. For not better securing the improved funding for SNAP when they had the chance and because now they have capitulated by agreeing with Republicans that some level of cuts are warranted, he argues a great disservice to the nation’s poor has been done.
“The loss of stimulus funding,” writes Blackmore, “will amount to a $5 billion reduction in SNAP in 2014, and $6 billion in 2015 and 2016 combined. Congress’s epic $39 billion cut would be spread out over the course of 10 years, if it somehow manages to become law. And that would come on top of this reduction, which is, in essence, a Democrat-approved cut that’s 1/3 of the size of the House’s slash-and-burn approach to SNAP.”
Across the country, poverty assistance organizations and food pantries are bracing for the cuts, but in Washington, DC, it remains unclear what powerful voices will take a stand for the nation’s hungry and most vulnerable.