Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., called on nutrition advocates Thursday to defend the authority granted in the 2018 farm bill to update the Thrifty Food Plan without being cost neutral.
Stabenow reiterated her opposition to a Republican proposal to impose guardrails on the way Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments are determined through updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, a formula for calculating the cost of eating.
Republicans want to use savings from TFP restrictions to fund changes to commodity programs or other titles of the next farm bill. House Agriculture Committee staff continue to work with the Congressional Budget Office on scoring their proposal, but estimates could be as high as $30 billion in savings over the life of the farm bill.
Many Republicans say that they didn’t expect the latest TFP update ordered by the 2018 farm bill to increase benefits. Stabenow said Congress is “now in a situation where we can’t go backwards on this.”
Stabenow said the first update to TFP in 50 years provided nearly a 20% boost for SNAP payments to recipients – or roughly $1.35 per person each day – but future updates likely would be 2% or less each time for future five-year mandated adjustments.
Speaking at a Food Research and Action Center event, Stabenow said, “I need everybody leaning in on this point” of smaller costs moving forward and said she needs help from nutrition advocates to communicate the necessity to maintain nutrition title funding.
Although 2% does not seem like that much money, when a SNAP recipient is going into a grocery store and trying to figure out how to feed a family on $6 a day for each person, that 2% is meaningful, Stabenow said.
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In her involvement of the writing of six farm bills, and leading the last three, Stabenow said there’s always been a “truce on nutrition” with the understanding it is a “red line” that can’t be crossed to pass a bipartisan farm bill.
“We have never taken dollars from nutrition title and put it into the commodity title. And we are not going to do that now,” Stabenow said, garnering applause from the room.
Stabenow also said it would have been irresponsible to not do an extension of the farm bill, but now that Congress provided a one-year extension in the November continuing resolution, “it’s also irresponsible not to move as fast as possible to get a five-year farm bill.
“So, we need to do that, and we need to move as quickly as possible.”
She said the fight over the Thrifty Food Plan has become a “real flashpoint right now in getting a farm bill done.”
There is a path forward on the farm bill, Stabenow said, but it requires a diverse coalition “to make sure that we are protecting our vital nutrition programs and doing everything we can to build a nation free of hunger.”
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