A new Trump budget suggestion has come out: let the government decide what food you can buy now. According to a recent NPR post (original article here), a large portion of the money currently spent by the USDA on SNAP benefits would be taken out of the hands of recipients and put into USDA food boxes.
The package was described in the budget as consisting of "shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit and vegetables." The boxes would not include fresh fruits or vegetables.
This isn’t similar to WIC, a program for pregnant and new moms (and their children) which provides something like a coupon set each month and allows the mom to choose what items and brands they will use each month. This would be a set box of items that would get delivered to a certain place each month for SNAP recipients to pick up. There is no choice beyond canned goods and boxed items here. How this could be promoting good health for our nation’s needy is beyond laughable. It doesn’t take into account that certain staples like flour, sugar, and bread, not to mention meat, cheese, and fresh produce, would still have to be purchased at a local store. The idea doesn’t address whether recipients even know how to make the items contained in the boxes. It also doesn’t take into account how states would deliver to these areas and also ensure that recipients are able to receive the packages. It’s a logistical nightmare, as well as a healthy diet nightmare.
Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, a hunger advocacy group that also helps clients access food-assistance services, said the administration's plan left him baffled. "They have managed to propose nearly the impossible, taking over $200 billion worth of food from low-income Americans while increasing bureaucracy and reducing choices," Berg says.
He says SNAP is efficient because it is a "free market model" that lets recipients shop at stores for their benefits. The Trump administration's proposal, he said, "is a far more intrusive, Big Government answer. They think a bureaucrat in D.C. is better at picking out what your family needs than you are?"
Now the good news is that this is only a proposal and it’s unlikely, even in the current Republican controlled Congress, that such a bill would pass. We can only hope at least. What is more troublesome, is that just the idea of such a thing reinforces the stigma that people are wasting SNAP benefits on terrible food choices or expensive foods that are not necessary. As Douglas Greenaway, president of the National WIC Association, was quoted
”Removing choice from SNAP flies in the face of encouraging personal responsibility," he said. He says "the budget seems to assume that participating in SNAP is a character flaw."
Of course, that sentiment has been a long-standing part of the Republican rhetoric for decades now. Reagan, as we all know, helped put the idea that people on any kind of welfare are crooks and frauds. In recent years, Fox news personalities have attack the poorest of Americans at every turn; putting up pieces touting that recipients are wasting our taxes dollars on lobster and caviar.
I hopefully don’t need to reiterate how desperately important it is for every person to have access to good, healthy food. This type of nonsense just helps stigmatize and push into the dark every SNAP participant. Most people currently in the program fall into one of three groups: people under 18, the disabled, and the elderly. They are undoubtedly our most vulnerable (both due to physical limitations and monetary ones). Now this proposal does something even worse: it forces these people out of the public areas, like grocery stores and markets and puts them into a special government pickup location separate from the rest of the community. I get that they will still have a portion of their benefits to get other items they need, but there is no way to get around the fact that forcing those most likely to struggle with getting transportation already to go to now another location just to eat every week is asinine.
And none of this addresses how states would accomplish such a feat of putting together and delivering said goods to every city and town in every county. We have no idea how many people would need to be hired to put these boxes together, how many trucks we would have to pay to transport them to each area on time (not even counting truly remote areas like deep in the mountains in the dead of winter, where often roads in and out are completely impassable), and then ensuring transportation is available to reach those who cannot travel to get their boxes of (non)nourishment. The whole idea seems to me to be just another way for Trump to sucker punch the poorest in our country, along with all of us who gladly support them. I have vowed to write to my senators and representatives on this and ask them to not only vote against this bill, but publicly speak out in support of the SNAP program and the people who receive its benefits. We need those in power to tell others that this nonsense we’ve been fed for years about food stamps and the people who use them is just plainly wrong. I urge you all to do the same.