The One Big
Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that Congress passed this summer represents the
third massive cutting spree in the history of the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps). The first came in three laws enacted under
President Reagan in 1981-82, by far the largest of which was the Omnibus Budget
Reconciliation Act of 1981 (OBRA 1981).
The second was another pair of laws enacted in 1995-96, dominated by the
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA
or “the 1996 welfare law”). This post
seeks insight into attitudes about anti-poverty programs by comparing the
three. It concludes that no meaningful
theme unites these three episodes beyond the desire to fund tax cuts delivering
most of their benefits to the affluent.
In other words, no enduring disagreements separate liberals and
conservatives on anti-poverty policy except that many Republicans regard assuring
adequate nutrition for low-income people is not an essential governmental
function.
OBRA 1981 was
passed by a Republican Senate and a House coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, signed by a Republican
President. PRWORA was passed by a
Republican Congress but signed by a Democratic President and, at his urging, gained a
great many congressional Democrats’ votes. OBBBA was passed on essentially party-lines
votes, with one Republican in each chamber dissenting over objections to the
cuts to anti-poverty programs.
In 1981, a group
of anti-poverty Senate Republicans led by Senator Bob Dole fought back against
the proposed cuts that they believed would do the most damage to the program
and the low-income people who depend on it.
(Those dismissing Senator Dole’s food stamp advocacy as merely serving
Kansas farmers badly underestimate the man.
Among other things, he spent enormous amounts of political capital,
risking his later ascension to be Senate Majority Leader, fighting Senator
Jesse Helms to replace cuts hitting the poorest of the poor with ones affecting
households somewhat better-able to bear the loss. Those shifts did not change anything from
farmers’ point of view.) Pro-food stamp
Democrats also led the House delegation in the conference committee, although they
were badly undermined by having repeatedly lost floor votes to the coalition
President Reagan had assembled.
In 1995-96,
Republicans on the House and Senate Agriculture Committees started out amenable
to some food stamp cuts, but demands from Speaker Newt Gingrich’s leadership
far surpassed the level they supported.
They lost intra-party battles on the depth of the cuts, but Reps. Pat
Roberts and Bill Emerson, along with Sen. Richard Lugar, remained open
throughout the process to ideas for how to reduce the hardship the cuts would
inflict on low-income households. Leaders
of both the House and Senate Agriculture Committees fought and won intra-party
battles to prevent the program from being block-granted.
This year, House
and Senate Agriculture Committee Republicans decided early among themselves
about how they wanted to slash SNAP and largely tuned out dissenting voices,
including those from within their Party.
Even on questions of drafting clarity, they largely froze out external
voices. Ultimately Senate Republican
Leader John Thune needed to exempt Alaska from some of the harshest provisions
in the bill to win Senator Lisa Murkowski’s vote; the Committee did as it was
told but did not take the occasion to reconsider any of its policies for the
remainder of the country.
Each of these
three episodes resulted in estimated reductions of about one-fifth in projected
spending. The composition of those cuts,
however, was very different.
President Reagan’s
theme was stripping benefits from the working poor. He insisted that he was maintaining a “safety
net for the truly needy”, but in food stamps and other programs he sought to
reduce or eliminate benefits for low-income working families. This played beautifully into Speaker
Gingrich’s hands a decade later as he complained that very few families
receiving welfare or food stamps were working.
Gingrich cited that as justification for slashing the programs
further.
As students in my
Public Welfare Law course could tell you, targeting benefits on those most in
need and providing incentives for efforts to reduce need are opposite policies
that must be balanced when designing any anti-poverty program. President Reagan was a targeter; Speaker
Gingrich was all about incentives while refusing to acknowledge, of course,
that he was repudiating President Reagan’s legacy. Some prominent Democrats, including Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have focused on targeting; others, such as Professor
David Ellwood, have focused laser-like on incentives.
OBBBA has no consistent
philosophical valence in either direction between targeting and incentives. Its authors complained
about people were getting benefits who did not need them – evidently a
reference to the low-wage workers states had begun to serve through some flexibility
PRWORA granted. But they also complained
that more SNAP recipients should be working.
(Research
shows that the overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do,
although they often turn to SNAP for help during gaps in employment, which are
common because low-skilled workers typically can obtain only unstable jobs.)
