One of the most contentious issues surrounding talks about raising the debt limit has been whether the Biden administration would agree to stricter job requirements for those seeking food stamps and other safety net aid.
The deal reached this weekend contains a compromise of sorts: It increases work requirements for the Supplemental Nutritional Aid Program and Social Security, but does not change the requirements for Medicaid. It also expands access to food stamps for veterans, the homeless and young adults leaving the foster care system.
Whether that deal will succeed with progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans remains to be seen.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy advocates including work requirements as a win, but more conservative members have criticized the compromise for not going far enough. Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, called job requirements “weak,” while Rep. Dan Bishop, Republican of North Carolina, featured the deal as “betrayal”.
to pray administration officials have labeled the expanded access for veterans a victory. But liberal Democrats and activists for the poor denounce the changes as burdensome and counterproductive. pointing to research showing that the existing requirements have little impact on employment.
Washington Democrat Representative Pramila Jayapal called the job requirements provisions “absolutely appalling policy” on CNN Sunday and said she should study the text of the agreement more closely before deciding whether to vote for approval.
It’s unclear how the changes would affect the total number of food stamp beneficiaries or how much money it would save the federal government. The White House has said the changes will not significantly change the number of people subject to requirements, suggesting a moderate impact on government spending.
As part of the agreement, so-called able-bodied adults who are 54 and under and have no children must works or attends training for at least 80 hours per month to receive food stamps for a longer period of time. Otherwise, they can only receive benefits for three months during a three-year period. Current work requirements apply to adults age 49 and under.
The agreement also exempted veterans, the homeless and young adults transitioning from foster care from those job requirements. Under the current law, only those who are unable to work due to physical or mental disability or pregnancy are exempt.
The debt ceiling agreement also requires the Department of Agriculture to disclose applications states make to waive job requirements for high-unemployment areas, and reduces the proportion of people a state can exempt from 12 percent to 8 percent of total beneficiaries .
Anti-poverty advocates praised the additional exemptions but lamented the expansion of work restrictions and the decision to link safety net programs to the need to raise the country’s debt limit.
“It’s positive to make improvements for some groups, but it doesn’t justify introducing harmful requirements that will harm older adults,” said Sharon Parrott, the president of the leftist Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“Avoiding a default debt limit will spare the country economic catastrophe, but it’s just wrong that the compromise deal forces low-income older Americans to pay such a high price,” said Eric Mitchell, executive director of the nonprofit Alliance. . End hunger, said in a statement. He said the expansion of job requirements “will cause more older Americans to suffer needlessly from hunger and poverty.”
About 42.5 million people received SNAP benefits in February, compared to about 36.9 million in February 2020, the month before the Covid-19 outbreak in the United States. Food stamp recipients receive an average of $169 in monthly benefits, according to the agriculture department who manages the program.
Raising the age to work is likely to reduce the number of beneficiaries. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that stricter changes proposed in April in a House Republican bill — which would also have raised the age limit to 55 and further limited state exemptions without new exemptions — would have kept about 275,000 people off food stamps and cut benefits for another 19,000 people would have been reduced.
But the new exemptions could also add people to food stamp rolls. A 2021 study from the Urban Institute estimated that adults fell under the job requirements more homeless than other SNAP beneficiaries. Waiving work requirements could also increase the number of veterans using food stamps the current level of 1.1 million.
The White House has estimated those exemptions would likely offset the increased age, leaving the number of adults required to meet work requirements unchanged.
But Ms Parrott argued that focusing the net impact of the agreement on SNAP participation overlooks the harm the requirements will have on older adults, calling such calculations a “low bar” for lawmakers to clear.
“The reality is that this is hurting a group of people who are very disadvantaged, and it’s not like we had to do that in order to have more positive policies,” she said.
It is also unclear how much budgetary impact these changes will have. The CBO had estimated that the more restrictive food stamp changes in the Republican House bill would have reduced federal deficits by about $11 billion over a decade. The changes to the agreement are likely to reduce the shortfalls.
In addition to changes to food stamps, the debt ceiling agreement changes work requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides monetary assistance to households with children.
To receive federal funding for the program under current law, states must prove that a certain percentage of adults in benefit-receiving families are employed, in work training, or participating in other approved “work activities”.
The agreement changes how states calculate labor force participation and will make it more difficult for states to exempt families from the requirements, said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy advisor with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization. But the agreement also created a small pilot program for states to test alternative models.
“The research is clear on the ineffectiveness of job requirements and the hardship they cause for people dependent on the social safety net,” said Ms Hempstead, adding that “this agreement avoids some of the worst outcomes”