Page 70 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

By Sara Wyant

WASHINGTON, March 5, 2017 – The Republican speaker of the House is committed to
reforming welfare programs – including food assistance – to fulfill a campaign promise. But
farm-state lawmakers are worried about holding together a fragile urban-rural coalition long seen
critical to passing a new farm bill.

That could be 2017, but actually that was 1995. The House speaker was Newt Gingrich, and he
was committed to carrying out the GOP’s 1994 campaign agenda, the “Contract with America.”
One of the Republicans’ promises
was to turn the food stamp program
over to the states by converting it into
block grants.

Gingrich immediately ran into
opposition within his own party –
lawmakers from farm districts –
including members of the House
Agriculture Committee, who were
intent on maintaining the
longstanding political ties between
farm and nutrition programs and their
supporters. In early March 1995,
facing that wall of resistance to block
grants, the House Agriculture
Committee marked up a food stamp
reform that would tighten eligibility
and add new anti-fraud measures – but leave the program under the federal bill agenda

“We made a decision to keep it (the food stamp program) at the federal level but to reform it,”
the committee’s then-chairman, Pat Roberts, R-Kan., announced as the panel prepared to vote on
the bill.

Gingrich would continue to push the block-grant idea over the following months, but that
early test demonstrated the power of the farm-and-food-stamp coalition first forged in
1973.

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