Illinois has mastered the art of gaming the federal food stamp program to where 101 of its 102 counties continue to fall under a recession-era expansion of the program despite near record-low unemployment levels, according to a recent study by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA).
A remedy exists in a U.S. House-approved version of the massive Farm Bill (H.R. 2), which authorizes funding for the program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But one conservative economist predicts that the Senate version of the bill (S.B 3042), which would continue to allow Illinois and some other states to rig the system, will prevail.
Among other tricks, Illinois combined unemployment rates for 101 of its 102 counties to qualify for a waiver from work requirement provisions in SNAP through 2018, the FGA study shows.
“A dozen counties had average unemployment rates under five percent, which would have disqualified them for waivers if they had been evaluated on their own,” Nic Horton, research director for FGA, wrote in a recent commentary. “But by gerrymandering the counties to create a single ‘area,’ Illinois has been able to exempt 337,000 able-bodied, childless adults from the work requirement.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Farm Bill will cost $868 billion over the next 10 years. Funding for SNAP takes up roughly 80 percent of that.
The initial expansion of SNAP through the use of waivers was intended to provide a safety net during the Great Recession. But an analysis by the House Committee on Agriculture shows it has gone well beyond that.
“The Obama administration and many state governments used a variety of loopholes and gimmicks to help weaken work requirements and boost participation to its highest level in history in 2013 — more than 47.6 million people,” the analysis says.
“Since then, the rolls have contracted, but not by as much as might be expected, given the improvement in the economy since the last recession. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ... still had 40.7 million recipients as of January — nearly nine years after the recession officially ended. That is up almost 55 percent from 2007.”
Congress faces a September 30 deadline to send the Farm Bill to President Trump. The bill, which squeaked through the House in June on a 213-211 vote, is now in conference committee to reconcile differences with the Senate bill, which passed in June on a 86-11 vote. Most of those differences center around SNAP.
Vincent Smith, director of Agriculture Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, predicts that if Congress meets the September 30 deadline, it will include language in the bill that provides political cover for the more conservative members of the House but will fail to rein in the ballooning program.
One factor on the side of the House language, Smith told Prairie State Wire, is that “(Speaker Paul Ryan) wants to leave a legacy of enhanced incentives for the poor to find work.”
In April, Ryan (R-Wisconsin) announced he will not seek re-election to his House seat.
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