Jobless regions brace for budget

Analysts expect proposal to target food aid for rural areas

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, would likely be felt most in regions of the country with chronic high rates of unemployment — such as the rural Southeast, aging manufacturing towns, and Indian reservations.

People in those regions are temporarily exempt from national work requirements for food stamps, because there are not enough jobs there for everyone who wants one.

But there is growing anticipation that the budget to be unveiled today could incorporate proposals drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation that would eliminate or curtail the unemployment-rate waivers. That means the federal government could cut off assistance to unemployed adults who live in areas where few jobs are available.

The areas hit would likely include southern and central California, where the unemployment rate can jump as high as 19 percent, as well as cities such as Detroit and Scranton, Pa., where joblessness remains rampant. The change would also affect numerous counties in Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana.

Across the board, the people with the most to lose under plans to tighten work requirements are American Indians living on reservations, where large percentages of unemployed adults rely on food stamps.

“It’s unconscionable, cruel and ineffective,” said Josh Protas, the vice president of public policy at Mazon,, a national anti-hunger organization that focuses on hunger on reservations, among other problems. “I’m honestly not sure what their goal is.”

Changes to the work-requirement waivers will likely not be the Trump administration’s only proposed cuts to food stamps. While details remain sparse, Trump is expected to propose cutting as much as 25 percent of the program’s funding over 10 years, which would go far beyond past House Republican proposals — and require far more than axing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s unemployed adults. According to the Department of Agriculture, only 14 percent of the people who receive benefits are able to work, and do not.

But the work-requirement waivers are a prime target. Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation who has asked the White House to prioritize work requirements, said the Trump administration needs to “go after” the 4 million able-bodied adults without dependents in the food stamp program.

“You say to them, ‘We will give you assistance, but come to the office one day a week to do job search or community service,’” Rector said. “When Maine did that, they found almost immediately that their caseload dropped 85 percent.”

The food stamp program does already have a federal work requirement, though that’s not always acknowledged by the safety net’s conservative critics. Able-bodied, working-age adults who aren’t raising small children must work at least 20 hours per week, or risk losing their benefits.

Since the late ’90s, however, the federal government has granted temporary waivers to areas that demonstrate high rates of unemployment. The number of states requesting such waivers rose dramatically during the recession; in fact, most food stamp recipients were effectively exempt from work requirements until 2016.

Over the course of that year, 22 states either lost their work-requirement waivers or voluntarily gave them up. As a result, as many as one million people were cut from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to the left-leaning Center for Budget Policy Priorities. And the percentage of Americans who live in waiver areas has fallen to 36.4 percent, from a high of nearly 90 percent.

Anti-hunger advocates argue that the people still covered by the waivers remain in need of them. Those places include California, Nevada, New Mexico, Louisiana, Alaska and Illinois, as well as large portions of New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Idaho and Michigan.

Many of Pennsylvania’s rural counties still have waivers, as do those in New York, Virginia and Minnesota. American Indian reservations in North and South Dakota, Montana and Arizona have had waivers since a decade before the recession, a reflection of both chronically high poverty and unemployment.

Food stamp benefits are too small for people to subsist on them without working. The average food stamp benefit was $465 a month for a family of four in 2015. The maximum monthly benefit for a family that size is $649 — which equates to about $5.40 worth of food per day for each family member.

In explaining its waiver requests for 2016, the state of Montana wrote that the reservations and counties included in its application “do not have a sufficient number of jobs to provide employment” — raising fears that a work requirement would leave vulnerable people without food or the jobs needed to buy it.

That has been the case in other states, advocates argue — though the evidence remains mixed.

In Kansas, for instance, which reinstated the requirements in October 2014, 40 percent of unemployed adults were still unemployed a year after being kicked off food stamps. Among those who found jobs, the average annual income was only $5,562, according the Foundation for Government Accountability, a right-wing think tank based in Florida.

Progress has also been hotly debated in Maine, a state that conservatives regularly hold up as evidence that stricter work-requirements are effective. When the state dropped its waiver in 2015, the number of unemployed adults in the program immediately fell by nearly 80 percent.

But a May 2016 report by the state found that nearly 60 percent of those affected individuals did not report any income in the year after they left the program — suggesting they were still unemployed or underemployed a year later.