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HUMAN SERVICES FEDERAL ISSUES

HUMAN SERVICES AND WELFARE COMMITTEE

 

June 11, 2007

The Honorable Joe Baca, Chair                        The Honorable Jo Bonner, Ranking Member
Subcommittee on Department Operations,        Subcommittee on Department Operations, 
             Oversight, Nutrition and Forestry                      Oversight, Nutrition and Forestry
House Committee on Agriculture                    House Committee on Agriculture
U.S. House of Representatives                          U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515                                   Washington, DC 20515

RE:  Nutrition Title of the Farm Bill

Dear Chairman Baca and Ranking Member Bonner:

On behalf of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), I am writing to express the strong support of the nation’s state legislators for federal nutrition programs.  These 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.  As your subcommittee debates provisions of the Farm Bill under its jurisdiction, NCSL asks you to show your commitment to a providing nutrition assistance to those in need.  The 2002 Farm Bill expanded eligibility for legal immigrants and made program improvements and simplifications to the Food Stamp program.  NCSL urges you to protect those improvements in the 2007 Farm Bill, and continue to strengthen the food assistance safety net.

Benefits and Eligibility

NCSL supports increasing the minimum benefit level, raising the resource limit, and providing additional exclusions from the income test.  Food Stamp program participants have seen the value of their benefits shrink.  Needed changes include indexing the food stamp benefit for inflation and changing the Thrifty Food Plan, the basis for the Food Stamp benefit level.   We 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 the proposal of the Administration, supported by many in Congress, to exclude all retirement and education savings when determining Food Stamp eligibility.  NCSL also applauds efforts to support our military families by excluding combat-related pay from the income test. 

Services

We urge you not to enact 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. 

We urge you to fully fund The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TFAP), and urge 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 the subcommittee not to adopt a USDA proposal that would: charge state agencies five percent of administrative costs if the state is more than 50% above the national negative error rate for two consecutive years; remove  the new investment option for states sanctioned for improper payments for three consecutive years; and hold states accountable for all overissuances resulting from widespread systemic errors.  These provisions would be a significant step away from the approach of the 2002 Farm Bill and would represent a return to the heavy-handed and unproductive sanctions of the past.

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,

Delegate Sandy Rosenberg
Maryland
Chair, NCSL Human Services and Welfare Committee