Trump's new rule on food stamps will hurt the people who need them most

Editor's Note: (Robert Greenstein is president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based nonpartisan research and policy institute. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. )

A new Trump administration rule will end Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (food stamps) for nearly 700,000 of the nation's poorest people. That is the opposite of what the administration should do if, as it says, it wants to help them find jobs and get them back into the workforce.

Those affected by the rule are individuals aged 18 through 49 who aren't raising minor children or disabled and who are either unemployed or working less than 20 hours a week. Their average income is just 18% of the poverty line, or about $2,250 a year, based on our analysis of SNAP data, and they receive about $165 in SNAP benefits each month on average — or, as we've calculated, $1.80 per meal. Most of them aren't eligible for any other government financial assistance (because they aren't elderly, disabled or raising a child). SNAP is generally the only assistance they can get.

What's more, they're often facing some of the biggest hurdles in the labor market: They are adults with no more than a high school education who suffer from much higher unemployment than others; people who live in rural areas where jobs can be scarce; people who are between jobs or those whose employer cut their hours to less than 20 hours a week, which is common in the very-low-wage labor market, even when the economy is strong.

A harsh provision of SNAP law from 1996 already limits the food benefits of childless adults aged 18 through 49 — while they're not employed for at least 20 hours a week — to just three months out of every three years. Because the provision is so severe — people who look for a job but can't find one are cut off anyway — Congress gave states the flexibility to seek federal waivers of the three-month cut-off rule for areas where there aren't enough jobs. Since the provision's enactment, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have used a common set of criteria in granting these waivers. And Democratic and Republican governors alike have requested and secured the waivers; 36 states currently have waivers for the parts of their state where unemployment is higher than the national average.

Now, the administration is abandoning this longstanding bipartisan practice and replacing it with a highly restrictive policy that will sharply limit state flexibility by sharply narrowing the criteria that states have long been using to qualify for waivers. As a result, hundreds of thousands of impoverished citizens will be tossed aside and left without the means to secure adequate food.

The administration defends its rule by portraying it as a reasonable "work requirement." And to be sure, participating in a work or training program counts toward fulfilling the 20-hours-a-week requirement. But states aren't required to provide any work or training slots to these individuals, and most states don't. Also as noted, searching hard for a job doesn't count toward meeting the requirement. If these adults can't find 20-hour-a-week jobs on their own, they lose food assistance anyway.

In addition, looking back at the history of the three-month cut-off shows that some people who should qualify for an exemption, because they suffer from a significant health condition, for example, often don't get one. They then lose their SNAP benefits because they can't satisfy the paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles to securing an exemption.

This is especially troubling now, because the administration is giving states little time to prepare for this sweeping change, which will take effect in stages starting next spring. Properly identifying which people in formerly waived areas should be subject to the three-month time limit and which people should be exempt requires training staff and allocating more administrative resources.

Cutting off basic assistance doesn't help individuals get jobs, as research on SNAP's time limit and similar rules in Medicaid indicate. Before the courts put it on hold, more than 18,000 Medicaid beneficiaries lost their health coverage after Arkansas' first-in-the-nation Medicaid work requirement took effect. With or without that policy, however, Medicaid beneficiaries move in and out of jobs often, due to the nature of low-income work, and there's no evidence that more beneficiaries found jobs under the work requirement than before it. The more than 18,000 who lost coverage apparently included many people who were working and many people with serious health needs who should have been exempt but weren't due to red tape.

The rule also eliminates the ability for a state to receive a waiver when its unemployment rate is high enough to trigger the Labor Department's federal Extended Benefits program, which provides added weeks of unemployment benefits to jobless workers. That change substantially weakens SNAP's ability to help the unemployed afford food during a downturn, when hardship mounts.

The new rule follows the administration's release of two other punitive SNAP rules earlier this year. Taken together, these actions would end food benefits for more than 3 million low-income people and reduce benefits for millions more.

Rather than punishing the poorest among us, the administration should help them by pursuing policies such as job training and employment programs, as well as a higher minimum wage and stronger Earned Income Tax Credit. Denying them basic food and nutrition is not what a compassionate administration of either party should do.