Trump’s USDA Will Consider Work Requirements for Food Stamps Recipients

The move follows up on the administration’s promise to make welfare beneficiaries more “self-sufficient.”

A sign on a sales rack of an energy bar in a 7-Eleven in New York promotes the convenience store's acceptance of the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).Richard B. Levine/Newscom/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The Trump administration is officially considering work requirement rules for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) spokesperson said Thursday. The move has been anticipated for months and marked by a December press release from the USDA promising to promote “self-sufficiency” and give states greater control over the program, which serves millions of Americans and families across the country. 

Requiring that poor Americans work to receive welfare aid has been a part of the GOP rhetoric for years and is being pushed particularly hard by the Trump team, which has criticized recipients it says are exploiting the system. “If you are on food stamps and you are able-bodied, we need you to go to work,” Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney said last year.

But the program’s eligibility requirements are already stringent. Currently, able-bodied adults without kids, known as ABAWDS, can only receive food stamp aid for three months in a three-year period unless they are working 80 hours per month or participating in an employment-training program.

However, USDA Administrator of the Food and Nutrition Service Brandon Lipps, who led the call on Thursday, stressed that not everyone is adhering to those stipulations—and that’s a problem. “There is a waiver process that is allowing this population not to reach those work requirements,” Lipps said. “That’s one of the issues that we’re looking for input on.”

The Trump administration has been taking aim at SNAP for nearly a year now, starting when his May budget proposed a 25 percent cut to the program. “The conversation on this population [ABAWDS] has gone on for a really long time,” Lipps said this morning. “We want everyone to give input on how we move this population forward to self-sufficiency.”

What the Trump administration doesn’t say is that the majority of adults receiving food stamps either already work or are looking for work.

And meanwhile, some states are moving forward on tightening work requirements, with or without the federal government. On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Senate passed a series of welfare bills, including one limiting food stamps access by increasing the hours recipients have to work or attend job training to receive aid past 90 days. “Rewarding work” is one of Governor Scott Walker’s top priorities this year, he said in a January radio address, stating that “public assistance should be a trampoline, not a hammock.”

“Long-term dependency has never been part of the American dream,” US Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a press release sent out after the call. “USDA’s goal is to move individuals and families from SNAP back to the workforce as the best long-term solution to poverty. Everyone who receives SNAP deserves an opportunity to become self-sufficient and build a productive, independent life.”

Public comment will be available here starting Friday through April 9, 2018.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate