Work Requirements Don’t Work – SNAP Proposal Would Leave Thousands Struggling to Afford Food
Thousands of Marylanders would have a harder time
affording sufficient, healthy food under provisions in the proposed federal Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018 (also known as the “farm bill”). The current provisions add aggressive new work requirements and state mandates and would require increased paperwork and staff at state agencies. If enacted, these provisions would endanger the millions of people nationwide who get food assistance through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and over-burden state and local government agencies delivering these services.
SNAP is the main nutrition program in the United States. In 2017, SNAP provided 42 million people nationwide, including 684,000 Marylanders, with assistance that helped them to put food on their table, and fill the gap between having enough to eat and going hungry. SNAP recipients include children, seniors, people with disabilities, low-wage workers, and many more. In addition to the immediate positive effects of SNAP, research shows that the program improves long-term health and education outcomes for recipients, particularly children.
The main change proposed in the farm bill is the addition of the work requirements for SNAP recipients. The provisions require people aged 18 to 59, who are not pregnant and do not have children under age 6, to work or participate in a job training program at least 20 hours per week. If they fail to meet these requirements, they will lose their food assistance.
These new work requirements impose both administrative and financial burdens on states. Under the proposed work requirements, states would need to create massive tracking systems to document SNAP participation for millions of people. To fund this new administrative requirement, the plan would use a portion of the resulting savings from benefit enhancements, which are deducted in determining a household’s benefit level. The net effect of these provisions result in a budget cut that will either decrease benefit amounts or drop a substantial number of people from the program. Redirecting funding from helping people get the food they need to paperwork is a waste of resources that actively prevents people from finding and keeping work.
More importantly, SNAP already has work requirements. Working-age adults receiving SNAP are expected to search for and accept work. Adults without dependent children can only receive benefits for 3 months out of every three years if they are not working or participating in work-like activities for at least 20 hours per week. Among Maryland SNAP participants who are working age and do not have a disability, 74 percent are working or looking for work. Enacting stricter work requirements is unnecessary.
The bill also ignores crucial lessons from existing work requirements for low-income parents who receive income support through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, known in Maryland as Temporary Cash Assistance (TCA). Work requirements often fail in achieving their goal of creating economic mobility and self-sufficiency. They do this in two ways:
- Public assistance work requirements do not help people find living-wage jobs – rather, people find jobs in which their earnings remain low. As reported in the University of Maryland’s Life after Welfare research series, in the year before receiving TCA, earnings for nine in 10 (92%) families were below the poverty threshold. In the year after exit, 86% of families had earnings this low. Five years after exit, 81% had poverty-level earnings.
- Work requirements do and could create burdensome administrative procedures that affect many people eligible for safety net programs. Studies have shown that even with work requirements, people lose access to benefits due to administrative reasons such as not completing paperwork on time, not receiving notices, or office errors.
To maintain self-sufficiency, people need access to jobs with a living wage, access to skill development programs, and benefits that provide food, housing, and access to healthcare – not a job requirement for public assistance. SNAP not only provides a modest food benefit to families, but it is also good for the local economy. Every $1 increase in SNAP payments generates $1.73 of economic activity. SNAP recipients in Maryland received $987 million in benefits in 2017, generating economic activity in Maryland. It is important for lawmakers to make changes that enhance the outcomes of the SNAP program, not repeating past welfare reform failures.
