‘I Think People Will Starve.’ Experts Are Worried About the Hundreds of Thousands Who Could Lose Food Stamps Come April

https://news.yahoo.com/think-people-starve-experts-worried-215356230.html

Abby Vesoulis
,Time•February 14, 2020

Kate Maehr’s job is about to get a lot harder. Maehr runs a food bank that’s part of a network distributing nearly 200,000 meals around Chicago every day. But last year, official unemployment figures for Cook County, where Chicago is located, improved. As a result, some 50,000 residents are at risk of losing their benefits from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps.

With so many people getting less help from the government, Maehr knows they will turn to her charity for help. What she doesn’t know is if she’ll be able to feed them. “We don’t have the ability to all of a sudden replace all of those meals that people will lose,” says Maehr, executive director and CEO of the Greater Chicago Food Depository. “I guess in my heart of hearts, the thing that keeps me up at night is that I think people will starve.”

This is not just Chicago’s problem. While Cook County just lost its benefits under existing guidelines, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, recently finalized a rule that will make it harder for all states to make concessions for able-bodied adult SNAP beneficiaries in struggling areas going forward. Nearly 700,000 people across the country could lose their food stamps once the new rule kicks in in April, according to USDA’s own estimates.

The tightening of the food stamp program is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reduce government spending on social safety net programs.

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Miranda Fenske, a 35-year-old Oswego County, New York resident with severe hearing loss and glaucoma in both eyes, is one of the people who could lose her SNAP benefits. Though Fenske has disabilities, she does not receive disability payments through Social Security and therefore does not qualify for a personal exemption from the SNAP work requirements. She’d like to work in retail, she says, but has had a hard time finding even part-time work. “My hearing loss is pretty bad, nobody wants to hire me,” she said, having requested to communicate via text message due to her hearing impediment. “It’s not fair… what’s about to happen with SNAP. There are way too many people like myself that have disabilities, but are still able to work, but can’t find work.”

Children will also suffer as a result of the new policy, its critics say. Though adults with dependents don’t have to be working to receive food stamps, parents often provide other types of support for their children even if they don’t live with them or claim them as dependents, Maehr points out. “They may not live in the household, but they might provide critical support and resources. If they all of a sudden lose their SNAP benefits, and now there are fewer resources, that will impact children,” she says. “Make no mistake, it will affect children. It will affect people with disabilities, it will affect older adults.”

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Whether tying social benefits to work requirements is actually effective in pushing people into the workforce is an open question. A recent Georgetown Law study suggested it doesn’t. “Work requirements do not lead to more work,” a fact-sheet of the project’s takeaways says. “Instead, they lead to more people losing coverage or benefits and will deepen or increase poverty.”

In the United Kingdom, researchers also found that harsh restrictions on welfare benefits had negative social effects, leading vulnerable populations to withdraw from benefits programs altogether, “in some cases triggering a move into survival crime.”

“There’s certainly no strong evidence base that harsh conditionality regimes will help move people into work and keep them in work,” says Suzanne Fitzpatrick, one of the lead investigators of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Welfare Conditionality Project. “There is certainly an impact on how many people claim benefits, but that’s not at all the same as saying you’ve moved people into work. Often, what you’ve done is just make them destitute, or dependent on other, more problematic ways of getting by.”

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