Republicans’ battle to gut benefits for poor isn’t over
MAGA Republicans in the House are raging about the deal lifting the debt limit that President Biden brokered with GOP leaders last week. One key complaint of hard-right Republicans is that the work requirements they wanted to impose on food stamp recipients are less cruel than they’d hoped.
But liberals shouldn’t indulge in too much schadenfreude about this. In a few months, Republicans will have another chance to secure work requirements tied to food stamps, when the farm bill — sprawling legislation that touches every corner of food policy in America — comes up for reauthorization. Which means MAGA’s defeat could prove fleeting.
“I don’t think the conversation is over,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., a member of the House Agriculture Committee, told me. “Food security programs within the farm bill are under threat.”
Most indications are that the BidenGOP deal will pass, lifting the U.S. borrowing limit for two years while restraining government spending, but by far less than Republicans had hoped.
Democrats agreed to extend work requirements for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — or SNAP — on childless adults up to age 54, an increase from the previous limit of 49. But Democrats also secured new exemptions from work requirements for homeless people, veterans and adults raised in foster care. GOP hopes of expanding work requirements on other populations on public assistance — such as Medicaid recipients — were frustrated.
Those latter outcomes have MAGA Republicans in a fury. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus, tweeted that the work requirements Republicans won are “minor.”
Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, fumed to reporters that the exemptions Democrats secured revealed the work requirements to be “sleight of hand,” as Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., nodded along.
In the coming debate this year over the farm bill — which is reauthorized about every five years — these Republicans will have another chance to add work requirements to SNAP. For months, Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee, which is key to passing the farm bill, have salivated for an expansion of work requirements, with some calling for imposing them up to age 65 and applying them to more people with kids. That’s far more draconian than what’s in the debt limit deal.
There is little evidence that work requirements encourage recipients to work or boost their character, as Republicans claim. Yet, as an analysis from the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concludes, these bureaucratic hurdles could put hundreds of thousands of additional adults at risk of losing food assistance.
But MAGA Republicans who view that number as not nearly large enough will surely expect to make up lost ground in the farm bill debate. As Sharon Parrott, president of the CBPP, told me: “It is critical to reject any such doubling down on these ineffective policies, which increase poverty and hardship and have no impact on employment.”
This could go beyond MAGA. A large bloc of House Republicans is expected to vote for the debt limit deal, but even some of them might be anticipating having another crack at work requirements. These Republicans could see the deal as “one step in the right direction,” Spanberger told me, while resolving to
“continue moving the rest of the way.”
Republicans who are vehement about expanding work requirements for SNAP recipients are trading on long-running right-wing tropes about welfare dependency in urban areas. Yet large numbers of rural Americans also rely on SNAP.
“The program has a direct impact on rural voters’ bank accounts and on local rural economies,” Matt Hildreth, a Democratic organizer in rural areas, told me. In a perverse twist, MAGA Republicans are in thrall to a vision of the rural-urban divide that, if further put into practice, could harm large numbers of their own rural constituents.
If MAGA Republicans push hard on this front in coming months, it could roil the delicate balance of interests historically needed to pass farm bills. These bills link rural stakeholders reliant on agricultural subsidies to urban constituencies that are dependent on food stamps (but not disproportionately so).
As Liam Donovan, a former Senate aide who lobbies for biofuels clients, told me, if MAGA Republicans can persuade the GOP caucus to drive an even harder bargain this time, “it could mean a united front to push for stricter measures in the farm bill that would complicate the traditional coalition.”
In an effort to block all this from happening, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., the chair of the upper chamber’s agriculture committee, sounded a defiant tone this week about the future of SNAP work requirements.
“We are not entertaining any other changes in the farm bill,” Stabenow declared. “That debate is over.”
MAGA Republicans in the House, alas, will not surrender quite so easily.
Greg Sargent is a columnist for The Washington Post.