Thus, on the one
hand, its rules terminating aid to those who had than three months with less
than half-time employment during any three-year period will hurt some of the
most needy: those with the least
skills. On the other hand, its
provisions shifting benefit costs to states are explicitly intended to
discourage those states from adopting options that broaden the program’s reach
among low-wage workers.
Just as the three
episodes of food assistance cutting show no consistency in their philosophies
about the best use of program funds, they also diverge on federalism. States did not feature prominently in debates
about President Reagan’s food assistance cuts.
Many states, including those with Republican governors, expressed
concern about losing federal aid for their low-income people.
The Gingrich
Revolution, by contrast, placed states on a pedestal. It offered them greater control over
programs’ funds in exchange for less total money. States eagerly grabbed this deal to liquidate
the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. Many balked about taking Medicaid or food
stamps, seeing few politically palatable opportunities to cut, but Gingrich
leveraged the threat of block-granting to force through massive food stamp cuts
within the existing program structure.
OBBBA takes the
opposite approach, lambasting states for sabotaging and maladministering the
program. This Republican pivot to
condemning states counterbalances a pivot by SNAP advocates following the 1996
welfare law. After decades of seeking to
buttress uniform national standards in SNAP, the lesson they learned
from 1995-96 was that improvements in SNAP are more politically sustainable
with the states’ support. Republicans
apparently have reached similar conclusions and are hoping that forcing states
to pay a share of SNAP benefit costs will discourage states from supporting
liberalizations and could cause some states to drop out of the program
altogether. This does follow the 1995-96
model of imposing financial inducements for states to shoulder the blame for
benefit cuts rather than legislating them directly. But a serious version of federalism it is
not.
The only major
through-line in the means of extracting savings from SNAP is increasing
dependence on bureaucratic disentitlement.
OBRA 1981 required working households to fill out and submit elaborate
reports of their earnings every month during a narrow window of days. When households made mistakes, or state
agencies became backlogged, the households were automatically cut off. This system caused so much chaos that a
cross-section of states as well as advocates clamored for its elimination;
President Reagan signed legislation making it a state option late in his
Administration.
OBRA 1981 also
imposed draconian fiscal penalties on states for overissuing benefits to
households. Because improper denials did
not factor into these error rates, a “when in doubt, deny” attitude grew among
many human services offices.
Overwhelming complaints from over forty states caused the Reagan
Administration to negotiate a drastic reduction in these penalties (followed by
further administrative reductions in the George H.W. Bush Administration and
legislative reductions approved by George W. Bush).
PRWORA pioneered a
new kind of “work requirement”.
Previously, public welfare programs’ work requirements directed
beneficiaries to “workfare” or other assignments; if the beneficiaries did as
instructed, they kept their benefits. Most
states disliked these programs as being administratively burdensome to operate
and serving little purpose as employable food stamp recipients already had
strong motivations to find jobs to pay their rent and other non-food
bills. Congressional Republicans were
dissatisfied with the numbers of food stamp recipients working so they kept the
disqualification rule but eliminated the requirement that recipients be given
the chance to work for continued benefits.
States’ distaste for
running work programs overwhelmed whatever moral responsibility they felt for
food stamp recipients who were willing to work but unable to find half-time
jobs. Many others who actually were
working half-time or more failed to navigate states’ bureaucratic requirements
for proving those hours. Hundreds of
thousands of desperately poor childless individuals between the ages of 18 and
49 were denied aid. Even when they
became eligible again, many failed to realize that or simply understood that
they were no longer welcome in SNAP.
Food bankers and other
emergency food providers regarded this as a disaster, but OBBBA’s drafters apparently
found this story inspiring. They
expanded this workless “work requirement” to childless individuals up to age 65
and to families with children age 14 and up.
Coupling this with ferocious penalties on states for serving someone
whom federal auditors find not to have documented sufficient hours, the
bureaucratic barriers to documenting work are likely to multiply.
Anti-poverty
programs can only be stable with substantial bipartisan support. Making significant program design sacrifices to
secure that support is worthwhile
even when one party dominates the levers of power. Unfortunately, the absence of coherent conservative
policy preferences concerning food assistance that emerges from these three
episodes makes a viable path to bipartisan compromise difficult to
discern.
@DavidASuper.bsky.social
@DavidASuper1