Page 74 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

the program. After Nixon resigned in 1974, President Gerald Ford almost immediately tried to
cut the program, with support from conservatives in Congress.

But Dole began working some of his Democratic colleagues, George McGovern of South Dakota
and Humbert Humphrey of Minnesota, on liberalizing the rules to make it easier for the needy to
get food stamps, in part by ending the requirement that recipients pay for the benefits. The
first Dole-McGovern food-stamp reform bill, introduced in 1975, never went anywhere. But
Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, and the Dole-McGovern proposals made it into the farm
bill Congress would pass later that year.

At the time, a family of four with a net income of $350 a month would have to pay $95 to get a
monthly allotment of food stamps worth $166. With the farm bill pending in 1977, McGovern
and Humphrey wrote Carter – appealing to him to support ending the purchase requirement so
that recipients could receive the net value of the food stamps without money changing hands.
The change would simplify the program while also ensuring that poor people who “can’t afford
to ‘buy in’ to participate” in food stamps for the first time, the senators wrote.

The requirement probably wouldn’t have passed unless food stamps had been part of the farm
bill, according to Matz as well as Robert Greenstein, who was director of USDA’s Food and
Nutrition Service at the time.
In addition to eliminating the purchase requirement, the 1977 farm bill also established outreach
efforts to promote the program and set new eligibility rules, including categories of income that
could be excluded from eligibility calculations. It also got rid of requirements that households
have cooking facilities and that stores must sell a significant amount of staple foods in order to
qualify for accepting food stamps.

For the farm-food coalition, that year was historic for another reason as well: The Senate Select
Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which McGovern had chaired since 1968, was
folded into the Senate Agriculture Committee in 1977.

The new committee became known as the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee,
its name to this day. The chairman is a senator from Kansas, Pat Roberts.

The coalition’s ‘Contract’ crisis in 1996

By the middle of the 1990s, spending on food stamps and
welfare programs was rising sharply even though the nation
had recovered from a deep recession that had helped Bill
Clinton win the White House. At the same time, there were
reports of scandals in food stamps as well as the country’s
main welfare program at the time, Aid to Families with
Dependent Children.

Participation in food stamps ballooned from 18.8 million
people in 1989 to 27.5 million in 1994, and the cost of the
program nearly doubled over that period to $24.5
billion. AFDC spending, meanwhile, hit $22.8 billion in Senator Pat Roberts

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