Six months have passed since 29 million recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) have stopped receiving the emergency allotments added to their regular benefit amounts during the years of the pandemic. That extra support, averaging $95 a month, ended on March 1.
According to some food-security advocates, the effect was to push 2.9 million New Yorkers over the edge of a rhetorical “food cliff.”
Since then, the triple-threat costs of housing, gasoline and foodstuffs have continued to intensify, putting additional pressure on those recipients of benefits at the bottom of America’s social structure.
Known colloquially as food stamps, SNAP currently still provides food benefits to 41 million low-income individuals in 21.6 million households across the country.
Here in Ulster County, nearly ten percent of our population, or 17,781 of our fellow residents, depend upon this federally provided subsidy to fend off food insecurity. A similar percentage of recipients is recorded in among the populations of Greene, Delaware and. Sullivan counties — the last of which records the highest percentage of recipients who depend on those benefits in the region, 16 percent.
As the September 30 passage deadline for the farm bill (and the entire federal budget) approaches, the House Committee on Agriculture in Washington is struggling to find consensus over how much SNAP money currently earmarked in the bill should be made available to recipients and exactly what work requirements will be required for the poor to receive those benefits.
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa predicts that Congress “will not have the bill done by the end of September,” in part because of the fight over food stamps. Facing the looming budget crisis, the House of Representatives adjourned for the last weekend before next Saturday’s deadline.
Alarmed by the possibility of cuts and the specter raised of additional work requirements, 22 local political and advocacy groups up, down and adjacent to the Hudson Valley have drafted and delivered a letter to Republican committee member Marc Molinaro, in his first term, representing the 19th District, serves a sprawling congressional district including the northern and western parts of Ulster County. None of the groups is Republican
“We have not seen you take action to protect this vital program from potential cuts,” the letter reads in part. “You must know and fully realize the toll that this will take on families throughout this district who rely on the program to put enough food on their table.”
The majority of the signatories of the letter are Democratic committees in Ulster County and Working Families Party groups from within Molinaro’s district. Other signers include community organizing groups Indivisible, Citizen Action, Empire State Voices and Mountaintop Progressives.
Molinaro, who secured 50.8 percent of the vote against Democrat Josh Riley’s 49.2 percent in the 2022 election, is in a swing congressional district.
The enemy is bureaucracy
Molinaro returned repeatedly to the narrative of an individual confronted and disoriented by a labyrinthine bureaucracy, with the state preying upon the leverage created from the federal funds distributed to SNAP recipients. The freshman congressmember identified a metastasizing government bureaucracy as the culprit hindering the effectiveness of the SNAP program in New York State.
“We often get lost in the argument. Do you want more or less money? I want more effectiveness,” he said. “I want the program to help families. I want to make sure that agencies are instructed to provide the wraparound supports necessary to help kids move from poverty to success and independence.”
As well as being a member of the House Committee on Agriculture, Molinaro also serves on the subcommittees on Nutrition, Foreign Agriculture and Horticulture as well as a subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry — all within the wheelhouse of items affected by the farm bill.
Molinaro noted that added work requirements already exist. “For the last two generations, there are established work requirements,” said Molinaro. “Again, what we saw over the course of the last 20 years was states more focused on supporting the bureaucracy instead of supporting the family and the individual recipient.”
Molinaro contended that the state can do more with less. He accused the state government of utilizing a cynical scheme to raise funds off the good works committed by its social-service operations.
“What is diminishing our state’s capacity,” said Molinaro, “is the fact that it leverages federal dollars to support the bureaucracy when we should be leveraging those very dollars to benefit and support the individual.”
The enemy is food insecurity
Ulster County executive Jen Metzger’s perspective differs.
“It is inhumane to cut SNAP,” said Metzger. “Blaming it on the state and on our county DSS, that’s just a deflection. We have incredible food insecurity in our county, consistently hovering between ten and eleven percent of the population, and SNAP benefits keep people alive. Most SNAP recipients have children in the household. So this is a basic need. And it’s that this is one we have to provide.”
Metzger finds how our society treats people who are impoverished dehumanizing. “We need to be focusing on reducing the barriers that people face in trying to access better job opportunities, education opportunities, mental-health support. These should be our areas of focus to expand the opportunities. To say that government services are the problem is pointing the finger at the wrong issue.”
The Ulster County Department of Social Services has almost 30 employees fewer now than it did in 2014. “So it’s not like this is a growing bloated bureaucracy, you know,” Metzger said. “This is a federal program! Our congressional representatives can make the program more flexible, better tailored to meet people’s needs. But cutting is not the way to help our community.
”By ending the enhanced benefits, the federal government has saved itself roughly $200 million a month. Even so, subsidizing the grocery-store shopping trips of New York families in need from this March through June cost the federal government $2.5 billion dollars, or an average of $633.5 million a month.
Work requirements
Molinaro returned repeatedly to a narrative of an individual confronted and disoriented by a labyrinthine bureaucracy, with the state preying upon the leverage created from the federal funds distributed to SNAP recipients.
Did Molinaro believe the only way out of poverty was work? He took issue with the tone implied by the question.
“No, no, no. People want to work,” said Molinaro. “They want to make a way for themselves. What they need is for us to confront the fact that the system traps them in government bureaucracy instead of providing the wraparound supports necessary.”
“Government bureaucracy” is an amorphous concept. The Everyman knows inherently the long, exhaustively detailed laundry list of moments wasted before being told to come back tomorrow.
Molinaro’s vision suggests a kind of waiting-room purgatory conjured into being by an ever-increasing state apparatus underwritten by federal dollars.
Metzger grappled with how adding more work requirements to qualify for SNAP benefits would reduce the overlapping layers of protocol and staff.
“In the debt-ceiling legislation, they raised the age for work requirements from 49 years of age to 54 years of age,” said Metzger. “It’s estimated that that change is going to deprive 750,000 additional people nationwide of the benefits that they needed.”
During the decades of the last century, being on food stamps carried with it a sort of stigma. In our society, a resident with no capital meets the definition of abject failure, an uncomfortable status for anyone to encounter while passing by the mirror. Rather than face up to all the ominous psychic implications of that status, many of the American poor would rather see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires..
In the last decade, engaging in the time-tested strategy of denial has become more difficult. The choice to reach out for help is defanged of much of the sting to the pride. It is an intelligent decision to make, financially speaking, to take the help that is offered.
“There isn’t anybody who understands New York’s social-services system,” said Molinaro, “that doesn’t believe that there is enormous government complexities that make it really demoralizing. And in some ways dehumanizing to individuals. What I want to focus on in a bipartisan manner is on achieving greater efficiency, not penalizing recipients, but ensuring they’re not left to fend for themselves in a bureaucratic maze.”
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