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HUMAN SERVICES FEDERAL ISSUES

HUMAN SERVICES AND WELFARE COMMITTEE

October 1, 2007

The Honorable Tom Harkin                              The Honorable Saxby Chambliss
Chair, Committee on Agriculture,                     Ranking Member, Committee on Agriculture,
Forestry and Nutrition                                      Forestry and Nutrition
United States Senate                                       United States Senate
Washington, D.C.  20510                                 Washington, D.C.  20510

RE:  Nutrition Title of the Farm Bill

Dear Chairman Harkin and Ranking Member Chambliss:

On behalf of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), I urge your Committee to report a 2007 Farm Bill that includes a strong nutrition title, and move the bill through the Senate as expeditiously as possible.   Food assistance programs are a vital support for low-income families—especially low-income working families with children—and seniors.  Such programs are also critically important in times of natural disaster, as the performance of the Food Stamp program in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita demonstrated.   NCSL urges you to protect the improvements to the program made in the 2002 Farm Bill, including expanded eligibility for legal immigrants and important program simplifications, and continue to strengthen the food assistance safety net.  These programs must be reauthorized and adequately funded now.    

Benefits and Eligibility
NCSL supports increasing the minimum benefit level, raising the resource limit, and providing additional exclusions from the income test.  We urge the Senate to support the House improvements in these areas.  Food Stamp program participants have seen the value of their benefits shrink.  This makes it critical to both index the food stamp benefit for inflation and change the Thrifty Food Plan, the basis for the Food Stamp benefit level.  State legislators believe that increasing the minimum benefit level and supporting resource limits, along with efforts to streamline program application, are especially important to making the Food Stamp program more accessible to the elderly.   NCSL applauds efforts to exclude all retirement and education savings when determining Food Stamp eligibility.  NCSL also supports assisting our military families by excluding combat-related pay from the income test. 

Services
State legislators urge you not to include proposals that would limit categorical eligibility for the Food Stamp program for recipients of TANF or SSI services, and the Special Supplemental Feeding Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC program).   Categorical eligibility for recipients of TANF services is critical to making sure that needy families are enrolled in the Food Stamp program and that their children receive school lunch and school breakfast services.   NCSL is pleased that this provision was not included in the House version of H.R. 2419. 

NCSL urges you to fully fund The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TFAP), and urges you to reject the Administration’s budget proposal to zero out the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides 5.8 million food packages a year for seniors, mothers, infants, children.

Administration
The Food Stamp program is a complex program to administer.  However, states took the simplifications provided in the 2002 Farm Bill and used them as a means to support their efforts to improve error rates in the Food Stamp program.  The result has been the lowest error rates in the program’s history.  Given this success, NCSL strongly opposes any provisions that would restrict state flexibility in managing the program and strongly supports technical assistance by USDA for states.    NCSL asks your Committee not to adopt measures that interfere with the flexible, sensible, and efficient administration of the Food Stamp program by the states.  This flexibility is necessary to ensure access to the program for recipients and to allow states to deal with large caseloads.  NCSL believes that the House provision to make states fully liable for overissuances resulting from systemic errors is a step in the wrong direction and represents a return to the heavy-handed and unproductive sanctions of the past.  NCSL also asks the Committee to discontinue the reduction of the state administration match due to cost allocation that is contained in the House-passed bill.  Since 1998, when cost allocation procedures were enacted, states have lost $197 million annually. 

NCSL believes that any extension of the 2002 Farm Bill should only be short term solution and would not provide the resources that are needed to address hunger.    We urge you to resolve the funding issues that have impeded the progress of this legislation so that Farm Bill reauthorization moves forward this week. 

Thank you for your consideration of NCSL’s positions.  If you have additional questions, please contact Lee Posey or Sheri Steisel (lee.posey@ncsl.org, sheri.steisel@ncsl.org) of our staff.  They can also be reached at (202) 624-5400. 

Sincerely,

Representative Pete Hershberger
Arizona
Chair, NCSL Human Services and Welfare Committee